Not specific to facebook, but I have been managing different operations / services / customer success teams over the last 20 years. Currently at Google and supporting startups with growth challenges related to that through Google's accelerator, Launchpad. I believe any company, big or small, building products intended to growth exponentially, have to have an exponential vision for services also.
These are my personal beliefs and learnings after helping products grow to Billions (users, dollars):
1. Hire people comfortable working themselves out of their (current) jobs and grow in the process: you do not want a linear relationship between your top level goal (revenue, users, engagement level, whatever is your target now) and support cost. That means besides outstanding execution skills, you want people thinking big and challenging themselves to automate/eliminate/make self serve/outsource what they do.
2. Build a SHARED vision: having the right people, hired according to an unnegotiably high hiring bar, you want to tap into their talent fully, get ideas from the front line. Different sizes and types of businesses will call for different ways to do it, but there are ways to involve people in building a vision balancing founders' vision with grassroots initiatives.
3. Sustain that vision: looking both at my failures (specially the failures) and successes, sustaining vision is where I often dropped the ball. Please do not. I love Dan Pink's "Drive" ideas and I love transparency as some of the most broadly applicable approaches to that.
If you are leading a social impact or start up in an emerging market, I'd love to help with those. For free.
It would be a generalist support role that is 100% reactive focused on putting out fires.
Such companies have huge support teams that are under strict workforce planning with well though trough (to the minute) scheduling and multiple support channels (email, chat & phone) that requires reps to be always logged to their scheduled channel on time.
Metrics like average handle time & idle time become very important as big support organisations are under strict financial investment plannings and have to monitor costs.
It also involves managing remote & scaling overseas teams if company is chasing the sun (24-7 support).
One of the bigger challenges then becomes front line workers tenure, turnover, employee attrition and retention.
