Facebook product chief Cox to exit as focus shifts to messaging

Facebook Inc’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 that his departure came “with great sadness.” He had left a graduate program at Stanford University to join Facebook in 2005 as a software engineer and helped developed its original news feed feature.