About
A product designer based in the Bay Area (San Jose).
Most recently I was at Meta, leading the Marketing message experience team, building 0→1 AI-powered creative tools and working closely with PMs, engineers, and data scientists along the way.
Before that, I was at Walmart Marketplace leading the seller acquisition and communications team, designing the Seller Center homepage, onboarding, notifications, and the overall seller experience.
Earlier in my career I did a completely different kind of design: experiential and brand work. Different medium, same job: I've always been a designer.
Marketing messages (MM) are how businesses re-engage customers across Meta's messaging apps, primarily WhatsApp. This project focused on WhatsApp.
MM setup was buried in a separate modal experience under Creative, where advertisers configured text, Auto Reply, and Quick Replies together in one area, apart from the ad itself. As a result, most advertisers never finished setting it up, and the marketing message was never delivered at all.
Marketing messages are one-directional today. 60% of consumers read them once delivered, but only ~1% end up in a real conversation. Once a consumer messages back, the conversation just stops.
My first read was that this was a structural problem: MM setup lived in a separate, legacy experience, disconnected from the core ad flow. Moving it into Creative increases prominence and unlocks Gen AI and automation already built for ads, while preserving the nuances MM needs.
Auto Reply and Quick Replies were configured inside Creative, a pre-publish flow, even though they only mattered post-publish. Most advertisers never found the automation setup at all.
Where advertisers configure the marketing message before it goes live, a one-time setup before the campaign launches.
Where automation lives. Auto Reply and Quick Replies only matter once a consumer replies, a response layer, independent of how the message was built.
MM's primary text field now sits directly under the ad's, auto-filled from whatever advertisers already wrote for the ad.
Surfaces MM-tailored best-practice variants based on what they entered, one click to swap in.
Now advertisers' mental model matched reality: setting up the marketing message was just part of one flow with the creative, not a separate step. But that alone didn't move CTR. The next question was how to actually improve CTR within that flow:
Only 1.4% of advertisers customized their MM text, even though multi-text variants were already lifting CTR +16.33% on the ads side. The opportunity: extend that same lever to MM.
We had to make it clear to advertisers what their selection would actually deliver for the marketing message, reused ad text or something written specifically for MM. To do that, we tested two options: progressive disclosure, where customizing stays tucked inside a dropdown, and full visibility, where reuse and customize sit side by side as soon as the section opens.
Looked safer: simpler, less clutter, but risked advertisers missing the option entirely.
Risked feeling denser, but made customization impossible to miss.
The option people could actually see, they used. Option B won.
The option people could actually see, they used. Option B won.
On top of what we changed for the primary text section, we also rebuilt Gen AI itself: instead of reusing ad copy, it now generates suggestions written specifically for MM.
Rebuilt to suggest up to 5 MM-tailored variants at once, synthesized from ~17,000 real messages for what drives CTR in direct messaging vs. standard ads.
Default, ad copy used for MM. If an advertiser does nothing, the MM text just mirrors the ad, so it's never blank.
MM inherits all ad text variants, so any multi-text option already set up for the ad carries over automatically.
Gen AI surfaces 5 tailored variants, built specifically for MM rather than reused ad copy.
Moving Auto Reply and Quick Replies out of Creative meant taking them out of a space Ads owned, into a new post-publish surface. That kind of structural change needed more than a good diagram. It needed both teams to agree the case was real.
During a platform rearchitecture, the Ads team proposed consolidating Conversations back into Creative. The Business Messaging team pushed back. Two different product philosophies.
Chat Builder stayed at L1. The product-moment argument held over the platform-simplification argument.
Auto Reply and Quick Replies moved out of that pre-publish Creative setup entirely, into their own home: Chat Builder, at the same level as Creative. Built on Click-to-WhatsApp's existing pattern, so the mental model transferred directly.
A closer look at what's new inside Chat Builder itself:
One click applies a saved automation setup. Chat Builder auto-saves every time you publish.
Both automations shown inline before you publish.
Buttons delivered with the MM. Tapping one sends that response instantly.
Pre-filled by default so advertisers can publish immediately, no setup required.
Clicking Edit on Quick Replies opens its configuration modal. Here's what changed inside it:
Live, consumer-POV preview updates in real time while configuring.
Conversations solved discoverability. Advertisers could finally find and set up Quick Replies and Auto Reply, but most businesses still can't respond to every consumer message manually, at scale.
Managing replies manually isn't realistic, and most conversations were still dying unanswered.
Conversations gave advertisers better tools to reply. Business AI removes the need for them to do it manually, inside the same free window, on the same setup surface they already use.
