Facebook Marketplace Lagged in Chile When Its Feed Loaded Slowly

Fiona Fung had gathered a set of local Android phones for the trip. Fung, who now oversees Claude Code and Cowork at Anthropic and who had started Facebook Marketplace from idea to launch, had traveled to Chile with just two colleagues to test the product the way local shoppers would see it.

Marketplace was trying to expand into Latin America, and Chile was the test. The team had already expanded into other regions, but Chile was not doing as well, and nothing the team had tried from headquarters in the United States explained the gap.

Upon landing, Fung opened one of the Android phones and tried Marketplace over the local wireless connection. The LTE connection was much slower than what the team was used to in the United States, and, as Fung said, "the Marketplace feed didn't even load very well on these little LTE situations."

She saw the slow loading as a growth blocker. "What a growth blocker you know, you can't even load," Fung said.

The moment stayed with her. Across later work on developer tools, shopping products, and virtual reality headsets, she kept a habit of constantly using the product herself rather than managing by metrics alone. If a team cannot easily use its own product, she argues, its leaders should spend time with customers, since they use the product in ways the team can't.

For Marketplace, which now handles more than $100 billion in goods sold each year, the Chile trip showed a concrete problem. A feed that worked on faster American speeds loaded poorly on slower Chilean networks, and the data had not revealed it.