Instagram for Business
Product Design Lead
Apr 2015 – Mar 2017
Projects include Instagram Business Onboarding, Business & Top Account Profiles, Business Insights, Ad Payments, and Ad Creation.
When joining Instagram, I was directed to work with a PM partner to build a new team and product centered around businesses on Instagram. We were essentially a pitch team to get funding and prove this work was viable.
In the early days, Instagram was designed for just regular people. With the growth of influencers and UGC, businesses felt left out with no way to genuinely connect with their biggest advocates.
The opportunity was to leverage Instagram as a platform to enable business to connect deeper with people and better understand their markets.
Onboarding
The first step in doing this (and since businesses already had Instagram accounts) was to get businesses to convert themselves to a business profile.
We created an onboarding flow that allowed them to take their current Instagram account and easily transfer over to a business account. Along with creating a Facebook Page (if needed), adding contact information, and gaining access to other business features in the process.
This had problems. Primarily because people didn’t want to seem “corporate” or “fake” when it came to connecting with people.
To solve this, it was important for us to allow businesses to keep their identity and not disrupt their followers experience with their new business profile.
Most business had their ads related information (payments, management, etc) on Facebook. To bridge this, we created a way for them to connect their Facebook Page.
You can view that flow here.
Business Profiles
Our main goal was to make the new business profile feel like they had the same experience as normal people.
Additionally, we added more businesses related features like Ad Creation and Insights to help grow their business. This wouldn’t be shown to their followers.
After establishing the new profile formats, we started to explore a few other options that integrated that content sooner on the profile.
One of those formats included Instagram Stories. You can view that here.
Insights & Payments
The final thing that we needed to implement was insights and a payment system.
Business insights were important because it allowed businesses to understand their ROI better when using ads on Instagram.
Payments were used to pay for the ads.
We later translated this system to consumer features like Instagram Shopping.
We worked with the Facebook Payments team to help integrate their platform so people could use one Ad Account for both Instagram and Facebook.
Metrics & Outcomes
Over 2 years, we scaled to 25M monthly active businesses on the platform. For most, Instagram is now their default presence (especially in Asia).
Internally, Instagram for Business is one of the biggest teams at Instagram. I helped it grow from 3 people to over 150+ employees over 2 years at Instagram.
Today, more businesses than any other platform use Instagram to find, connect and engage with people interested in their brand. We were able to add emotional value to their business while helping them drive real world results.