Meta
Helping A Global Organization Understand Social Connection
Qualitative research that helped product teams understand the people behind the metrics.
Research Methods
Over several years at Meta, I researched online social connection and partnered with cross-functional teams exploring a deceptively simple question:
What helps people build and maintain meaningful relationships through technology?
Understanding Social Connection
Designing products for billions of people means understanding far more than behavior. It requires understanding the motivations, constraints, and relationships behind it.
While product metrics could reveal what people were doing, my role was to uncover why they were doing it and translate those insights into practical recommendations that teams could act on.
Understanding People
Across multiple research initiatives, I partnered with product managers, designers, and data scientists to understand how people experienced connection across Meta's products.
Metrics told us what people were doing. Qualitative research helped us understand why it mattered.
Rather than validating existing ideas, we used research to uncover unmet needs, challenge assumptions, and identify broader patterns that quantitative data alone couldn't explain.
Individually, each study answered a different question. Together, they revealed a richer picture of how people formed, maintained, and sometimes struggled with meaningful relationships through technology.
Helping Teams Decide
My work extended beyond conducting research. I partnered closely with product teams to synthesize qualitative findings into clear, actionable recommendations.
Sometimes that meant reports. Other times it meant workshops, facilitated conversations, or interactive learning tools that helped stakeholders internalize the research and build shared understanding.
While the products themselves remain confidential, the outcome was consistent: decisions grounded in a deeper understanding of people's motivations, contexts, and lived experiences rather than behavior alone.
What Stayed With Me
Working at Meta changed what I value most as a researcher.
I became less interested in producing insightful decks alone, and more interested in helping teams understand those insights well enough to make thoughtful decisions.
Since then, I've tried to make every study easier to understand, easier to remember, and easier to act on. That is when research has the greatest chance of shaping what happens next.