How would you work with engineering to reduce latency in Ads Manager

Problem Statement Description

Product context: Meta is a social technology company; its products include Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger, Threads, Quest, creator tools, and ads.

Meta Ads Manager is a complex workflow product used by advertisers and agencies to create campaigns, define audiences, set budgets, upload creatives, review estimates, launch ads, and monitor performance across Meta surfaces. In this scenario, users creating or managing campaigns aimed at VR enthusiasts are experiencing latency in key Ads Manager flows, creating friction for campaign setup, optimization, and decision-making.

You are being asked how you would partner with engineering as a Technical PM to reduce latency. The focus is not just on making the interface “faster,” but on defining the problem clearly, identifying where latency matters most in the advertiser workflow, aligning product and engineering priorities, and ensuring improvements are measurable, reliable, and safe at Meta scale.

Your response should cover how you would frame the technical and product requirements, collaborate across frontend, backend, data, infrastructure, and ads delivery teams, and make trade-offs between performance, feature richness, accuracy, reliability, privacy, and launch risk.

The experience should consider:

- Which Ads Manager workflows are in scope, such as campaign creation, audience targeting, budget changes, creative upload, reporting dashboards, or performance recommendations.

- How latency should be defined and measured, including page load time, API response time, time to interactive, save/publish time, and reporting freshness.

- What instrumentation, logs, traces, and user cohorts would be needed to isolate the issue across advertisers, geographies, campaign types, devices, and account sizes.

- How frontend, backend, data pipeline, ML ranking/recommendation, and third-party dependency performance could each contribute to perceived slowness.

- Reliability, privacy, security, and correctness requirements, especially when handling advertiser budgets, targeting data, and campaign state changes.

- How to prioritize fixes with engineering based on advertiser impact, technical complexity, risk, and expected performance gains.

- How rollout, experimentation, observability, alerting, and rollback plans should be handled to avoid disrupting active campaigns.

The goal is to explain how you would lead a structured product-engineering effort to diagnose, prioritize, and safely reduce latency in Ads Manager while preserving trust, accuracy, and business-critical advertiser workflows.