During my time at Instagram, I shipped a major redesign to one of the most highly-used surfaces in our app, Camera.

Redesigns are admittedly some of the most painful product efforts in "impact driven" companies – the benefits are hypothetical, hard to measure and long-term (i.e. let's simplify the app so we have space to add more features); while the costs are measurable and immediate (i.e. sharp drop to engagement).

Along the way, my team developed a playbook for them - how to ship on schedule, with a high degree of craft and minimal regressions. Sharing some of what we learned hoping it might be useful for other folks, too.

---

*Background on Viewmaster*

Viewmaster aimed to make Instagram Camera “more expressive and fun”, by making AR Effects and Formats easier to discover. After 9 months of iteration and bouncing through several PMs, the project had no line of sight to shipping: regressions to business metrics were too high and key leads believed it no longer met our bar for Simplicity and Craft.\
\
[Ryan O’Rourke](https://rourkery.com) and I were asked to step in and help. We were able to ship it on schedule with a high degree of craft and minimal regressions to business metrics and performance. Together with the launch of AR Platform, Viewmaster made AR Effects become the most popular capture creative tool (surpassing even Boomerang!) and helped our pillar double our Camera Sharing goal (traditionally really tough to move and wasn’t even my team’s goal!).

```cv
gallery
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```

---

## A few best practices for redesigns

*Before you start...*

### **Align on goals and tradeoffs, write them down**

This seemed a bit silly to include, but redesign projects often struggle with it. Beyond the visual refresh, folks often aren't aligned on what the redesign should achieve. When that's not clear, it's very hard to make trade-off decisions (which you inevitably have to, because you moved things around in a surface people use every day).

This was the case with this project as well. The success criteria was somewhat implicit (Increasing discoverability of Effects, Scaling Camera Formats, Unblocking Create Mode). We wrote these down and stack ranked how important they were to us.

Leads were reluctant to give us a "budget" of how much we could regress important company metrics (like sharing from Camera). This frustrated us, but in hindsight, I can understand why: we'd stop trying to mitigate losses upon reaching this number instead of trying our best.

### **Set realistic timelines to avoid stress and protect craft**

Redesigns have a lot more complexity than an average "incremental" feature launch, but teams seldom account for this when planning. In my experience, while you can get an initial test out fairly quickly, accounting for all the edge cases and regressions can take way longer than anticipated. This stresses teams out; and craft work often gets deprioritized to meet deadlines.

In this project, I engaged my eng partners closely on their estimates and tried to provide a "devil's advocate" perspective on what could happen, which adjusted our estimates. (Or you could skip all this and just take the eng estimate and double it, which has also worked for me in the past 🙃).

This might be a bit controversial and culture dependent. I personally prefer keepings sustainable for my team and prioritizing craft even if that might mean we move a little more slowly.

### **Recruit the right engineers**

Some engineers enjoy growth-style iteration, some enjoy thinking through scalable backends, some enjoy the intricacies of design details. If you have the luxury to do so, make sure you recruit engineers that belong to the latter group. You'll be able to move a lot faster, since these engineers will notice things proactively (as opposed to you waiting for them to be done and testing things) and their initial build will have a higher degree of craft.

---

*As you design and write code...*

### **Anticipate and solve problems before they happen**

Iteration cycles on mobile are VERY long: coding, QA, shipping a test, collecting data, interpreting results... This makes it very costly to test and learn sequentially, which redesign efforts often need to do as user behavior changes in unpredictable ways.

To solve for this, we "pre-mortemed" potential issues that could happen, or reasons why we'd see regressions to behaviors we cared about. This helped us preemptively come up with solutions for them. We coded these and put them in the build as experiment parameters.

At this point, some folks in your team might tempted to test these parameters "just to see what happens". Resist this temptation, it will slow you down. Have a strong opinion about what you're testing and only after getting concrete data that something may not be working, test another hypothesis.

By "pre-morteming", we were able to launch new tests without waiting for a mobile release and cut down our iteration cycle from 6 weeks to 2 weeks. This contributed to being able to ship on time.

As we did this, we also realized we had a huge long tail of lightly-used features that add complexity and risk. We unshipped them independently of the redesign, which simplified our test setup.

---

*After you get test results...*

### **When interpreting results, compare what's in production, not mocks**

This might be a bit Instagram specific since we have so many teams working on so many features and it's often hard to know exactly what the app experience is like. Teams sometimes struggle interpreting results as they might be looking at just the "test" experience or mocks of what it was supposed to be. What I recommend instead: frequently screenshot production test/control experiences, paste them into a document, compare them side-by-side. We had a few occasions unrelated work interfered with our test, but had we only looked at mocks, we wouldn't have known.

