Types of DS

This is a bit Facebook-specific, when picking teams, I normally categorize DS IC roles into 3 types: product DS, backend DS, and ecosystem DS.

• Product DS spends a lot of time guiding and leading product directions. Most of what they do involves understanding user behaviors, user conversion funnel, and user growth. Any team specifically works on some user-facing products within Facebook falls into this and normally you see a product design working in such a team.

• Backend DS deals with systems, I am a typical backend DS working on ads ranking. These DS poked around a complex system to understand where we can find more opportunities for improvement. Instead of understanding users’ behaviors like product DS, backend DS tries to understand system behaviors. This normally will require a deeper understanding of the domain and requires some technical background.

• Ecosystem DS deals with ecosystems problem: how does a specific product group change user’ consumption at Facebook over time, how do consumption behaviors interact with production behaviors within a product, what value a specific product group is generating, and how it changes the long-term goal of the organization.