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 • 3 SWE • 2 PMs • 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.

The migration was underway, but the numbers were alarming.

14% rollback rates back to Pages 

-12%stat sig drop in ad creation 

-4%drop in active businesses 

-7%drop in engaged businesses

Instagram profile switching

Pages old profile switching

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

My Role

Newly updated Pages

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+

Admin controls couldn't simply move into the profile UI, doing so would violate the new platform's core philosphy, profiles are public-facing surfaces, not management interfaces.

Design challenge: How might we provide admins with control and coherence without violating the profile’s core philosophy?

Profile+ initial rollout

What the migration broke

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

Mapping features from Pages to all of Facebook App

Mapping the Pages Ecosystem

Mapping every Pages tool to Profile+ revealed a 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 led to me reframing the solution from a tool container to a professional home, and that became the Professional Dashboard.

Design 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.

Initial Pro Dash designs

Defining Principles

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

Entry points: Anchored to profile and menu, the natural landing zones when switching accounts, not buried in a sub-navigation

Persistent 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.

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.

Professional Rich Tiles

Rich Titles

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

Rollback reduced from 14% → 2%
~720K SMBs migrated successfully
7% increase in active businesses
12% increase in engaged businesses
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 before and after

Instagram

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.

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 Science 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 Science 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