Meta’s Sheryl Sandberg Successor Is Mark Zuckerberg’s Quiet Growth Engine

The transition for Meta’s No. 2 spot, due to take place formally in the fall, was announced at a tumultuous time for the company, with the digital-ad market in upheaval from rising inflation,

Apple Inc.

privacy policies and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Meta in April posted its slowest revenue growth since going public a decade ago.

Meta has been trying to adapt and revitalize the advertising juggernaut that Ms. Sandberg created. Mr. Olivan signaled that he would focus on the inner workings of the company to deliver growth and efficiencies. “One of my biggest priorities will be to ensure that the business products and partnerships sides of our company are in lockstep,” he said in a Facebook post after his promotion was announced.

“Mr. Olivan will be tasked with reclaiming Meta’s ad targeting dominance, likely through tighter integration with platform commerce,” Jason Helfstein, head of internet research at Oppenheimer, said in a note.

Meta declined to make Mr. Olivan available for an interview.

The Spanish-born executive joined the social-media platform in 2007 as head of international growth when Facebook was working to expand beyond the U.S. At the time, the company had about $150 million in annual sales, largely in its home country. Meta’s revenue last year reached $117.9 billion, with about half generated outside the U.S.

Mr. Olivan, with a new M.B.A. from Stanford University, accelerated the expansion. Less than six months after his arrival, Facebook introduced a Spanish-language version of its site. Mr. Olivan told a Spanish news agency at the time that the goal was to “offer the largest number of languages as soon as possible.”

Mr. Olivan then helped Facebook expand into countries such as Brazil, Indonesia and India. By the time the company went public in 2012, Facebook said it was available in more than 70 different languages.

“My first job at Facebook in 2007 was overseeing international growth and expansion,” he said Wednesday about his new COO role. “This role gave me a global perspective and reinforced the importance of international voices at Meta. In many ways, this new role brings me back to my roots at the company.”

Since joining the company, Mr. Olivan has worked his way up the ranks. He became a direct report to Mr. Zuckerberg by 2014 and went on to build an expanding power structure within the company. A Wall Street Journal analysis published last year of a decade of internal employee lists at Facebook showed that Mr. Olivan’s direct reports had grown by more than 900% since 2016, outpacing those of all other executives. At the same time, the number of employees who directly reported to Ms. Sandberg shrank.

In 2018, in the midst of a management shake-up, he shifted to a new role as vice president of central products, still with an emphasis on growth. Mr. Olivan was put in charge of shared features that run across Meta’s different products and apps, including ads and security spanning Facebook, as well as Instagram and WhatsApp. In January, he secured another promotion, to the position as Meta’s chief growth officer.

With Mr. Zuckerberg’s focus shifting to the metaverse, the online virtual realm that he projects will be so core to Facebook’s growth that he renamed the company Meta, Mr. Olivan is emerging once again as a central player. Unlike Ms. Sandberg, who had been noticeably absent from meetings on how to build out the company’s metaverse, Mr. Olivan joined Meta’s vice president for global affairs,

Nick Clegg,

in October in announcing 10,000 new jobs being created in the European Union as part of its effort to build the metaverse.

Write to Meghan Bobrowsky at Meghan.Bobrowsky@wsj.com