Pages → Profile+

260M+ businesses were abandoning Facebook's new identity system at a 14% rollback rate. The migration had prioritized setup over outcomes. As the sole designer, I expanded scope, redesigned the model, and helped with recovery.

Team: 1 PD's • 3 SWE • 2 PM's • 1 DS

Impact: Rollback reduced from 14% → 2% • Ads creation recovered from -13% → -2%

Overview

Profile+ was Meta's strategic bet to unify business identity across its app, bringing Facebook Pages in line with how Instagram handles brands.

Instagram profile switching
Pages old profile switching

The migration was underway, but the numbers were alarming.

14% rollback rate back to Pages

-12% stat sig drop in ad creation

-4% drop in active businesses

-7% drop in engaged businesses

Businesses and creators were actively rolling back a platform Meta had staked its business identity strategy on, risking the migration timeline and revenue.

As the Pages design lead, I diagnosed the root cause, expanded scope to address the systemic problem, and shipped a redesign, the Professional Dashboard, that reversed the trend and later became the foundation for Instagram's professional tools.

My Role

Newly updated Pages

As the design lead:

Problem diagnosis
Reframed a feature parity exercise as a systems design problem, expanding the team's scope
Scope expansion
Brought findings to PMs to unlock a broader issue, what started as a tool migration became the Professional Dashboard
Cross-team alignment
Facilitated alignment across 3 teams, drove UX decisions through to production, and influenced roadmap prioritization
Cross-platform impact
Designed decisions that adapted cleanly to Instagram, validating the work as a platform system, not a Facebook specific fix

The Problem

On Facebook, businesses had lived behind a separate Pages tab, a mature ecosystem of management tools built over 13 years.

Profile+ asked 260M+ businesses to abandon that and switch to a new identity model modeled on Instagram's approach.

Pages in Profile+

There was a structural constraint that made a direct fix impossible: in Meta's new system, profiles are public-facing surfaces, not management interfaces

Admin controls couldn't simply move into the profile UI, doing so would violate the platform's core architecture.
Design challenge: How might we provide admins with control and coherence without violating the profile’s core philosophy?

The migration with it's core philosophy had resulted in the following:

Profile+ initial rollout
Workflow loss
A restaurant owner couldn't find their Inbox to respond to customers , a daily workflow, now gone
Campaign disruption
A creator lost the Ads entry point mid-campaign, no continuity, no fallback
Tools were lost
A small business admin lost their entire workflow, bookmarks, tools, history,  in a single migration

Process

Dashboard interface showing Facebook business page management with sections for setting up page identity, insights on reach and engagement, free business tools, friend invites, ad creation, and a feature comparison matrix with checkmarks and icons for Bookmarks, Pro Dash, About, Profile Surface, NewsFeed, New Page Guide, and Biz Suite.
Mapping features from Pages to all of Facebook App

Mapping the Pages Ecosystem

Mapping every Pages tool to Profile+ revealed few systemic gaps.

Features were orphaned with no coherent home
No team owned the cross-surface experience, each team had shipped their piece, nobody was responsible for the whole
Improving Profile+ notifications

Look at the whole ecosystem

I partnered with Data Science to understand what admins actually did after switching profiles.

Responding to comments and messages dominated behavior, but these key timed actions were buried along with all other notifications.
This became a first ecosystem migration fix and the case I used to expand the team's initial scope and roadmap
The same audit shaped how I prioritized Search and Groups for professional use
Diagram showing the flow and features of Facebook Page management, including New Page Surface, Page Management, Page Insights, Link Sharing, New Page Guide, Tools Expanded, Jobs Browser Manage View, Jobs Browser, and More Menu interfaces with annotations and arrows connecting each section.

Mapping tools back into Profile+

'Manage Page' implied a container of tools, but I realized admins also needed insights, growth actions, and workflow shortcuts to improve outcomes.

This lead to me reframing the solution from a tool container to a professional home, and that became the Professional Dashboard.

Design principles

Initial Pro Dash designs

Defining Principles

With a live rollback crisis, multiple teams, and a constrained platform architecture, I needed principles that could function as shared decision factors for this new surface.

