Problem
Splitting Messenger out of Facebook broke the core social loop — replying. Time spent had fallen ~20% since 2017, and ~580M people used Facebook without Messenger installed, leaving them no way to reach their friends' messages and breaking new surfaces like Stories, Marketplace, and Dating.
Solution
I led design strategy to bring messaging back natively into Facebook. After testing a limited inbox and escalating upsells to map the real trade-offs, we shipped a native inbox — no app-switch, no upsell — that felt like a natural extension of the app.