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Product Management Lessons from 'The Social Network'

The Social Network is one of my all-time favorite films and as a technologist, it's on my repeat playlist around every 3 months. It's also a cult movie that has motivated a number of budding entrepreneurs to dive in. The pace of the movie is incredibly energizing on a Sunday afternoon. I'm especially drawn to the character narratives that the film draws in the context of Facebook's founding. When I re-watched it after having spent a few months as a Product Manager at Salesforce Commerce Cloud, I realized that there are some important lessons for PMs. We can assume Mark Zuckerberg (Jesse E) to be Ben Horowitz's 'Good Product Manager' and contrast that with Eduardo (Andrew G) as the 'Bad Product Manager'. The PM lessons that this character teaches us are:

• Focus & Obsession - This is probably the most important trait for a product manager. You need to keep the focus on the product and problem statement. As the product grows, new shiny things will come up and you might be distracted from your original objective. However if you're able to keep up the intensity and a singular focus, chances that you'll grab growth opportunities increase exponentially. In the movie, Mark is singularly focused on solving the connections and user growth problem throughout the films. He is always either developing or looking to draw ideas. This was highlighted when Mark and Eduardo fought over keeping the 'party going' or having advertisers. Mark's perspective was to focus on addressing the problem statement. Mark gets the idea to add the 'Relationship Status' feature from a stray question from Dustin. Eduardo on the other hand doesn't even know how to change his relationship status till the end. Any guesses on what Facebook might have been with ads before a million users?

• Customer Perspective - As a developer or Product Manager, it's easy to get busy with the details and lose touch with the customer's perspective. You need to make sure that the product works for the end-user instead of making them work for the product. This is what Alan Cooper calls the apologists vs the survivors. 'The bear needs to dance well or are we satisfied that the bear is dancing at all?' Mark outlines this when he states that the difference between Facebook and its competitors is that Facebook never goes down because that will frustrate the users and push them away. He also fights in favor of a clean interface for users than stuffing it with ads.

• Establishing Culture - Product Managers are often light-houses of culture for their Engineering and Product teams. The team often takes up the persona of the PM and amplifies it. That's why it's really important for this persona to be positively oriented, or at least project that kind of persona. In the movie, Mark's most important cultural trait is going all-in. This starts with Mark spending all his time thinking or developing Facebook including taking a semester off and moving to Silicon Valley. In his team, being 'plugged in' is a reality in which developers are left to focus on the work and even Mark does 36-hour sprints. Mark also emphasizes having fun, with the shots-fuelled intern recruiting round.

• Growth - If your product is not moving towards its goals, then it's dying. There is no status quo in the Product world. Any product has an in-built maintenence cost whether it's keeping the servers on or engineering Run-The-Business. So if you're not growing, you'll have to justify these costs, and you can't do that for long without drawing adverse attention. Mark is never satisfied with just the users that are on board and always plans the next phase of growth whether it's more schools or growing across continents. To achieve this growth, he pulls in whoever is required to be an ally - like starting with Eduardo for the stealth phase and then switching to Sean Parker for the scale phase.

• Product Motivation - This is a personal observation that a good product manager can never be just about the product. It has to be something beyond that, the product is actually scratching a very deep and distant itch. In the movie, Mark builds Facebook to actually satiate the need for social validation and attention. This feeling drives him to succeed with Facebook and doesn't just end at a hypothetical milestone like a million users or a billion dollars. If the motivation was just a product OKR or KPI, Mark would have stopped a long time ago. A good product manager has a vision much bigger than the product and ultimately wants to make a dent in the universe.

These are some of the lessons I observed from the movie and I'm sure everyone watches with a slightly different lens. Let me know what you liked/disliked about this movie!