Job Alert: Facebook’s VP of Common Sense
Starting date: ideally, two years ago
We’ve all heard it: success has many parents, while failure is an orphan. It’s a good saying because of what it winks at: no one wants to have a disaster attributed to them. Of course failures have parents — often many parents. And in fact, many times such failures are failures because of such parentage.
I was thinking about this recently when reading about Facebook’s Portal device. If there’s ever been a device that is so obviously going to be a failure out of the gate, I’m hard-pressed to remember it. But it’s not just that it’s going to be a failure, it’s that it’s a horribly bad idea for Facebook to even release such a thing. And that too is obvious! Yet here we are. And here it is.
A few years back I wrote about the idea that some companies could benefit from a “VP of Devil’s Advocacy” — that is, someone who could be a step removed from a company with ‘yes’ or ‘no’ powers to launch (or more importantly, not launch) a product. This isn’t exactly a new concept, but it’s honestly a little surprising it isn’t actually implemented in some form inside of tech companies. The example in my post four years ago was Amazon’s Fire Phone, which sure seemed like it would be a fail — and was. But other examples seemed obvious too: Surface RT, Nexus Q, Apple Maps, etc.
But actually, the Portal seems like a step beyond any of those. I’m honestly not sure a VP of Devil’s Advocacy could have saved Facebook here because it is such an obvious fail on so many levels. Something else is clearly wrong here. And at least some people at Facebook clearly know this because they apparently delayed the launch once! But a delay wasn’t good enough in this case; the project and product should have been killed.
Instead, they’re apparently doubling-down on it.
Look, on some level, I get it. You’ve spent a ton of time and resources on this thing. Undoubtedly, there are insanely talented people working on it, and I’m guessing it’s even well done. It looks well done!¹ And yes, you launched it while saying all the right things about privacy, and even built features to instill confidence in this regard.² But none of that should actually matter. Because none of that will ultimately matter. I shouldn’t have to explain why Facebook shouldn’t be releasing this product given the temperature of the waters they’re in, but… Again, apparently that’s the problem here!³
So yes, in this case, you take a product that you spent millions of dollars and months (or years?) developing, and you kill it. Because of the reality of the situation you find yourself in. And because the release of such a product actually extends and exacerbates such problems.
There is but one word to sum up all of this. And it’s a rather stupid one, so you’ll have to forgive me: duh.
That’s why I go back to a VP of Devil’s Advocacy not being enough here. There’s clearly a more systemic problem within Facebook that they can’t see such an obvious fail. Or that they can see it, but go ahead anyway. Maybe the company needs something decidedly more primitive: a VP of Common Sense.
It’s not about someone willing to push back against those too far in the forest, it’s about someone willing to just state the obvious. And that someone having the power to change things.
Obvious statement alert: launching a product doomed to failure is problematic for a number of reasons! But I’m also sympathetic to the Bezosian mindset (post-Fire Phone debacle, of course) that you can’t be afraid to launch failures. After all, sometimes — just sometimes, mind you — you achieve success by doing something completely out of left field; something that seems like it will fail.⁴ But again, this Portal device is different. It’s not just that the product is doomed to fail — which, again, it is — it’s that it’s very existence is damaging to the core of the company.
It’s a decent idea released at an incredibly bad time from the worst company possible to launch such a device. It’s Enron launching a financial auditing firm in 2001. It’s the Titanic launching an iceberg tour in 1912. And Facebook just doesn’t see it. Or at least, those who do at Facebook don’t have enough power to stop it beyond a delay. A VP of Common Sense should…
¹ I kid you not, a commercial came on for the device while I’m writing this — wait, does Facebook know I’m writing this?! Are they watching me?!
² Of course, the other shoe was always going to drop…
³ And I recognize that a large percentage of Facebook’s billions of users don’t know or care about their broader issues. But there are very real trickle down effects at play here, and again, this product just serves to hasten those!
⁴ And yes, Amazon’s own Echo/Alexa comes to mind here!
