Acting CTO for a Facebook advertising platform

Context

Connectio makes Facebook ad targeting easier to run: A/B testing of ads, two-way lead synchronisation with autoresponders, and campaign retargeting. It leans heavily on Facebook’s advertising APIs, and the integration was approved through Facebook’s own app review.

I held the acting CTO role from 2017 to 2020 — an engagement through my company rather than direct employment — which meant technical direction and executive partnership with the founders rather than delivery management.

Leadership & decisions

Building on someone else’s platform. The entire product sits on Facebook’s advertising APIs. That is a commercial position as much as a technical one: the surface you depend on is owned by a company that can change it on its own timetable, with no regard for your roadmap. Deciding how much of the product to build on that surface, and how to absorb changes when they came, was the recurring judgement call of the engagement.

Staying inside what app review would approve. Deep advertising-API access is granted, not assumed. Keeping the integration within what Facebook would approve shaped what we were willing to build, and the platform passed their review.

Knowing when to stop hand-rolling. The product began on custom PHP. As it grew, I moved it onto Laravel — a decision about maintenance cost and hiring rather than elegance. Custom code you wrote yourself is cheapest at the start and most expensive later, and the crossover is a judgement call about when the team’s time is better spent on the product than on its plumbing.

Outcome

A Facebook advertising platform in continuous production across a three-year tenure, integrated deeply enough with Meta’s advertising APIs to pass their app review, and migrated onto a maintainable framework as it matured.