Efficient: Key actions in ≤2 taps.
‍Adaptable: Ranking driven by behavior, not static IA
‍Understandable: Every tool explains its value, establishing clear expectations.

Solution

I designed a two-part system:

Professional Dashboard

Professional Dashboard

Entry points: Anchored to profile and menu, the natural landing zones when switching accounts, not buried in a sub-navigation
Persistant actions: Key dashboard actions coexist across the app, so admins can act without always returning to the dashboard first
Constrained upsells: One upsell unit, two insight units. The dashboard had to feel like a working tool, not a growth surface. I pushed back on this in design review
Behavior-driven hierarchy: Sections beneath ranked by real admin behavior and journey stage
Dashboard showing insights from the last 28 days with 3.1k views up 21%, 31 engagement up 3%, and 32 followers up 6%, with a See All button below.Interface panel titled 'Invite Friends to Follow' showing profile photos and names of Rosie Parker, Tim Quirino, Eloise Sarfesai, and Erica Lee, with a button labeled 'See All'.Illustration of person holding a gift card with shopping bags and gift boxes, promoting setting up a shop to sell products online.Facebook Professional Dashboard showing insights with 20.3K views, 31 messaging conversations started, and a graph of page performance from Dec 1 to Jul 28, plus options to manage content, page status, and tools.Facebook app interface showing story creation option, user stories of Andrew Aquino, and a prompt to finish setting up profile with a boba tea image and a resume button.
Professional Rich Tiles

Rich Tiles

I extended rich tile to include professional use cases to scale beyond the profesional dashboard.

This meant the same component could extend to Facebook Web's right rail, Facebook News Feed, and other surfaces.

Example: The insights 28 day reach and engagement surfaced first, the metric admins asked about most, with a direct path to deeper analytics

The Impact

Post experiment results:
  1. Rollback reduced from 14% → 2%
  2. ~720K SMBs migrated successfully
  3. 7% increase in active businesses
  4. 12% increase in engaged businesses 
  5. Ads creation recovered from -13% → -2%
Learnings
After introducing the Professional Dashboard and building into the broader Plaza system, the regression signals reversed, confirming the hypothesis that businesses weren't rejecting Profile+, they just couldn't find their tools.

Long term impact

Instagram profile page of Willowvane Ceramics showing a handmade home goods studio with colorful speckled ceramic pottery in the posts.Instagram profile of Willowvane Ceramics showing handmade colorful speckled pottery including mugs, bowls, and pots.
Instagram before and after

I helped bring Professional Dashboard to Instagram,  the system translated to a different platform without being rebuilt, validating that the design was a real system, not a Facebook specific fix.

Professional dashboard showing MM Dogfooding weekly progress at 2%, analytics with 74 views down 83%, 0 engagement down 100%, and 0 net followers down 100%, plus content section with latest post featuring Pikachu and 6 views with zero earnings.Sidebar menu of a social media app showing profile 'MM Dogfooding', notification badge with 9+ alerts, shortcuts including Test, Ciaooomag, Jade Ele, and MM Dogfooding, plus options like Professional dashboard, Memories, Reels, Avatars, Events, Fandom, Groups, Pages, Saved, Ad Center, Community Notes, Explore People, and Feeds.

On Facebook:

Professional Dashboard now exists as a core navigation surface
The Menu remains a key entry point for professional tools
Notification filters for professional accounts have shipped

Reflection

What worked:

Expanding scope
Expanding scope before designing was the pivotal move, without it, we would have shipped a feature complete version of the wrong solution
Data Scince collaboration
Partnering with Data Science to understand real admin behavior gave the IA decisions credibility
Adding constraints
Holding the dashboard constraint against growth pressure preserved the trust that made the platform worth staying on

In hindsight, I would push earlier on three areas:

Cold start for businesses
Push earlier on cold-start for businesses, recommendation systems were optimized for creators, not SMBs
Earlier Data Scince collaboration
Earlier DS collaboration would have revealed real admin workflows sooner, strengthening IA decisions
Pushing simplicity
We optimized for feature parity with Pages before questioning whether all those features needed to exist in their original form
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