Facebook Design System

Overview

A design system initiative partnering with 3 orgs to design and integrate 17 new components. 6 weekly sprints, kicking off January 30, 2023 and closing out March 13, 2023.

Goal

As PM, my goal was to accelerate completion of our 80-component release in 8 months, targeting 80% surface component usage.

My Role

• Created project brief, aligned approach with leadership to define POCs
• Ran project kick-off and daily sprint cadence
• Individual contributor on 4 components created personally

The Human Problem

Recognizing the need to address the challenges of transitioning to AI and the Metaverse while appealing to a younger audience, Meta's leadership prioritized improving our UI experience. This decision was prompted by user research findings indicating users did not perceive Facebook's UI to be of high quality — highlighting the need for streamlining and refreshing the overall user experience.

Along the way, Meta-wide metrics were falling prey to bureaucracy and product teams were struggling to come up to speed with working with Design Systems and the Facebook Design System Team. It was clear a more lightweight approach was needed to accelerate our progress and get back on track.

Challenges

We kicked off an initiative called Mahalo — a project to get the FDS team back on track and working with product teams in a more collaborative way to ship components to the system in a scalable way.

Managing complexity at scale

With 20 people across 3 organizations, aligning on a single shared goal required strong facilitation, clear role definition, and daily visibility into progress. Bureaucratic blockers were real and had to be navigated carefully.

Outcome

The sprint increased design system usage from 19% to 59% across product surfaces and delivered 21 components, surpassing the initial target of 17.