Facebook's Bet on Mobile

It is May 2012. You are a Product Director at Facebook. The company is weeks away from its IPO, and the pressure is suffocating.

For years, Mark Zuckerberg has bet on the "Open Web." Your mobile app is essentially an HTML5 wrapper—it's just your website stuffed into a phone app. It's slow, it crashes constantly, and users hate it. Meanwhile, Instagram and Twitter are growing purely on native mobile speed.

The market is shifting. In 2012, more users are accessing Facebook via mobile than desktop for the first time. But you have zero mobile revenue. Investors are terrified that Facebook is a "Desktop Relic."

Mark gives you a brutal mandate: "We are now a Mobile-First company. If you aren't building for mobile, you aren't working here." You have to decide how to rebuild the engine while the plane is flying at 900mph toward an IPO.

The principle: You cannot win a paradigm shift with a "wrapper" of the old world.