Meta warns employees of ‘serious times’ in internal memo listing key product bets

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

According to an internal memo sent to employees this week, Meta is preparing for a leaner second half of the year. Chris Cox, the company's chief product officer, gave a note detailing the company's priorities and challenges.

Cox said in the memo that we are in serious times and that the headwinds are fierce. Teams shouldn't expect a lot of new engineers and budgets in a slower growth environment.

Cox says in the memo that privacy changes and macroeconomic pressures are the biggest revenue challenge. Cox says it is important to monetize Reels as quickly as possible.

Cox thinks that Facebook needs to deepen its investments. Metaverse products, artificial intelligence, messaging, and continuing to push Reels are included. Without new staff or budgets, teams will have to prioritize more brutally.

Employees were told that a slowdown was imminent. The company stopped hiring teams working on shopping and video chatting products. Over the past five months, the company's stock has plummeted as investors worry about slowing growth and expensive investments that may take years to pay off. Meta didn't reply to the story.

The memo can be read below.

Cox is an employee.

Investment priorities in H2.

We take stock of our portfolio and investment plans every six months to see how we are doing. We evaluate which areas need the most new investment relative to their current staffing levels, then publish these as guidance for managers and leaders to deploy scarce resources over the next six months. These are the areas where we see the biggest opportunities for angle- changes in the value we can deliver for people, businesses, or our own business, by investing disproportionately relative to our baseline.

These are not statements of our absolute priorities. We will continue our industry-leading investments in integrity, security, infrastructure, core products, and ranking, while also continuing expensing R&D investments in how we will deliver the next computing platform across our portfolio. These are the places where we see the biggest gaps between what we have now and what we need to do in the future.

The priorities for this half are the same as the last one. The long-term roadmap, product vision, and strategy that Mark and I shared at our last company all-hands in February are related to these. They're here.

Our focus now is on execution, as the main priorities are still Metaverse: Avatars and the platform. We need to finalize our new art style, launch our art store, and improve the experience for users of virtual reality and the family of apps. Increasing growth and retention through improved performance and reliability, launching cross-screens, integrations across the Family of apps, and building new social experiences in the product are some of the things we are focused on. Project Simile is a critical product infrastructure that we are focused on shipping to launch Company accounts across Family of Apps and Reality Labs devices. We are laser focused on the success of the launch of the mixed reality product line.

We have made great strides across the family and have continued to make progress in short-form video. Time spent on Reels has more than doubled year over year in both the US and globally, with 80% of the growth coming from Facebook. The days are early but with good vibes. A push in our Infrastructure team to 5x the amount of available GPUs in our data centers by the end of the year is one of the things we are focused on. Our content org needs to be retooled to include real-time and regionalized insights, as well as text, links, Groups, re- shares, and our formats more broadly. The goal of these will be to recommend the best content to the billions of people who use our products each day. We will push forward with a refresh to the home screen and coreUI of bothInstagram and Facebook to incorporate short-form video more in line with the native experience.

There is a demand for community messaging in consumer internet right now. No one else can match the scale of our service. We will focus on testing before we launch globally in the second half of the year. With Messenger, we are working on improving product-market fit by creating Creator channels and joinable chats before rolling out globally in the months ahead.

The jet engines that power out products across the course, our business, and RL are still powered by the artificial intelligence. We want to get to scale more quickly in H2 now that we have five innovation centers. Over the next half, we will focus on increasing AI capacity, product recommendations, responsibility,regulatory readiness, and research. The FAIR team will provide the research breakthrough needed to make progress in the field of artificial intelligence.

We reworked our Privacy Policy in the first half of the year. In addition to continued investment in our Privacy Program, H2 will see complex company-wide efforts kick off for major new requirements, which will affect virtually all product teams. Increasing Privacy Review efficiency and working to make Privacy Review less disruptive for product teams are some of the things we will be focusing on.

Our biggest revenue challenges are signal loss and the current macroeconomic situation, but we can make high impact investments to meet those challenges. We expect to continue to be a major driver of our business due to the fact that we want to monetize reels as quickly as possible and invest in artificial intelligence. Shops ads will be doubled down in H2 to create an exceptional experience. Click-to-messaging ads, paid messaging, and software and tools are the key priorities for business messaging.

I have to point out that we are in a serious situation and the winds are strong. Teams shouldn't expect a lot of new engineers and budgets in a slower growth environment. We need to be thoughtful about measuring impact, invest in developer efficiency, and operate leaner, meaner, better exciting teams.

I'm very excited about our product plans and look forward to heading into the second half of the year with you all.

On the way!