Small teams. Serious product discipline.
The experience
I joined Facebook in London in April 2016 and worked on the ads business when the London organisation was much smaller. We had the people needed to work on a product together: product management, design and data alongside engineering. We were
That distinction matters. This wasn’t a standalone startup, and autonomy didn’t mean independence from the rest of the business. We were a cross-functional unit connected to a wider network of teams. I worked through those relationships rather than relying on direct line-management authority.
My work combined behavioural analysis, opportunity discovery, goal-setting and experimentation. The useful discipline was connecting the problem, potential solutions and measurement, rather than treating the analysis or the release as the end of the job.
For a growing business, I’d want to bring that Give a team the skills to act, a clear outcome and a way to establish whether its decisions improved it. Be deliberate about the dependencies that still need coordination. Small doesn’t have to mean informal about everything; rigorous doesn’t have to mean slow.
How much smaller?
Facebook’s UK workforce was approximately 1,000 in late 2016. Contemporaneous reporting ↗
For the latest comparison I could verify, Prospect reported 5,000 Meta staff across the UK in September 2026. These are UK-wide figures, not counts of London product teams or the ads organisation. They provide context, not a precise measure of the team I joined. Prospect’s announcement ↗
London engineering itself began in 2012. Meta’s original announcement explicitly described starting small and giving engineers room to build and ship. By March 2022, Meta reported more than 4,000 employees in London. That is a dated London figure, not today’s headcount. The original engineering announcement ↗ · Meta’s 2022 London update ↗