When Mark Zuckerberg told Sam Altman what Facebook’s best invention is: If you are trying to grow a product, the best ...

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has quickly risen up to be counted among world’s richest people, riding the exponential rise of his company. The Meta CEO credits the app’s ‘Growth Team’ for revolutionising user expansion by incorporating data-driven experiments into the product. In a 2016 Y Combinator talk with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, video of which surfaced recently, he shared that its good to have a communication team for marketing and growth but having a dedicated, rigorous investment in data infrastructure is the key to level up the game.“Making it so that we could grow faster was the most important product feature we ended up building for Facebook. The traditional approach to growing and marketing is you have a communications group or marketing team and you buy ads. Sometimes there’s a place for that,” he said.Zuckerberg argues that for any tech giant, the most effective tool for scaling isn't a massive ad budget – it’s the product itself. “If you are trying to grow a product, the best levers for doing that are often within the product itself,” Zuckerberg explained. By shifting the responsibility of user acquisition from the marketing department to the product team, Facebook was able to bake “virality” into the user experience.He cited the "People You May Know" feature as a classic example—a tool built into the interface that leveraged existing data to expand the network without a single dollar spent on external advertising.He explained the the ‘Growth Team’ did not have any magic but the way they worked with data was the reason behind the company’s growth.“There’s no magic in the group we’ve built here that other people can’t replicate. It’s just being very rigorous with data and investing in data infrastructure so that you can process different experiments and learn from what customer behaviour is telling you,” he added.