Status Strategy
Why Status Needed a Reset
Status, the world’s largest stories product, was experiencing regression driven by declining posting and misalignment between user expectations and product behavior. As the inaugural designer during the team’s reboot, I was asked to reset Status’s direction by defining a clear system strategy to restore participation, trust, and relevance at global scale.
Three beliefs grounded the strategy:
Status succeeds when it strengthens connection between close friends, not broad audiences
Lightweight feedback and relevance signals matter more than creation complexity
Any future AI involvement must preserve privacy, agency, and non-performative social norms
These beliefs shaped how we evaluated tradeoffs, prioritized investments, and defined success.
What We Believed
I defined and led a multi-year strategy that aligned teams around a shared direction and sequencing of work.
Year 1: Foundations
Close critical gaps between Status and expectations of a modern stories product, including audience control, relevance, feedback, and participation, laying the groundwork for trust and consistency.
Year 2: Creative expression
Invest in expression systems that made posting feel easier, more rewarding, and more personal. This phase emphasized reshares, mimicry, text and media tools, and lightweight creation paths that reduced friction without increasing pressure.
Year 3+: AI-integrated social experiences
Establish an AI North Star grounded in trust and human agency, exploring how AI could support expression, reduce effort, and enhance relevance without introducing synthetic performance or violating privacy expectations.
The Strategy
The strategy reset Status’s trajectory, aligned leadership around a clear system vision, and directly informed roadmap decisions across product, design, and engineering. It unlocked additional headcount, made parallel execution across teams possible, and shaped the prioritization of high impact projects including Status Likes, Private Mentions, Ranking, and creative expression investments.
What This Unlocked
This led to a durable system direction for Status that moved from foundational repair to expressive growth, with a clear and principled path toward AI-augmented social interaction. The strategy connected long-term vision to shipped work, allowing Status to evolve while preserving WhatsApp’s core norms around privacy, trust, and intimacy.