Designing trust at platform scale
Meta Developer Platform · Head of Design · 7 years
Meta's developer platform is the infrastructure behind Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger, Quest, and Meta AI. Millions of developers build on it. Hundreds of millions of people log in through it. When a major data privacy crisis put that platform at the center of a company-defining regulatory reckoning, I led the design team that rebuilt it, and stayed to lead it for seven years, from crisis response through to the AI era.
Outcomes
Strengthened user data protection across every product built on the platform
Passed all FTC assessments, helping Meta avoid a potential $5 billion fine
Cut median App Review submission time from 36 days to under 4, a 90% reduction
Unified 10+ fragmented developer ecosystems into one scalable platform architecture
Built and led a multidisciplinary design organization through five major reorgs without missing delivery milestones.
The problem nobody wants
In 2018, the Cambridge Analytica scandal exposed how third-party developers could misuse data accessed through Meta's platform. The fallout was a $5 billion FTC settlement and a consent order that put the developer platform, the very surface I led design for, at the center of the company's regulatory obligations for years to come.
The platform's data access model went from growth engine to existential liability overnight. The obvious response was to lock everything down. But a locked platform kills the developer ecosystem that millions of businesses depend on.
The design problem: rebuild trust infrastructure, under regulatory deadline, while up-leveling the company-wide fragmented user experience.
Approach
Three principles guided seven years of work:
Translate law into clear UX. Legal constraints arrive as obligations, not designs. We treated every compliance requirement as a translation problem: what does this mean a developer actually sees, understands, and can act on?
Make it easy to do what’s right. Providing context at every step of the onboarding and data request experience ensures that developers understand their obligations and company guidelines, before they opt-in.
One platform, not ten. Meta's developer surface was fragmented across products. We defined a single architecture for onboarding, API access, identity, and compliance, with frameworks reusable across every product group.
What changed
(This is the section for 2-3 specific stories: the Required Actions Dashboard, the App Review rebuild, one hard tradeoff between usability and legal. Each as a short subsection: the situation, the decision, the result. We'll draft these once you pick them.)
Leading through it
Crisis work is usually measured in months. This was seven years, spanning five major organizational transitions, sustained regulatory pressure, and constant executive visibility. I built a shared-services design model that cut duplication across platform teams, kept delivery moving through every reorg, and grew designers into leaders along the way.
"Ani closes critical gaps, aligns teams through creative operational excellence, and leads with the kind of clarity and resilience that elevates everyone around her." — Jason Rubin, ex-Meta VP
Where it led
The trust frameworks we built for the privacy era became the foundation for what came next: the team went on to define governance UX for third-party AI agents on Meta's platforms, design standards for AI-era data access. The hardest constraints we worked under turned out to be the best training for designing what's coming.
My Role
Design lead for Meta’s developer platform experience
Led multidisciplinary teams across product design, content, and systems
Drove alignment across legal, regulatory, product, and engineering partners