Meta · Sr. Content Designer · Nov 2024 to May 2025
The door was the deliverable
Weeks after I started, cuts landed across the org. Teams on Horizon lost their content designer and their product designer in the same week. The fix wasn't working harder.
Platform · Design operationsProduct design couldn't commit. Content design could, so we did.
Horizon OS is a large platform with more teams shipping than any content design team could cover person by person. After the cuts, the ratio stopped being difficult and started being impossible. Teams weren’t asking for polish. They were stuck.
Product design wasn’t able to staff open office hours. We were, so we opened them to any team on Horizon that needed help: editorial, UX guidance, terminology, legal review, all of it. No intake process, no partner agreement, no headcount request. Just a door that was open on a schedule.
A queue you can join beats a person you have to find
- Releases that had stalled waiting on copy nobody was left to write
- UX research tracks that couldn't finalize stimuli
- Ad teams who couldn't get their product work out of Figma
The ad teams are the ones I’d point at. They weren’t blocked on strategy or on approval. They were blocked on not having anyone to ask, so work sat in Figma with holes in it. An hour on a call moved things that had been stalled for weeks.
That’s the whole argument for a mechanism over a heroic individual. One designer answering direct messages helps whoever knows to message them. A standing session helps whoever shows up, including the teams who didn’t know content design was something they were allowed to ask for.
I have no numbers for any of it. Nobody was measuring, and I’m not going to invent a figure for a page. What I can point at is the list above.
Project details
- Company
- Meta, Reality Labs
- Role
- Sr. Content Designer, Horizon OS platform
- Timeline
- November 2024 to May 2025
- Tools and methods
- Design operationsOffice hoursTerminologyPrivacy and consent contentLegal reviewFigma