Meta CIO Atish Banerjea on Crafting Connected Digital Experiences for Customers & Employees

Yeah, thank you, Chris. When we rebranded ourselves as Enterprise Engineering, there are two broad mindsets that I put forth to the organization in terms of embracing going forward. The first one, I think, is really understanding our internal employees around the company and having their viewpoint really understood and incorporated into the products that we are building. I think that is hugely important, so really spending time listening and understanding our internal customers is a huge part of it. The second thing in terms of how we execute: we made a fundamental shift. As opposed to relying largely on third-party platforms and systems that we used to rely on in earlier days, we made a fundamental shift and said we're going to go to a build culture inside the organization. We're going to build tools, we're going to build technology, we're going to build platforms that service our customers to get their jobs done, our internal users across whether you're in finance, HR, marketing, or sales, in order for them to be able to do their jobs in the most effective and efficient way. The goal now for Enterprise Engineering is to give them custom tools that will enable them, because I think the challenge is when you bring in a bunch of third-party tools, many times you're actually asking the business user to change their business processes to match what the tool is capable of doing, versus allowing them to do their work in the most effective and efficient way possible. The big change that requires, though, Chris, is that if you want to make this kind of shift in your organization, you're essentially going away from a mindset where your engineers are just taking in the third-party system and configuring it, versus really having the consumer mindset and saying this is a fully engineering organization now and a product building organization now. So you need to have the same competencies, the same disciplines, and all of the same skills as someone who is building a consumer product. You need engineering, product management, design, content strategy, research, UX, machine learning, artificial intelligence skills in order to build a product. So it was a recrafting of the skill set of the organization to become a truly build organization, and then having a supporting operational organization and an infrastructure organization which is also very engineering-centric to deliver the complete set of services. That's the kind of transformation journey that we went on, Chris. I'll touch on two quick points. I think we have achieved a lot of success in this journey, not only from the perspective of doing work building tools that our internal users can really benefit from, but in some cases we have actually been able to take these products and give them to other enterprise customers. We have a workplace platform, as you know, which is used by large companies around the world, and there are functionalities that we built for Meta that some of these customers we knew would benefit from, and we were able to release them to external customers through our workplace platform, so commercializing the products that we built internally for Meta. The other area that we've really gotten involved in supporting external consumers is that the supply chain systems, the e-commerce platforms, as well as the customer support systems. If you are a user of one of our products that the Reality Labs organization builds, a Quest device for example, and you want to go buy it at Best Buy or come directly to us and buy it, and then you need that supported, all of the technologies and tools that enable all the e-commerce, the supply chain getting the products to stores like Best Buy, and also the customer support tools, those are also built by Enterprise Engineering. So we don't only touch the internal organization at Meta; there are areas we support the enterprise customers and the consumers as well.

Absolutely, Chris. This whole concept of just being a technology leader and understanding the technology, I think it is really outmoded now. Understanding the business is just as important, spending time with the business partners, really understanding the business problems you're trying to solve, and then figuring out how technology can actually go and solve those problems or create those new opportunities. That's really the way to approach things. In terms of this test and learn approach, Chris, I'll give you a real-life example of how we're thinking at Meta. If you think about the world before the pandemic, in the Meta environment we had most of the employees coming physically to work every single day in the office. Then you went to the pandemic where no one was in the office and everyone was working remotely. Now you're coming back and there is this hybrid environment where some people are in the office some days and other people are working remotely. If you think about the fundamental shift that is created from a technology landscape perspective, it's a little bit accentuated at Meta because we were virtually all in the office culture and now we are very much hybridized. All of the technology and tooling that we had before was really geared for people physically in the office. With the pandemic, we had to make a major shift and make them work mostly for people who were remote. Now we're getting into this world where these tools have to work for people in the office and also for people at home. So we have come up with this concept of having a democratized work environment where the concept really is that you as an employee of Meta should be able to do your best work no matter where you're doing that work from. That essentially means that all the tools and technologies that you are now developing have to work equally well in the office as well as at home, whether you're talking about video conference technologies. That's where some of the concepts about, for example, you started off, Chris, we are piloting technologies in the metaverse, XR, AR, VR, to really bring the democratized experience to work. So fundamentally, from a philosophy perspective, I think the key learnings we have had as we have gone after how to make this democratized work experience work for everyone around the company. There are three key learnings I would pick out. The first one is what I started off with: having this build culture thinking is really important because you are now developing tools and technologies with a lot of engineering expertise required to be able to make sure that this concept of giving people their best creative opportunities no matter where they're working from can actually translate to products and services that work equally well at home as in the office. The second thing is another key learning for us: flexibility now is key. The world of the 12 to 18 month roadmaps is absolutely done; the world is just changing too fast. In order to be able to really react and do what the business needs on any given month, any given week, we have to be a lot more flexible. So the nimbleness, the agileness, being able to work in an agile environment, I think is absolutely important. The final thing I would say is that we are spending a lot more emphasis on building community. Because again, to make sure that the people who are working remotely feel as engaged with their work. I'll give you a really good example. When a new employee started at work in the days before the pandemic, you were sitting in an office, you had a bunch of your co-workers around you, and if you had a question you could just tap your co-worker on the shoulder and ask that question. When you're a new employee starting and it's a remote employee and you're at home, it's not quite as easy to do that. So you have to fundamentally think how do I make information just as equally available to that remote employee so that they can simulate that experience of tapping someone on the shoulder and getting an answer quickly. So we built a product called Knowledge Library during the pandemic, the whole goal of making information accessible at the fingertips of employees as they're starting their onboarding process. This product became so successful internally that we released it as part of the workplace offering to other customers as well. So I think it is this concept of being able to build this community and make people feel engaged and empowered no matter where you work that is also a key learning for us during this time.