This Tuesday in San Francisco, Facebook Inc Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg ordered perhaps the biggest management shuffle in the history of the social platform. This shakeup, however, will affect neither Zuckerberg’s role nor Sheryl Sandberg’s. Yet, this restructuring aims to redirect responsibility roles to product officer and launching a blockchain division.
Regardless of the shocking shift in management, Facebook declined to make any comments on the reasons behind this executive decision, as the company confirmed the massive reorganization of basically all of its major product teams. This decision will basically lead to the company’s division in three branches: family of apps, central product services, and new platforms and infrastructure.
Changes will span different areas of the company
The current Chief Product Officer in charge will now be responsible to surveil the company’s several messaging services like WhatsApp, Messenger and Instagram’s widely used Direct service. Two other executives, CTO Mike Schroepfer and VP of Growth Javier Olivan, will be over watching other consolidated divisions related to new platforms and infrastructure.
Among one of the most surprising shifts, there is David Marcus, current head of Messenger for the past 4 years now, who will be leaving his role in order to further explore how to use blockchain technology across the social network, as he stated in a post on Facebook.
Family of apps
Chris Cox will now be the leader of Facebook’s family of apps team, including Messenger, WhatsApp, Instagram and the company’s main platform itself. Cox is a close friend of Zuckerberg and was the company’s VP of Product before the shuffle.
New platforms and infrastructure
Mike Schroepfer is the company’s Chief Technology Officer, and he will now be leading a team with the task of thinking and structuring the future of the company through long-term proposals. Among these long-term ideas, it is known that Facebook’s main focus points will be put on augmented virtual reality, artificial intelligence, data privacy and the growing efforts of the company regarding blockchain.
However, Marcus will be in charge of heading a new group dedicated especially to leveraging blockchain for the company, in order to achieve Facebook’s first incursion into this sort of technology. As Marcus leaves Messenger, he will be replaced by Stan Chudnovsky, who will be taking over the team.
Central product placing
Javier Olivan, the company’s Vice President of Growth, will now be in charge of the product service division, in which he will be engaging in analytics and advertising tasks in order to improve Facebook’s growth and product management.
Source: Wall Street Journal