Paola

I was asked to redesign the compose box, one component. But I found it behaved differently everywhere it showed up: InMail had its own version, Pages had its own, Groups had its own. The real problem wasn't the compose box, it was that messaging had never been designed as a system. I audited 20+ compose variations across surfaces, then convinced Premium, Pages, and Organic Messaging, each with their own roadmap, to converge on one shared model.

I stress-tested it against two hero flows, messaging a non-connection through InMail and messaging a connection for free, starting with the compose box as the anchor and working outward until the entire compose experience, message bubbles, media attachments, reactions, statuses, banners, was rebuilt as one coherent system. When LinkedIn began Nile, a multi-year re-platforming of its core technical infrastructure, this model became the blueprint for how the new architecture handled messaging.

Only 18% of LinkedIn members had profile key fields. I ran the first deep audit of the profile editing flow, something no one on the team had done before, then validated it against real funnel data with the data science team. Together they confirmed it wasn't a completion problem, it was an articulation problem: members weren't stuck on a slow or buggy form, they were stuck on what to say about themselves. I proposed a conversational, question-by-question builder with no precedent at LinkedIn, no components, no patterns, and convinced design, product, engineering, and data teams to build it from scratch.

It shipped as a guided flow that adapts to any career path, increasing profile completion by over 300% and getting adopted as the interaction model on 3 other LinkedIn surfaces.

Members landing on an incomplete profile were overwhelmed: 15+ competing prompts, no clear priority, and private tools that made the profile look more finished than it was. I mapped the journey and validated it against the completion funnel: 40% of members were missing a position, but only 2% of those had even looked at their own profile in the past month, awareness wasn't the gap, motivation and clarity were.

I narrowed the fix to three moves: snoozing non-essential promos, turning key missing fields into persistent prompts with AI-powered suggestions, and hiding guidance modules until a member actually hit quality-profile status. After getting buy-in from product and consumer VPs, it shipped and increased quality profile completions by 15% and profile networking actions by 25%.