What I’ve Been Working On…

Messenger

Messenger is the instant messaging service that powers conversations within Facebook, Instagram, Portal, and Oculus. I support our Shared Experiences pillar, focusing on new features for Groups and 1:1 Messaging.

I’m super lucky to have a fantastic, well-balanced team. Here are a few of the features we’ve shipped:

2024 Sizzle Reel

This reel showcases key features our team shipped in 2024, highlighting the thoughtful execution and craft excellence that define our work. Below are a few standout projects:

Custom Stickers

Stickers are a powerful tool for self-expression and authenticity. To expand Messenger’s creative inventory, we introduced a sticker maker that enables users to design personalized stickers aligned with their unique styles and relationships. This feature leverages AI backdrops, advanced editing tools, and sticker favoriting to provide a seamless and intuitive creative experience.

Birthday Sparks

Birthdays are natural conversation starters, helping rekindle connections and keep chats engaged. We identified an opportunity to enhance the discoverability of friends' birthdays, making them more prominent and accessible to drive meaningful interactions.

Command System

In March 2022, we launched a robust system for chat commands to help supercharge messaging efficiency and add a little extra fun to Messenger.

Examples include the “@everyone” command, which notifies all participants in a chat about a new message, and the “/silent” functionality, which makes it so that members of the group will not receive a notification of your message at all, removing the anxiety of interrupting someone who may be in a different time zone and allows users to read messages at their leisure.

Covered by The Verge, and TechCrunch

Word Effects

We introduced suggested word effects to easily add a fun emoji cascade to everyday words and phrases you’re already using in your chats. Now, when you send standalone messages like “goodnight,” “congrats” and “jk,” you’ll see an option to create a word effect for that term, including a suggested emoji pairing like 😴, 🎉 or 😛. … A new way to help people discover this feature and bring their conversations to life!

Covered by TechCrunch

While I love the challenges of management, I also loved being a part of a product team as an IC. Here are a few features I worked on as an IC designer:

Soundmojis

In 2021, I stepped in to support the Audio & Immersive team before they hired their first designer, leading the design for Soundmojis—a next-level emoji experience that pairs short sound bites with expressive visuals.

Users could send everything from classic sound effects like clapping 👏, crickets 🦗, drumroll 🥁, and evil laughter 👻 to pop culture clips from Ariana Grande, Universal Pictures’ F9, NBC’s Brooklyn Nine-Nine, and Netflix’s Bridgerton.

This project was a fun challenge in blending expression and interactivity, creating a richer, more dynamic way for people to communicate. It was lauded for it’s intentional and user-centric design.

Covered by The Verge, TechCrunch, and WSJ.

Messenger & Instagram Cross-App Launch

With over a billion people using Messenger to share, connect, and express themselves, 2020 marked a major milestone: integrating the Messenger and Instagram messaging experience. This update brought some of Messenger’s best features to Instagram, ensuring users could enjoy a seamless and enriched messaging experience across both apps.

For this launch, I led design for Custom Reactions, Chat Themes, and Replies, helping shape a more personalized, expressive, and engaging way for people to communicate—no matter which platform they use.

Custom Reactions

I championed this feature for about two years, ever since I first tested it as a Growth experience. I was ecstatic when it finally made the roadmap in 2020 and I got to lead design on it. As a heavy-duty messaging user, I desperately wanted to give Messenger users the ability to react with any emoji — expanding on the original set of seven. Custom Reactions is designed so users can trick out their personal reaction tray while having the flexibility to add cheeky or contextual one-offs. What’s in your reaction tray?

Replies & Forwarding

Replies is one of my favorite features on Messenger, designed in staggered collaboration with Will Yoshimura. I’m especially proud of the thoughtful design details we refined—the precise tension of the swipe gesture, the seamless interaction for viewing the original message, and the intuitive threading across different media types.

I also developed a deep familiarity with Forwarding while working on Messenger’s Growth team. Here, I focused on improving the accuracy of broadcast suggestions and designing a more equitable experience for group chats, ensuring that messages reached the right people in the most intuitive way.

Chat Themes

In 2020, we launched chat themes to give users more ways to personalize their conversations. Our Pride theme debuted in early June to celebrate Pride Month, followed by Tie-Dye, Love, Halloween, and Monochrome in the fall as part of our first cross-app release for Messenger and Instagram DMs.

Since then, we’ve continued expanding our theme collection through exciting collaborations, including:

• TinyTAN (BTS) – Covered by Rolling Stone, bringing K-Pop flair to chats.

• Dune (Warner Bros.) – A cinematic theme celebrating the film’s release.

• Billie Eilish – A custom theme marking her new album launch.

• …and many more.

Each theme is crafted to bring conversations to life, reflecting cultural moments and user passions in a fresh, engaging way.

Covid-19 Care Reaction

At the start of the pandemic in 2020, we introduced a pulsing heart reaction in Messenger—a temporary feature designed to help people express extra love and support when digital connections mattered more than ever. This playful easter egg was a joy to design, and I had the incredible opportunity to collaborate with artist Ryan Putnam, one of my design heroes 💗

Project Lightspeed

In 2019, Messenger embarked on an ambitious org-wide initiative to rewrite the app from the ground up, reducing its footprint on iPhones from 120MB to 30MB. As the design lead on this project, I spearheaded efforts to unify and simplify our design system, ensuring that components could be built once and seamlessly reused across the app to minimize binary size. This process not only streamlined our architecture but also strengthened the scalability and robustness of our design system, setting a new foundation for future features. It was an incredibly rewarding challenge that reshaped how we approached design at scale.

I was interviewed by Fast Company.

Omnipicker (Chat Composer)

From 2016 to 2019, I owned Omnipicker, driving multiple major iterations to enhance its functionality and user experience. Key improvements included streamlining group creation, increasing the accuracy of suggested ranking, and introducing a dedicated group-specific entry point. Additionally, I ensured seamless adaptation across two app-wide redesigns and documented its evolution to provide a historical record of this core feature.

Messenger’s Redesign (M4)

In 2018, Messenger launched a major redesign that TechCrunch described as bringing "a subtle sense that the claustrophobia had lifted."This overhaul streamlined the app by consolidating nine tabs into just three and introducing a lighter, cleaner interface for a more intuitive experience. As part of this effort, I worked on redesigning Thread Details, Chat Creation, and Wave, ensuring these features aligned with the new, simplified vision for Messenger.