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 high-traffic, business-critical product used by advertisers, agencies, creators, and internal sales/support teams to create campaigns, edit budgets, target audiences, review delivery, and monitor performance. The product spans complex workflows and backend systems, including campaign creation, ads auction inputs, reporting queries, billing, permissions, creative assets, recommendations, and experimentation infrastructure.

You are the Technical PM responsible for partnering with engineering to reduce latency in Ads Manager. The latency issue may affect different surfaces differently: initial page load, campaign table rendering, audience or placement selection, ad preview, bulk edits, reporting dashboards, or save/publish operations. Some users may be small advertisers making quick changes, while others may be large agencies managing thousands of campaigns across accounts.

In this interview, focus on how you would define the latency problem, align cross-functional teams, make technical and product trade-offs, and drive execution without compromising correctness, privacy, ads integrity, or advertiser trust. You should show how you would work with engineering in a complex Meta-scale environment where latency improvements may require frontend, backend, data, infrastructure, and product workflow changes.

The experience should consider:

- Which Ads Manager workflows and user cohorts are most impacted, and how latency affects advertiser outcomes such as campaign creation, optimization, spend, and retention.

- How latency should be measured across client, network, backend, database, API, and rendering layers, including p50, p95, p99, time-to-interactive, save latency, and reporting freshness.

- What instrumentation, logs, traces, dashboards, and user journey data would be needed to isolate the problem and distinguish real latency from measurement gaps.

- How to partner with engineering to identify bottlenecks across APIs, data fetching, permissions checks, ranking/recommendation services, reporting queries, caching, and frontend rendering.

- Product and technical trade-offs around speed, data accuracy, consistency, personalization, security, privacy, reliability, and advertiser confidence.

- How to prioritize latency work against other Ads Manager roadmap commitments and define success criteria for each phase.

- How to roll out improvements safely through experimentation, staged launches, monitoring, regression detection, and rollback plans.

- How to communicate progress, risks, and impact to engineering, design, data science, sales/support, leadership, and affected advertiser segments.

Your goal is to describe a structured Technical PM approach for reducing latency in Ads Manager: how you would frame the problem, define measurable outcomes, work with engineering to diagnose and prioritize fixes, manage cross-functional execution, and ensure the product becomes faster without degrading reliability, correctness, or business performance.