The challenge

Facebook’s main app was losing relevance with people ages 18–29. The problem crossed the entire product: young adults had inherited networks that no longer reflected their lives, struggled to find content worth returning for, and increasingly built community elsewhere. The team needed app-wide directions, not another isolated feature.

The work also had to align more than 20 product leads while everyone was remote during the first year of the pandemic. Each group owned a different surface, roadmap, and measure of success.

My contribution

I led design across the six-week sprint, managing the stakeholder system while keeping the work grounded in a coherent young-adult experience. We framed the opportunity around three connected behaviors: curating who and what belongs in a network, discovering relevant interests, and turning passive consumption into meaningful participation.

I guided the team from strategy into six high-fidelity, interactive concepts:

• Prototyped tools for resetting and intentionally rebuilding a network as life changes.
• Designed new ways to discover people, groups, and content through interests rather than inherited connections.
• Built community mechanics that helped young adults contribute, bridge groups, and make their own voices visible.

We used prototypes as decision tools with product leaders, showing individual interactions and how a set of concepts could shift the main app’s relationship with young adults. That system view helped teams see shared dependencies and where organizational ownership would need to change.

The impact

Leadership adopted all six directions and moved them into product development. Three were fast-tracked into production and early market testing in India, and the portfolio prompted additional resourcing and organizational changes around the young-adult experience.

The project’s most important output was not one winning screen. It was a shared product framework that connected fragmented teams to the same user problem, gave leadership six concrete bets to evaluate, and made young-adult relevance an app-level responsibility.