Badges & Stickers, Noah Kim

Connecting distributed teams through peer recognition.

Designing professional identity and peer recognition for 80,000+ remote Meta employees.

TLDR

1

Product Creation

I created and led a net-new product vertical at Meta, from concept to launch, sparked by insights across Career Profiles and the Jobs Tool (other products I owned within Meta).

2

Global Mobilization

Over 1.5 years, I built and mobilized a global cross-functional team, including a scaled design effort, aligning 120+ stakeholders to bring this experience to life.

3

Company-Wide Adoption

Within 6 months of launch, it became one of the most-used internal community products at the company.

The Problem

When Covid-19 forced Meta's workforce remote overnight, employees lost
the in-person interactions that drove connection, professional identity,
and community. My area of product ownership, driving connection and
internal mobility, was suddenly dealing with a workforce that couldn't
discover peers, find mentors, or feel plugged into culture.

“Given the virtual setting I think any sense of community would have helped to foster a sense of belonging...”

, Remote employee

“..being remote is sad and makes it harder to feel a sense of community”

, Remote employee

“Very impersonal...I haven’t spoken to a single human being since starting. It does not make me feel like part of the Facebook community... ”

, New hire

The gap was clear: without organic networking, both people and products
lacked the context needed to serve employees well.

"Help me..."

Research across employee profiles and internal mobility surfaced three core employee needs:

Help me be understood

And understand who my fellow employees are.

Help me discover

Communities, teams, and people aligned to my interests and career.

Help me participate

In the culture of Meta.

How might we...

Create opportunities for employees to find and understand how they're connected, while building belonging through a medium that looks, feels, and tastes like Meta.

Strategy: Why Badges?

An abstraction people already understand, are the ideal platform for aligning what employees need with what the business wants to drive.

Creating Design Principles

I partnered with UXR to run employee discovery sessions. Their feedback shaped our core design principles:

1

Credible Signal

Tied to transparent criteria and expert validation, earning trust, not just points.

2

People First

Connecting employees directly to peers, teams, and internal career mobility.

3

Universally Understood

Simple, shared signals that carry clear meaning and reflect company culture across teams.

The Pitch

I designed and prototyped a mobile app concept to illustrate the mechanics of identity, credibility, and communication, choosing mobile for focus on story and strategy, even though employees primarily work on desktop.

The Solution

The desktop experience walkthrough that was used to create the roadmap, secure leadership buy-in, and build the product.

Stickers: The Companion System

I proposed Stickers alongside Badges after identifying a critical tension: restricting badges to credible, earned achievements could fight against the social connectedness we were trying to foster.

Stickers are rewards anyone can create, collect, and share, no achievement required. They protect the integrity of Badges as a credible signal while still promoting organic social connection.

Go-to-Market Strategy

The primary risk: how to kickstart a 0-1 marketplace. My approach was a wide-scale brainstorm workshop with cross-functional partners, designed to serve three strategic purposes:

1

Seed the ecosystem

The output became the first set of Badges.

2

Set the quality bar

Walking partners through what makes a good Badge, so early examples guide future ones.

3

Baked-in evangelism

A participatory event that gave partners skin in the game and a reason to spread the word.

I opened the invite to encourage organic growth. 90 people attended a 2-hour workshop that produced 55 initial Badges. Badges was prioritized as a 2021 H1 "first priority" item and launched company-wide in June 2021.

Results

After spending the 6 months creating and pitching the concept, and collaborating with teams and programs across the globe, Badges was made a “first priority” item for the team. Even in basic form, the experience required a fair amount of engineering and design work due to it’s nature of being a marketplace where the experience had to accommodate both the supply and the demand experiences.

In June of that year, Badges was launched company wide.

1.34M+

Badges earned across Meta
6 month span

574

Badges created by 150+ teams and programs (vs. a goal of 30/year)

+2.1%

Increase in multi-profile views indicating higher relevance in peer-to-peer discovery