Overview
I was part of the Small Business Ads team at Meta, which owned the ad tool on Facebook that helps small businesses grow their reach. We built an ads platform to power ad creation across the Meta family of apps on a single unified framework. In 2023 we shipped a native ads tool inside Messenger; in 2024 we set out to do the same for the WhatsApp Business app.
I embedded myself in my partner teams' worlds to understand their users' needs and constraints, so we could adapt ad creation to each platform's requirements. This case study covers our product strategy, building the ad tools from the ground up, and my role across surfaces.
The ads landscape at Meta
Meta offers advertising solutions that help businesses reach new customers across Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, and WhatsApp. Advertisers of every size use these platforms to promote their business, both organically and through ads.
We broadly categorize advertisers into three segments:
Basic
People with little to no marketing expertise, for whom advertising is just one part of their job.
Intermediate
More comfortable with advertising, but lacking the time or resources to become experts.
Advanced
Advertising professionals at agencies, or dedicated campaign managers at medium–large businesses.
To support users of such varying sophistication, Meta offers two categories of tools:
- Lightweight ads (LWI) — a simple tool built for novice advertisers with minimal marketing experience, targeting the basic and intermediate segments.
- Ads Manager — the full-featured, robust tool with an advanced feature set, aimed at more sophisticated advertisers in the intermediate and large segments.
An expanding family of apps, and a tool that couldn't keep up
Facebook has grown into a family of apps, including Messenger, Instagram, and WhatsApp, and many users promote their business primarily on one of them. An ad tool embedded only in Facebook left those users behind, so each app team set out to meet users where they were and support ad creation natively.
"As a small business, I'm not as familiar with other platforms' interfaces and language as I am with Instagram's. I find them difficult to understand, which demands a lot of effort to finish creating an ad."
"As a WhatsApp-only business, I don't expect — and don't want — to be taken to other platforms to create an ad. Today, when that happens, I give up on ad creation."
Shaping the Ads platform
Strategy & systems
We developed an Ads platform that can be embedded into any Meta surface, so teams don't have to reinvent the wheel and invest in creating their own ad tool from scratch.
Ads platform
I first mapped out the advertiser's user journey, then evaluated which parts the platform could provide building blocks for: ad creation and ad management.
I broke these down into individual steps and identified how to split our monolithic application into discrete, logical "lego blocks." That's where I landed on the platform's two primary tenets:
Defining system tenets
Composability
The blocks had to work together like pluggable legos, offered as a "menu of options." A partner team might not want to replicate the full ad experience — they should be able to pick the blocks that compose the right experience for their app.
Adaptability
Design: each app has its own design system — visual language and components — so blocks had to adapt to the team's design system. Code: blocks had to be easy to adapt regardless of the app's backend or frontend technology.
My contribution
This phase barely involved drawing new pixels. It was primarily strategic and systems thinking — figuring out how our existing ad tool could be abstracted into a usable platform. The few pixels I did draw painted the vision: how our blocks could be adapted by partner teams to deliver a consistent ads experience while still feeling native inside their own app.
"Platform, meet Messenger."
In our conversations, we learned Messenger was considering building its own native ad tool. We convinced them to partner with us and build on the platform instead, and Messenger became our first user.
Over the next 6 months, I embedded myself within the Messenger team, bringing my ads expertise to build a native ad solution inside Messenger, on top of the platform I'd designed.
Goal: empower messaging-active small businesses to discover, create, optimize, and manage performant ad campaigns right from Messenger.
How businesses use Messenger today
Small businesses use Messenger to engage customers through conversation — answering questions and making sales. They reach users by organically inviting them to "send message" from their Facebook business page, or by running messaging ads on Facebook.
Aligning three teams around one goal
I organized a design sprint that brought together 25+ stakeholders across two organizations and three teams. It turned out to be crucial for building relationships and laying the groundwork for this 0→1 project.
Driving alignment
The sprint built a shared understanding of our goals, the unique advertiser problems on Messenger, each team's long-term strategy, MVP prioritization, and early design explorations. It surfaced differing assumptions that had been quietly blocking alignment — and by the end, we'd come together as a single team with a unified goal.
Prioritizing features
When my team collaborates with a partner, we bring core ads expertise while the partner brings deep knowledge of their vertical and surface. I documented general ad use cases while the Messenger team documented "messaging ad" use cases and north-star solutions.
We evaluated each feature by impact (adoption, completion, performance, retention), experience (needed, expected, nice to have), strategic relevance (key vs. not integral), and eng/design effort (low, medium, high) — then prioritized each into MVP, fast-follow, or future, and worked through the items where we disagreed.
Design principles
From what people, platform, and product experts shared in the sprint, we distilled three guiding principles:
Lightweight
In priority markets, connectivity is a real constraint. A simplified experience where advertisers can easily access, create, and manage ads is key for SMBs.
Personalized
Recommendations reduce cognitive load, help advertisers create better-performing ads, and build trust over time.
Supportive
Our advertisers are often inexperienced solo entrepreneurs — so we guide them at every step, without overwhelming them.
From lego block to native Messenger flow
Ad creation
This is the final end-to-end ad-creation journey, as implemented in Messenger.
Sub-journey: set audience details
User needs
- Help me get started quickly, without needing to deeply understand how targeting works — give me smart defaults.
- More advanced advertisers need more control.
- Everyone needs a way to efficiently reuse (and edit, if needed) a previously created audience.
What the Ads platform provides
- Advantage audience: a Meta-recommended audience that uses an ML model to predict personalized targeting settings.
- Edit / custom audience: create a custom audience by choosing targeting locations and interests.
Making performance legible, natively
Ad management
This is the final end-to-end ad-management journey, as implemented in Messenger.
Sub-journey: ad insights
User needs
- Manage: make changes to an ongoing ad.
- Measure: understand the ad's performance — and whether it was "worth it."
- Learn & act: understand what drove success or failure, and how to improve ongoing and future ads.
What the Ads platform provides
- All the core components for ad management: modify an ongoing ad, handle ad rejection, and recreate an ad.
- Key performance metrics plus recommendations to improve future ads.
The work moved the business
In Q4 2023 we launched the Messenger ad-creation experience — driving an annualized revenue impact of approximately $20M.
Introducing the native experience roughly tripled ad completion in Messenger. It's a substantial jump, though still short of the ~11% benchmark on the Facebook ad tool — which is expected, given that tool's decade of optimization.
Next steps
In early 2024 I transitioned to scaling the ads platform on WhatsApp for iOS, while the Messenger team continued funnel analysis and optimization — enhancing top-of-funnel adoption and adding features to improve comprehension and retention.
2024 → WhatsApp
I embedded myself in the WhatsApp team to bring a native ads experience to the iOS WhatsApp Business app using the Ads platform. Today WhatsApp deep-links out to the Facebook ad tool for ad creation — the platform is how we bring it home.
What building 0→1 across orgs taught me
1Cross-org collaboration is the real skill
Over 1.5 years immersing myself in partner teams, the one skill I've had to develop and lean on most is collaborating with cross-functional partners spread across different organizations.
It means quickly adapting to different platforms and design systems, understanding each team's unique users and challenges, and integrating the ad platform to meet those needs — often across differing opinions, goals, and assumptions.
2Documentation is a design tool
Documentation streamlined communication and made collaboration possible on a project this large. Two documents did the heaviest lifting:
Design execution — outlining scope, ownership, progress, user insights, and review timelines, keeping my design partner and me working toward a common goal.
Variants, new components & patterns — capturing where existing Messenger components fell short, and the rationale for a variant or a net-new component. It informed design decisions and guided conversations with the design-system teams.