Meta Credits let teens buy virtual items without a card or parental approval each time, but adoption lagged after launch. The team read it as an access and utility problem and proposed two expensive, hard-to-reverse fixes: a Credits gift card and wider utility.
The catch: no one owned the end-to-end purchase experience. Four payment teams were each optimizing their own product and metrics, so no one was looking at the whole journey.
Payments Research Lead across 4 payment teams. I:
- spotted that the brief was framed wrong
- got the PM and Design directors to pause already-approved scaling work
- designed and ran the co-design study
- turned the findings into a shared principle, sprint, and metric for all four teams
Three signals said this wasn't about access
of first-time buyers never bought again.
Support tickets showed gift-card value stranded where it couldn't be spent.
Creators were losing sales at checkout.
We had built four independent products that users experienced as one economy. Scaling Credits would have scaled a broken journey. I made that case in a one-page risk map, The Fragmented Economy Problem, and framed it around the one-way doors in the roadmap.
- How do users think about and navigate a multi-currency economy, and where do they expect value to move?
- What should the payment infrastructure look like so value moves seamlessly for both users and creators?
- Participatory co-design: 16 teens fluent in Meta, PlayStation, and Xbox economies.
- Designers from all 4 teams paired with participants: the real problem was alignment, so I had the teams build the solution together instead of receiving four separate readouts.
Users had a simple two-tier model: in-game currency vs. platform value. Our org boundaries were invisible to them, and they read the fragmentation as extraction:
“I know Meta wants all of my money, but don't be so explicit about it.”
PrincipleOne economy for users, however many currencies sit underneath.
Two clean tiers users expected (left) vs. the overlapping tools the ecosystem presented (right).
- Authored the Interoperability Principles: adopted as the shared payments principle across all 4 teams and used as guardrails for evaluating future payment methods
- Paused approved Meta Credits scaling initiatives
- Applied the principles in a 4-week cross-team design sprint; a software redemption flow replaced the physical gift card, avoiding ~$5M in logistics costs
- Moved teams from siloed adoption metrics to a shared cross-product usage metric
- $3M in year one, above projections; gift-card support tickets declined
4-week design sprint · 4 teams, one principle
- Reframing the brief before it's funded
- A decision-to-evidence audit of the roadmap
- Triangulation
- Behavioral data, support tickets, and creator research
- Influence without authority
- Changed a director-level decision across 4 teams
- Research as an alignment tool
- Participatory co-design
- Metric design
- Replaced siloed adoption goals with a shared ecosystem metric