Facebook chief product officer Chris Cox exits as company’s focus moves to messaging
- Cox said the website was ‘turning a new page’ with its messaging network, which would need ‘leaders who are excited to see the new direction through’
Facebook’s chief product officer and one of its earliest employees Chris Cox said on Thursday he is leaving the company just days after chief executive Mark Zuckerberg revealed a plan to transform the world’s biggest social network into an encryption-focused messaging company.
Cox, the 36-year-old Zuckerberg lieutenant who would have managed the CEO’s vision to bring Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp closer together, said in a blog post his departure came “with great sadness”. He left a graduate programme at Stanford University to join Facebook in 2005 as a software engineer and helped develop its original news feed feature.
“As Mark has outlined, we are turning a new page in our product direction, focused on an encrypted, interoperable, messaging network … This will be a big project and we will need leaders who are excited to see the new direction through,” Cox said in a Facebook post.
Cox’s departure removes a layer of management, bringing Zuckerberg closer to a family of apps that he wants to make compatible, which could be a complicated engineering task.
Facebook shares were down 1.7 per cent in extended trading following the announcement.
