Namrata B. is a Product Manager for the Community Integrity team in Facebook’s London office. Before joining Facebook, Namrata founded and led POPxo.com, an online community for Indian women to safely connect on personal issues. After feeling she had accomplished what she set out to do, Namrata was ready for her next adventure and Facebook presented an exciting opportunity to continue building strong and safe communities. Here’s her story.
Transitioning from CEO to Product Manager
Some people may have been surprised when I joined Facebook as a product manager. I initially thought it would be quite different, but the role of a product manager is really not that different from the role of a startup founder. With both, you need to be comfortable problem-solving when the stakes are high, working under tight timelines, and collaborating with others toward a shared mission. For me, it was a natural transition.
Not only do the skills and teamwork crossover, but I’m able to further my passion for protecting and promoting safe spaces. I’m responsible for helping minimise, harmful behaviours (such as scams) that jeopardise the safety of our Facebook communities. Due to the nature of our work, my team works closely with a number of other groups at Facebook, including operations, sales, policy and legal. Across the spectrum, I work with some of the most dedicated and highly-motivated individuals.
The biggest difference between roles is the sheer scale of people I’m able to impact with my work at Facebook. We have a great responsibility to protect billions of people around the world, and I feel incredibly motivated by the problems we are solving.
Keeping Our Community Safe
Our number one goal is to keep everyone across the Facebook family of platforms safe, while also fostering supportive communities. Since the youngest users allowed on Facebook are 13 years old, we are especially focused on protecting minors, which is very important to me as a mother. My team and I use machine learning, a lot of data analysis and advanced behavioural research to proactively identify and remove accounts that violate Facebook’s community standards by targeting or exploiting minors on Facebook. We learn everything we can to better understand their behaviour and ultimately prevent these accounts from returning to Facebook.
I work on a very technical team despite not having an engineering background. My degree is in economics, and I’ve not found that to be a handicap in any way. As a product manager my role is to help define the user problem and to be the champion for that user. It is also crucial to have the ability to build a strong team of people with complementary skills. You also need to be a good communicator, know where to jump in and how to best collaborate with colleagues. Most importantly, success in this role is about feeling invested in keeping our communities safe and helping others build meaningful connections.
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