Facebook Turns Off Website Internally To Force Mobile Development
Just how important is mobile to Facebook? According to Facebook product manager Josh Williams, the former CEO of Gowalla, the social network's push toward mobility is crucial enough to its strategy to turn off Facebook's website internally.
Context & Ripple Effects
Facebook had framed mobile as its intended identity as early as 2011, when its mobile chief said the company expected to become a mobile company within one to two years. Coverage in 2012 still characterized the transition as a mobility challenge, making this an operational escalation rather than a newly declared priority.
By removing the desktop product from employees' workflow, Facebook is using its own staff as the first audience for mobile constraints and unfinished mobile experiences. Josh Williams, a Facebook product manager and former Gowalla CEO, described the measure as central to the company’s strategy.
First-order effects
- Facebook product and engineering teams must perform core work through mobile, concentrating internal feedback and development attention on the mobile experience.
- Desktop-web access stops being the default internal reference point, so mobile shortcomings become immediate blockers for the teams building Facebook.
Second-order effects
- Facebook’s mobile product roadmap gains leverage over desktop-oriented work because employee use supplies a continuous stream of mobile-specific bugs, friction and feature demands.
- Third-party developers building around Facebook face a clearer signal that the company’s product priorities are moving toward mobile use cases rather than browser-first assumptions.
Third-order effects
- If maintained, Facebook’s internal product process shifts from adapting a web service for phones to treating mobile as the primary environment in which features are designed and validated.
- The move points to a broader organizational pattern in which consumer internet companies use mandated internal adoption to accelerate platform transitions before external users fully migrate.
The trend: Facebook is turning a stated mobile ambition into a mobile-first operating discipline by making employees experience the product through phones first.