Meta has one of the most unique Product Growth cultures of any company out there. In today’s episode we break down the function with Andre Nader.

Andre spent 9+ years at Meta in Product Growth, and before that he was at Indeed, BuildASign, and Offers.com.

In today’s episode, we cover:

* How to Break Into Meta | 2:04

* Meta's Unique Product Growth Function | 12:20

* How Meta (and Facebook) Does Product Growth | 30:10

* How to Optimize Your FAANG Compensation | 48:30

* The Path to FIRE (in San Francisco) | 1:06:05

Brought to you by:

* June.so: Customer analytics for product focused teams

* Cello: Your all-in-one platform for partner & user referrals

* Attio: The next generation CRM

Here are the key takeaways

There were so many things I learned, but here is a summary of my favorites.

How to Break Into Meta

You want recruiters to reach out to you. To do so, find out where people who are now in the role you are wanting worked in the past.

Recruiters are constantly setting out feelers on LinkedIn, and they like go back to the same companies and teams over time — like Indeed’s growth marketing team, and Capital One’s analytics team.

Meta’s Unique Product Growth Function

Every product team at Meta has a Product Manager, but only certain teams have a Product Growth Analyst. The Product Growth person’s job is to amplify the growth and success of the product by focusing on a specific metric.

They play a hybrid data science/ product management role, and the core characteristic is they do “whatever it takes.”

How Meta (fka Facebook) Does Product Growth

Understand, Identify, Execute is their core framework. It’s a data-driven, fast-paced approach to growth.

But that doesn’t mean they use complex data science metrics. Their goal is to move a key, simple metric. And they’ll make a thousand small optimizations to get there.

How to Optimize Your FAANG Compensation

It’s less about optimize and more about understand. Most people lack that basic understanding of how much they are actually getting compensated. And the ‘TC’ they share is usually bogus.

But, once you do have a grip on how much you make, it does make sense to optimize your tax strategy with backdoor and mega backdoor Roth IRAs.

The Path to FIRE (in San Francisco)

With a 50/50 bond-stock portfolio, based on history, a 3% withdrawal rate will never run out of money. Living in San Francisco with one kid, for Andre and his lifestyle the number he needed was $5.6M.

Your number may be different based on your expenses, but it might not be as high as you think. It’s worth doing the math.

Check out the whole episode for many more details!

We have some great podcasts coming from Stephanie Leue, Ravi Mehta, and Sam Kawsarani. I can’t wait to share them with you.