The Hard Parts of Growth
One of the most important lessons I learned at Meta is the by-now-common refrain of “Execution eats strategy for breakfast.”
If you have a perfect strategy but poor execution, you don’t win. And worse, you don’t know why you didn’t win — is it because your strategy was wrong, or because your execution was wrong? You’ve wasted time, and worse, you’ve learned nothing.
If you have a mediocre strategy but great execution, you still don’t win. But at least you know why you didn’t win — you know your execution was great, so you must have lost because your strategy wasn’t exactly right. Now you can update your strategy, and you have your execution machine ready to go to pick up the changes and ship them out. You keep doing that enough, and then you win.
One example of this at Meta was how often we worked on tackling a problem — with a slightly updated solution — repeatedly until we got it right. For instance, it took us multiple tries over several years to build a successful ad network. (I worked on our first version — now ~15 years ago!) With each try, we refined our target audience, the formats we provided, and the way we created value, until we got the right match for what our customers needed.
