Facebook Chief Product Officer Chris Cox is leaving the tech company, CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced in a note Thursday.
“Chris and I have worked closely together to build our products for more than a decade and I will always appreciate his deep empathy for the people using our services and the uplifting spirit he brings to everything he does,” Zuckerberg wrote.
Cox was one of Facebook’s first 15 engineers and climbed his way up the company. He oversaw a huge part of the social company, and he was a part of the so-called M-Team, which is a group of key executives that Zuckerberg relies on.
Cox worked on a number of key Facebook products, including News Feed, he ran the Facebook app, and most recently, he oversaw the strategy for all of the company’s apps, Zuckerberg wrote.
Cox informed the company of his decision to resign on Monday, according to a Facebook financial filing.
“As Mark has outlined, we are turning a new page in our product direction, focused on an encrypted, interoperable, messaging network,” Cox wrote in a goodbye post on his Facebook profile. “This will be a big project and we will need leaders who are excited to see the new direction through.”