```cv
gallery
{"layout":"hscroll","images":[{"src":"https://firebasestorage.googleapis.com/v0/b/maitake-project.appspot.com/o/pages%2FVd3PvJA5K3ULQE9fZgQ4gblqYWj2%2FGqpF43cPCshoaAWcLMio%2F457a2a3f-4bec-49b1-942e-9f4caa39d390.png?alt=media&token=20518879-f73f-4784-a2ae-a9bf341ece58","id":"457a2a3f-4bec-49b1-942e-9f4caa39d390","width":569,"height":881,"filename":"Screen Shot 2022-11-15 at 4.00.17 PM.png","type":"image/png","caption":"Side by side screenshots from the production experience and the test","border":false}]}
```

### **Mitigate "analysis paralysis" with this handy table**

When I took over this project, I was handed a 23 page analysis of what we were seeing in the test. It was a great piece of data science work, but overwhelming and hard to action on.

Here's a format I find helpful to analyze experiment results in redesigns. I throw this into a table, which helps create a bird's eye view about what's going on and what to do next. I often find it helpful to pick one core metric to compare everything "apples to apples".

* Hypothesis ("People get distracted playing with effects instead of sharing in the moment")

* Supporting evidence ("People try more effects in this design. The more effects they try, the less they share").

* An estimate of how much of the regression is caused by this. These are hard to do scientifically, so you might need to push your DS partner to be comfortable making assumptions and guesstimating.

* Potential mitigation ("We'll cap the Effect Tray to 25 items")

* An estimate of how much of the regression you can recover.

```cv
gallery
{"layout":"hscroll","images":[{"src":"https://firebasestorage.googleapis.com/v0/b/maitake-project.appspot.com/o/pages%2FVd3PvJA5K3ULQE9fZgQ4gblqYWj2%2FGqpF43cPCshoaAWcLMio%2Fe7342d0e-ee7f-414b-9f88-341e748e47a4.png?alt=media&token=bf807846-1cb3-4b7e-9759-83e88b4cc6f0","id":"e7342d0e-ee7f-414b-9f88-341e748e47a4","width":1558,"height":1210,"filename":"Screen Shot 2022-11-15 at 3.11.08 PM.png","type":"image/png","caption":"","border":false}]}
```

---

*As you iterate...*

### **NAME your variants!**

Another silly thing, but helps a lot. Likely you'll iterate on the design many times to find acceptable trade-offs and it will become super unwieldy to refer to them ("v4 but format picker was a bit bigger and we moved library to the left"). We started giving nicknames to each of these variants that simplified communication within our team and with leads.

```cv
gallery
{"layout":"hscroll","images":[{"src":"https://firebasestorage.googleapis.com/v0/b/maitake-project.appspot.com/o/pages%2FVd3PvJA5K3ULQE9fZgQ4gblqYWj2%2FGqpF43cPCshoaAWcLMio%2F5a7c5242-bb69-4898-b6da-634f50d06064.png?alt=media&token=614244a7-7b05-46f1-ba82-fa1cceecd73b","id":"5a7c5242-bb69-4898-b6da-634f50d06064","width":955,"height":546,"filename":"Screen Shot 2022-11-15 at 4.14.27 PM.png","type":"image/png","caption":"Variants can end up getting very complicated, so give them names and document what exactly they do in a place the team can refer to easily.","border":false}]}
```

### **Set the bar for craft amongst your leads group**

While PM, EM and PD can come to the table with different viewpoints and negotiate (as we should) , we need to find balance in a direction everyone feels good about; ideally moving quickly AND ship with a high degree of craft. This requires aligning on we consider blocking for team/company dogfood, small/large public test and launch.

In our case, we aligned on a prioritization scale for issues and maintained burn-down lists for these issues that cropped up. This ensured we had line of sight to craft issues and design was bought in to when things were going to resolve. This was a simple, flat list we looked at in each meeting, rather than a complex spreadsheet or something in a Tasks/Jira type tool.

It also really helps that all leads actively test the feature and find issues, not just design. Seeing PM, EM and other leaders flag issues signal to the team that craft is actually important, not a platitude.

