Evolve Instagram’s Messaging Flywheel
Transform sharing to be a friend-first experience across sender and receiver areas by defining vision, setting product direction and shipping features across the flywheel
Duration: Spring ‘23 - Summer ‘24 (~1.5 years)
Role: Senior Product Design Lead
Connecting with friends over content is key to the Instagram experience, but features across our sharing flywheel were feeling uninspiring and cumbersome
OPPORTUNITY AREAS
Sending reels
While users told us they were familiar with how to share, pressing issues revolved around efficiently finding friends to chat with and feature awareness.
We knew users weren’t catching up with enough reels, resulting in a low reply rate, while the shipped experience prioritized partial, in-thread watching.
Receiving reels
Vision
A friend-first, best-in-class sharing space
Powerful and personalized, helping people connect across multiple use cases
A conversation-first receiver experience
Efficiently catch up and continue chatting with friends across the funnel
Building a fun, feature-packed sharing space
This is a highly optimized area that funnels multiple user journeys, so our goal was to increase sharing across the most impactful and growing use cases— single, group and external sharing— while balancing our new “friend-first” vision with strict metric checks.
Developing new consumption baselines to grow the flywheel
The shipped experienced lacked product direction, so in our journey to hit our goal of increasing reply rates, we set to prioritize opportunities to easily catch up and reply across the funnel with a milestones-based approach.
OUTCOME
Sharing transformed: a new focus on connection across the entire flywheel
My work delivered outsized impact across multiple company priorities (friend sharing, groups, growth, reels) while delivering on our established vision.
Across both sender and receiver areas, we developed guiding principles and frameworks that established a clear product direction— backed by real-world results.
PROJECT DETAILS
My Role
Identify opportunities within problem space
Set vision with XFN leads
Define & prioritize workstreams with XFN leads
Lead time-wide brainstorms
Develop and present roadmap to Design Leads
Develop studies with UX Research
Design POV owner in Privacy & Legal reviews
Own end-to-end designs
Create high-fidelity prototypes
Own approval reviews
Support Eng team with implementation
Iterate based on Data readouts
Team Composition
1 Product Design Lead
1 Product Manager
1 UX Researcher
1 Eng Manager
1 Tech Lead
10+ Engineers
1 Data Scientist