Hi! 👋 My name is pronounced ᴊᴇᴍ–ʀᴀʏ and I work on the Editor and AI at Figma.
Previously, I led the PM team for Instagram Camera and was the Design Co-founder for Branch, which was acquired by Facebook in 2014.
Contact
Side Projects
Generate a cool treemap-style visualization of your air travel activity that you can share on social media.
Data sculpture representing a year of traveling in an acrylic cube that can be observed from all three dimensions to get a different understanding of the data.
Work Experience
Started Figma's AI team, pitched and shipped many features unveiled in Config '24. My team shipped Figma's biggest ever redesign, much-needed usability improvements to Auto Layout, along with our beloved "Little Big Updates" throughout the year.
I support Instagram Camera; scaling it from 10 engineers to an organization of 5 teams with 100 engineers across 3 global sites.
Our group is responsible for visual sharing in Reels, Stories and Feed and other formats; investing in features for capturing, editing and enhancing visual media, AR Discovery, First and Third-party AR Effects, Prototyping and shipping novel creative tools, Infra, Design systems and more.
We had many notable launches (outlined in the Projects section here) and landed more impact to Reels Production per engineer than our peer teams for several halves.
Supported several teams in Facebook's Sharing organization.
Drove outsize impact on original content production by identifying multiple opportunities that weren't on our organization's radar; like Feed Ranking (Quantified previously-unknown downstream effects of Ranking on Production) and Text Posts (Launched features that make them more prominent and expressive - aka "Super Awesome Text Posts").
Established 0>1 teams for Integrity, Relevance and Awareness; as the go-to person for our org leaders to expand into new areas.
Designed features to give people more control over News Feed, including Feed Preferences (aka "Awesomizer"), Chevron Menu and "Tombstone" options after hiding a post. Many of the design patterns I came up with got copied verbatim by competing social platforms; and still exist in Facebook App today, 10 years later.
Projects
While many AI efforts were under way in Figma, noticing we were underinvested in features that would make designers more productive, I pitched starting a new team. With a small and mighty crew of 3 engineers and a part time designer, we shipped many features revealed in Config 2024: Replace Content (our take on Excel's "Autofill"), Rename Layers, Rewrite/Shorten/Translate Text, Make Image, Remove Background.
As the IC PM, I built all of the validation sets that define how these features should work and how to assess their quality. I also led evaluating vendors and models for Image Generation and Background Removal; and aligned company leadership on the deals to sign.
We supported a company-wide redesign of Instagram to create space for new company priority bets (Reels and Shopping) in our navigation stack. This redesign merged these flows and entry points, driving Reels +XX% (most significant product change to date). We managed to move the Feed sharing entry point (of 8 years!) without substantially regressing production.
"Refresh" helped Instagram Camera scale to more formats (like Reels) and more tools (such as Handsfree and Boomerang); significantly driving production of Reels and Live.
Having learned many lessons from "Viewmaster", we were able to see ahead of and address potential problems and were able to ship it rather painlessly :)
I led the inception, launch and growth of the AR Ecosystem on Instagram. It was a huge success for both the supply and demand side.
We 3x'd Effect usage in Instagram, becoming the most popular creative tool for capturing media (surpassing even Boomerang!) and led to many mainstream cultural moments with games and quizzes our competitors quickly replicated.
We also amassed the largest base of AR Creators (Over 600k Creators publishing over 2 million effects), many of them reaching huge audiences on Instagram that allowed them to pursue their passion for a living.
I turned around the first major redesign to Instagram's Camera, which had no line of sight to shipping after 9 months of iteration and bouncing through several PMs. We were able to ship it on schedule, with a high degree of craft and minimal regressions to business or perf metrics, helping our pillar double our Camera Sharing goal (which actually wasn’t my team’s goal!).
Launched a number of features around text posts on Facebook. These were the highest ROI product launches that grew original sharing in News Feed.
Speaking
Spark AR and Instagram team members Dan Moller and Cemre Güngör host a live Q&A session to share their best tips for creating AR effects for Reels.
This session will explore the motivations and behaviors that drive AR usage on Instagram today, and introduce a series of AR design principles informed and inspired by a blend of Instagram creators, in-house experts, and brand partners.
Writing
Features
I chatted with Design Details about my experience moving to Product Management from Product Design.
I was interviewed about my experience moving from Product Design to Product Management for AIGA's book on Design Careers.
Education
Coursework from ITP (Tisch)
Minor in Product Design
Coursework on Advanced Finnish and User-centered Design