```cv
gallery
{"layout":"hscroll","images":[{"src":"https://firebasestorage.googleapis.com/v0/b/maitake-project.appspot.com/o/pages%2FVd3PvJA5K3ULQE9fZgQ4gblqYWj2%2FGqpF43cPCshoaAWcLMio%2Fa83004f0-119a-4ce3-ae6e-6372410eb96d.png?alt=media&token=76458696-a1bc-4be5-bba1-b7eb870c91e2","id":"a83004f0-119a-4ce3-ae6e-6372410eb96d","width":922,"height":681,"filename":"Screen Shot 2022-11-15 at 3.50.08 PM.png","type":"image/png","caption":"We kept things simple with a flat, prioritized burndown list.","border":false}]}
```

---

*When trying to make a decision...*

### **Be comfortable decoupling some goals so you can ship**

Our preferred variant had regressions we couldn't recover, so we had to let go of the goal to “scale formats” and kept Boomerang & co in the footer. This initially disappointed me, I'd rather have taken a metric hit and ship the vision we had. However, the following half, we found a different design that met this outcome and were able to ship it without regressions.

Decoupling helped us actually launch and take a breather; and provided time and space to find a better solution. I also have a hunch people have an easier time adjusting if you don't change everything at once.

```cv
gallery
{"layout":"hscroll","images":[{"src":"https://firebasestorage.googleapis.com/v0/b/maitake-project.appspot.com/o/pages%2FVd3PvJA5K3ULQE9fZgQ4gblqYWj2%2FGqpF43cPCshoaAWcLMio%2F3f6e331a-68b1-40ae-bb9c-251fe3eaa2eb.png?alt=media&token=58724c42-500c-43e3-a9d1-59f362b5d18c","id":"3f6e331a-68b1-40ae-bb9c-251fe3eaa2eb","width":1285,"height":942,"filename":"Screen Shot 2022-11-15 at 4.05.30 PM.png","type":"image/png","caption":"","border":false}]}
```

---

### Parting thoughts

Redesigns can be hard and thankless, but I loved the challenge because they require every function to collaborate very closely and be on their A-Game. This project was no exception. Thanks to Eric Dorman, Ryan O’Rourke, Kevin Huang, Leah Acosta, Brandon Kieft, Jonathan Lee, Jose Zuniga and Kevin Hiscott and others I may have missed on a great partnership.

I have a lot of tips for "how to turn things around when a redesign goes south", but didn't include them this time for brevity. If that sounds interesting to you, please let me know and I'm happy to share.

What I learned shipping redesigns for Instagram Camera (on schedule, with a high degree of craft and minimal regressions)

Product Manager at Figma

How to give better product feedback

Coursework on Advanced Finnish and User-centered Design

I chatted with Design Details about my experience moving to Product Management from Product Design.

Becoming a Product Manager ft. Cemre Güngör

I was interviewed about my experience moving from Product Design to Product Management for AIGA's book on Design Careers.

The AIGA Guide to Careers in Graphic and Communication Design

"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 :)

Camera Redesign – "Refresh"

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!).

What I learned shipping three redesigns for Instagram Camera (on schedule, with a high degree of craft and minimal regressions)

Camera Redesign – Viewmaster

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.

Figma AI

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.

Camera Redesign – Panorama

Launched a number of features around text posts on Facebook. These were the highest ROI product launches that grew original sharing in News Feed.

Super Awesome Text Posts

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.

AR Platform

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.

Travel Data Sculpture

Generate a cool treemap-style visualization of your air travel activity that you can share on social media.

TripIt Year In Review

Fast-tracking workflows with Figma AI

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.

Spark AR x Instagram Reels (Live)

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.

Creating Standout AR Effects for Instagram

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.

Product Manager

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.

Design Co-founder

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.

Product Designer

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.

Cemre 💎 Güngör

2022