Badges & Stickers

Creating people connection for remote employees at scale.

When Covid-19 forced Meta remote overnight, the question became: how do you design professional connection for 80,000+ employees?

TLDR

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).

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.

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 due to Covid

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

, Remote employee due to Covid

“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 during Covid

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?

A slide from my proposal deck illustrating why the abstraction of Badges and what they’re already universally understood to be, offers an ideal platform for what employees needing, and what program/business wants to drive.

Creating Design Principles

After identifying the opportunity, I reached out to our UXR to conduct
an “understand” session with various employees to gauge their perception
of a system like Badges. We walked away with some core takeaways that I
constructed into guiding principals for a solution.

1. Badges must be a reliable, credible signal.

A reward for quantified achievement, with transparent criteria, intrinsic value comes from expert validation.

2. Badges connect us to people, and through people, everything else.

Social connection (find people and teams), growth connection (explore ways to grow), and opportunity connection (discover where you want to go and who you want to do it with).

3. Badges are universally understood because they're driven by a universal intent, to connect and satisfy curiosity.

The connection experience at its center, fueled by curiosity, not utility. A carrier of Meta culture in how it's delivered, not just its content.

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