Meta.com
Cobra
Meta's
Billion-dollar
Front door
Role:
Senior Design Leadership & Pillar Lead
Duration
2024-2026
Meta.com
I united the store and web experience teams around a shared design standard, replacing siloed, inconsistent surfaces with a self-service system that's both beautiful and performant.
Meta's hardware ambitions (Quest, Ray-Ban Meta, Oakley Meta) had outpaced its web presence. The products were premium; the web experience wasn't. Different teams, no shared design language, no performance baseline. This required more than a redesign. A premium standard needed to be set on Meta.com, prove it drove results, then scale that standard across the store experience and 20 Tier 1 partner properties, each with its own team, priorities, and constraints, none of which I had direct authority over.
The Meta.com store redesign drove +5% wearables conversion and +6.7% add-to-cart lift, exceeding the program's sales goal by 120%. That success served as the catalyst for a new web standard across Meta: every surface should be both beautiful and performant.
I didn't mandate a design system across 20+ partner teams up front. Instead, I set the strategy to prove the model on one surface first: I directed my team through building a design system for Meta.com's store refresh, then used the resulting +5% conversion / +6.7% ATC lift as the evidence base to drive voluntary adoption across partner teams. As a deliberate leadership stance, the outcomes made the case so compelling that teams chose to adopt, rather than requiring a mandate to migrate their work.
I was accountable for two fronts at once. On one, I directed my own team's build of the standard: wayfinding, design system, component architecture, and a custom content management system. On the other, I had to set the stage for alignment with 20+ external partner teams, each with their own priorities and constraints, while having no direct authority over any of them. My strategy for that second front was self-service: rather than brokering every decision myself, I set the direction for a self-service model for the design system and directed the creation of the enablement tools (guidelines, documentation, component libraries, performance benchmarks) that let those teams adopt the standard on their own timeline.
Performance and visual richness are often treated as a tradeoff. I decided that performance would be a first-class constraint alongside the premium visual direction for the design system, and worked to hold the broader team to that standard, defining what "good" meant for the entire program.
Due to compressed timelines, I proactively managed escalations and drove leadership presentations rather than waiting to be asked. I made sure senior stakeholders had visibility at every key moment, and the C-suite praised the work.
For the design work to be impactful, it had to establish a standard that scales. Meta.com proved that premium design does drive conversion. Direct partnership with the store proved craft and quality could scale. Twenty Tier 1 partners proved the ability to scale through enablement rather than a mandate. The standard set here now flexes to new products and extensions.
