SUMMARY
At Meta we’re committed to empowering millions of businesses to achieve their goals. As the VP of design for the monetization team — a group that serves 10 million active advertisers across our services — our business tools should have easy-to-use experiences (e.g. tools, interfaces) that unlock tangible value for advertisers.
The monetization design team at Meta recently doubled down on usability — meaning, how we make our products easier to navigate and better able to accomplish advertisers’ goals. We launched an ambitious program that’s focused on holding a high bar for quality and craft in the business products we deliver. As my colleagues will explain in greater detail below, what's been truly innovative about this initiative is its inclusive approach. It empowers everyone with a stake in our products to experience them firsthand — from engineers and product managers to executives and more.
In the year since we started the program, teams across my organization have implemented copious usability and quality fixes which resulted in significant improvements to our advertiser experience. This accomplishment also drove business outcomes and bottom-line benefits, demonstrating that craft and quality changes can lead to direct, quantifiable business outcomes. The program also led to a cultural shift: Executives and product teams are proactively taking charge to maintain high standards of craft in the experiences we ship through more extensive “dogfooding,” which involves using and testing the products internally.
Through the program, we’ve instilled a strong sense of ownership and pride in the experiences our organization creates and sends into the world, reinforcing that it’s not just one team or discipline’s responsibility to solve for craft and quality — it’s everyone’s.
— Jhilmil Jain, VP, Monetization Design, Meta
Trying to improve a product’s usability is an ambiguous problem. Usability issues can range from design choices that decrease trust, to functionality problems that block or confuse audiences. On top of this, user satisfaction — which influences usability — can be a subjective measurement, and as people become familiar with a product or interface over time, their perception of usability may shift. The size of our offerings at Meta make solving for usability even more of a challenge.
The monetization usability team — a cross-disciplinary group including designers, engineers, product managers, executives, researchers and more — started by clearly defining the scope of our work to the most important and high-use user flows — like a sign-up experience or navigating from one area of a product to another — that our advertiser customers rely on. This led to our two-fold vision: 1) address all flows that need improvement and 2) create best-in-class strategic flows.
We then set goals for each team responsible for various business and ad products to help the vision feel achievable and progress feel tangible. Tight alignment across the different product groups on the vision and goals ensured we stayed in lockstep and progressed as a full organization.
How to do this on your team:
Keep the scope of your program narrow. Don’t try to fix everything, and fiercely guard against the project’s scope growing and changing unintentionally.
Concretely define what you are solving for (e.g. specific user flows, clear criteria for usability issues).
Translate the vision into explicit, time-bound goals and hold people accountable for achieving them.
From our previous attempts to improve product quality, we knew we needed to move fast and land impact early. Within a few weeks of starting the program, we organized a “fixathon,” an event focused on fixing issues and improving processes within our broader team. Our goal was to fix over 80 percent of issues, but teams resolved 95 percent. This provided validation to the program’s early sponsors.
The monetization design team’s “fixathon” — an event focused on fixing issues and improving processes — resolved 95 percent of advertiser tool issues identified for the event.
After the fixathon, we partnered with the research team to identify additional usability issues through numerous research sessions and organized a “state of usability” event to raise broader awareness of these existing challenges. In addition to this, our team completed hundreds of internal audits and established a new prioritization process and approach to ensure continuous progress and momentum.
How to do this on your team:
Draw on design teams’ core capabilities (e.g. research studies, usability audits) to quickly establish the bar for product quality and any gaps.
Utilize company or team-wide events to raise awareness and land impact in a short timeframe.
To prioritize and progress, we needed more clarity and organization. Creating sub-workstreams — what we refer to as “rocks” — that correlate to the size of the issue and ladder up to our flows and vision helped with this.
The monetization design team organized their work by the size of the issue needing to be fixed, resulting in small, medium and big “rocks.” The size of the rock influenced the amount of engineering time required and level of risk.
We categorized each sub-workstream by size — small rocks, medium rocks and large rocks — to help people operate independently with a dedicated, accountable owner and distinct prioritization and goals. We ensured program cohesiveness through centrally-defined terms (e.g. “small rocks”), and shared milestones like completing audits. Finally, we reinforced our commitment to the work through bi-weekly usability operations meetings attended by product group, product management, engineering and other product area leads.
How to do this on your team:
Create robust processes for identifying issues (e.g. research studies, internal audits) to keep prioritization and execution aligned across the organization.
Deeply understand and define the types of issues present in your product and establish workstreams to tackle executing solutions accordingly.
Establish visibility practices like meetings to keep leaders engaged.
Articulate common language for the program that can be repeated to reinforce the central ideas.
The monetization usability team consists of two main groups: a core cross-functional group of people who own the program at-large and the small, medium and big rock workstreams. These people are accountable for central strategic planning and rapid decision-making. A larger group of team members are accountable for driving execution for each of the product areas within the monetization organization.
This set up has proven to be an effective way to make quick decisions and delegate responsibilities across our organization. We ensure tight coordination between groups and drive accountability by reporting progress to all monetization leaders.
How to do this on your team:
Be intentional in limiting the size of the core decision-making group (smaller = better).
Identify cross-functional allies who are passionate about product quality to recruit into the core group.
Prioritize rapid communication and establish a quick decision-making process (e.g. owners as tie-breakers).
Ensure accountability by reporting progress at the organization-level and to high-level leadership.
Measurement is the key to understanding impact. This is a particularly hard problem for usability as there’s no agreed-upon industry standard for usability metrics, and often the business impact from usability improvements in enterprise tools is hard if not impossible to measure. To address this, we established a dedicated usability measurement workstream — led by data scientists and product growth analysts — who helped drive progress.
How to do this on your team:
Partner with data scientists and product growth experts to develop a measurement strategy that works for your program.
Define metrics that help you understand impact of usability (e.g. flow completion rates).
The usability program demonstrates the power design has to improve user experience and company culture, and the value of holding all teams — from design to research — accountable to business goals. The latter is a win-win for the communities we serve and the company.
We hope you find these learnings useful and actionable, and we'd love to hear your thoughts. What best practices for upleveling product quality resonate with you? What other ways can designers be held accountable for business objectives, and how do you see design influencing business impact and culture change at your organization? Share your thoughts with Design at Meta on Instagram or Threads.
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