I audited Amazon, eBay, Etsy, and Shopify to understand what sellers experience elsewhere. All four had dedicated homepages with task guidance and growth features. Walmart had none of these, and was the only platform without a dismissible notification system or a promotions discovery surface.
| Platform | Guided tasks | Contextual metrics | Growth tips | Lifecycle-aware |
|---|---|---|---|---|
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✓ | ✓ | N/A | ✓ |
 |
✓ | N/A | ✓ | N/A |
 |
✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
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✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
 |
N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A |
I ran a content workshop with the product team to determine the essential requirements across three core areas: key business metrics, tasks, and growth. From there, we mapped each piece of content to the seller's lifecycle stage, whether they're onboarding for the first time or already an active seller, so the homepage surfaces the right information at the right moment.
A week-one seller and a three-year veteran need completely different things. I mapped the full journey to design an experience that adapts to where sellers are.
I explored several directions before converging on the final approach, testing how to balance metrics density with task clarity.
After several iterations, we developed the initial version of the homepage: a single layout organizing everything sellers need into three focused sections, To-dos, KPIs, and Promotions.
We tested this first-round design using the PURE (Practical Usability Rating by Experts) method with 5 evaluators. To set a baseline, we first tested the original onboarding flow, then integrated that onboarding into the new homepage to see how the To-do section improved seller comprehension.
The original onboarding prioritized the "Add Items" banner over the actual setup steps. Sellers were pushed toward listing products before completing essential account setup, causing confusion and drop-off.
By integrating onboarding into the To-do section, sellers could clearly see what setup steps remained, in the right order, with the right priority, without being distracted by promotions.
The redesigned homepage brings together three focused sections in one scannable layout, adapting to each seller's stage and surfacing the right information at the right time.
In collaboration with the Content Designer, we developed a framework to determine what content belongs on the homepage and where, including where seller alerts should be routed, how each module is prioritized, and when content appears or retires based on the seller's lifecycle stage.
Promotional banners were a major pain point. They'd pile up, go stale, and drown out more important tasks. I designed a lifecycle system that controls how banners appear, surface, and expire.
Partnership ad allow advertisers to run ads with partners: creators, brands, and other businesses. The advertiser and partner accounts are featured in the ad's header and the ads leverage signals from both accounts for improved ranking and incremental performance.
Right now, enabling a partnership ad during campaign creation means the Marketing Message (MM) simply doesn't send.
Our main objective is to unblock that 5% of eligible revenue, by enabling partnership ads for MM and bringing them to full feature parity with the rest of the ad creative experience for WhatsApp MM.
On the consumer side, we had to think through how a partnership ad would actually look inside an MM. Instagram and Facebook posts have their own dedicated header for surfacing a partner, but an MM lives directly inside a chat thread with the consumer, so we needed a different way to represent the partnership there.
We ran several rounds of review with the WhatsApp, Partnership Ad, and MM XFN teams across a set of tag placement directions before settling on an approach.
The direction we landed on had to meet a few requirements:
Once we landed on where the tag would sit, the next question was how much of the partner's identity to surface. We considered the following directions with the WhatsApp team before landing on the one that shipped.
We proposed Option 1, it won for two reasons:
To display partnership ads in MM, we use image burn-in automated creative optimization (ACO) to embed the partnership tag directly within the media asset.
The maximum username length is 30 characters for Instagram and 50 characters for Facebook. If a username exceeds the available space for the partnership ad tag due to media width constraints, it's truncated to fit within the media width. This keeps the tag visually consistent and prevents it from overflowing or disrupting the layout.
On the advertiser side, we updated copy throughout the flow to introduce partnership ads with MM as a new capability, and added an identities step with a live preview, so advertisers know exactly what they're publishing.
MM wasn't supported for partnership ads at all, it wasn't referenced or included anywhere on the partnership ad card. We updated the card's content to let advertisers know they can now set up partnership ads with MM.
Once turned on, advertisers choose an existing partnership or send a new request, same as before, but MM wasn't referenced here either. We updated the content to add MM, and added a WhatsApp Business Account (WABA) field, displayed under the Business Asset section of the identities card, so advertisers can see which number will send the MM before publishing.
We added a WABA field under the Business Asset section, appearing under whichever identity the advertiser assigns it to, plus an MM preview alongside the existing Instagram and Facebook preview. Since no creative is chosen yet, it only shows the tag.
On the creator side, we updated the permission approval copy so creators understood what they were agreeing to now that partnership content could include MM, not just ads. Content was written in collaboration with a Content Designer and went through legal review.
"Partnership ad" is the term people already recognize, and a marketing message isn't technically an ad, so repeating both got long. We anchored the request around "partnership" as one concept instead.
Creators who'd already approved a partner needed a way to review the change, not just accept it blindly. Continue takes them to the updated terms, or they can jump straight to reviewing their approved partners.
