Project Background
Meta's Facebook Android and iOS teams need to reduce API bandwidth usage for Feed and notifications in markets with slow or expensive mobile data. Internal analysis shows that 28% of sessions in target regions occur on 2G/3G or unstable networks, and mobile data cost is a top complaint in app store reviews. You are the engineering lead driving execution for a bandwidth-optimization program that must ship before the next quarterly performance review.
The working team includes 6 mobile engineers, 3 backend/API engineers, 1 product manager, 1 data scientist, 1 designer, and shared support from Site Reliability Engineering. The project is urgent because leadership wants measurable improvement in session success and data efficiency within 12 weeks, without materially hurting Feed freshness or engagement.
Key Stakeholders
- Director of Mobile Engineering wants a clear delivery plan and low regression risk.
- Feed Product Manager wants to preserve ranking quality and engagement, even if payloads stay larger.
- Infrastructure/API team wants to avoid major backend rewrites this quarter.
- Data Science wants clean experiment design and measurable impact on bandwidth per session.
- Regional Growth team wants the feature enabled quickly in India, Brazil, and Indonesia.
Constraints
- 12-week timeline with no additional headcount
- Engineering budget of $180K for backend capacity, testing devices, and observability work
- Must support Facebook for Android and iOS; no breaking API version change allowed for older clients for at least 6 months
- Backend team can dedicate only 1.5 engineer-months to new API work in the first 6 weeks
- Launch must cover at least 3 priority markets first
Complications
- A parallel Reels performance initiative is competing for the same backend engineers.
- Feed ranking owners are concerned that aggressive field trimming or batching could reduce content freshness.
- Existing mobile telemetry does not reliably attribute bandwidth savings to specific API endpoints.
Your Task
- Define the execution plan to design and launch bandwidth-efficient API interactions.
- Propose how you would prioritize technical trade-offs across mobile, backend, and product quality.
- Specify the rollout strategy, success metrics, and experiment plan for target markets.
- Identify key risks, dependencies, and rollback triggers.
- Recommend how to align stakeholders when engagement and efficiency goals conflict.
