Workplace from Meta was an all-in-one organizational communication app built by Meta that combined chat, video, groups and intranet with the work tools that teams already use. Workplace has 7 million users globally, and was a direct competitor with Microsoft Teams. While with Workplace, I led the design for the Integrations team. The team’s mission was to amplify organization communication across third party work tools like Slack, Zoom and Workday.
Embedded product designer supporting the Workplace integrations team
Jan – Apr, 2022
PM, 6 eng, CD and a PMM
Many of Workplace’s customers were large organizations with frontline staff, e.g., Walmart and McDonald’s. Frontline workers did not usually have work emails, and therefore could not register on Workplace to receive company updates. Communication leaders posted important news to Workplace, but frontline workers did not see it.
In markets like Brazil, Facebook Messenger was already used by 40% of frontline workers informally to get updates about work. We thought that by integrating Workplace with Messenger we could enable comms leaders to reach more of their frontline. Our goals with the integration were to increase the engagement of Workplace with frontline users, and by extension, increase the reach of workplace communications within a customer company.
We built an integration between Workplace and Messenger, so that it was easy for frontline workers to link their personal Messenger accounts to Workplace, and it was easy for managers to share content with their frontline workers from Workplace to Messenger.
How might we workshop
I worked closely with my PM to plan and lead a 2-day design workshop. We chose a How Might We workshop structure because of the outcomes we wanted, and put together the workshop outline, board and organized the lightning talks.
Business process modelling
We defined how each persona involved in the integration would accomplish their jobs via a workflow diagram. It was vital for building shared understanding across the team. We used the diagram to align on technical constraints and to identify areas for optimization.
Working with Messenger surfaces
On Messenger specific surfaces, this meant collaborating with designers from the Messenger team on what components best suited each use case, and how components could adapt to fit the content requirements.
We shipped the first version of a Messenger integration with Workplace to an Alpha test with 20 customer accounts. Shortly after testing, Meta underwent a re-org that caused all frontline work to be stopped, including further testing of our Messenger integration. However, our work with the Workplace Integrations team lead to Connected Lab, the agency I worked for, expanding the Workplace contract with Meta, and landing a new contract with the Messenger team.
