samuelalake / product designer + engineer

Facebook · 2020–2024

Designing for growth and engagement at billion-user scale

Across notifications, video, birthdays, feed, and live audio, I moved work forward within large cross-functional teams while keeping sight of the Facebook experience people encountered as a whole.

Role
Product designer
Timeline
2020 & 2021 · Internships
2022–2024 · Full-time
Scope
Growth and engagement surfaces
Skills
Product design
Prototyping
Systems thinking

My experience

Many teams. One Facebook.

Every product team had its own goals and metrics, but people experienced one Facebook. My role was to move work forward while balancing a team’s metric wins with building a cohesive product.

The work

Driving a product forward

My work spanned different teams and surfaces, but fell into two themes: growth that helped people reach and revisit Facebook, and consumer engagement that kept its social flywheel moving.

Growth

Designing when and how Facebook should ask people to turn on notifications, log in, or visit the app from the open web.

01 · Reachability

Prompt people at contextual moments

A generic permission prompt feels like noise. I designed contextual moments that connected the request to what someone was already doing, so the benefit of turning notifications on was easier to understand.

02 · Off-platform entry

Improve the logged-out experience and create a path into the app

For people arriving from outside the app, I designed a better logged-out video experience and app-entry moments. They could watch what brought them there, then choose whether to continue in the app.

Read the Video Off-Platform case study →

Consumer engagement

Designing participation across live audio, birthdays, and feed while keeping each experience connected to the wider product.

03 · Live audio

Bring Live Audio Rooms to the web

As an intern on the listener experience, I helped bring Live Audio Rooms to the web by designing how people discovered a room and moved between full-screen, in-feed, and minimized listening. Because timing and state were central, I used interactive prototypes instead of static screens. The web experience launched publicly in the U.S. in 2021.

04 · Birthdays

Design one moment across several surfaces

Birthdays appeared in notifications, feed, profiles, and creation. I designed for the shared moment rather than treating each surface as a separate feature, including ways to celebrate before the day arrived.

05 · Feed

Use social context to make recommendations relevant

I built and tested ways to bring social context into Feed, then explored what that context could help people do next.

How I worked

Communication and rationale drove the work forward

Communicate the decision

I used PRDs, working sessions, reviews, and prototypes to make the problem, rationale, and interaction concrete. The artifact changed with the audience, but its job was always to help the team decide and move.

Root the rationale in principles

When I brought work to partner teams, I grounded the rationale in shared principles. When teams brought work to me, I evaluated it against my team’s principles and domain knowledge, then used that context to ask sharper questions and guide the decision.

Reflection

What I learned

Build for the end user

Product teams pursue metric wins. The user experiences the combined result, so the work had to balance what moved the product forward with what was genuinely useful for the person receiving it.

Make the next decision clear

At large scale, progress came from finding the smallest decision worth testing or shipping. PRDs and prototypes helped make that decision concrete.