What a room full of strangers with paper and pens taught me about design, leadership, and letting go.
There's a version of design work I used to believe in. You study the problem. You synthesize the research. You generate the ideas. You — the trained, experienced, empathetic designer — figure out what people need, and then you build it for them.
It's a generous model, actually. It comes from a good place. But it has a flaw so fundamental I'm embarrassed it took me as long as it did to see it.
It still puts you at the center.
I was early at Facebook when we started noticing something strange happening in Groups. People were using them to buy and sell things — furniture, clothes, appliances, handmade goods — with no tools built for the purpose, no structure, no safety net. Just posts and comments and a kind of improvised trust between neighbors.
We knew there was something here. A product waiting to be made. But every time our team sat down to design it, we hit the same wall. We couldn't see it. We could describe the behavior, map the need, sketch flows — but the concept itself stayed blurry. We were too close to the platform, too fluent in how Facebook worked, too shaped by what already existed to imagine something genuinely new.
So I stopped trying to figure it out ourselves.
I ran sessions with groups of people — in the US, and in Southeast Asia, where this kind of informal neighborhood commerce was already deeply woven into daily life. I didn't show them prototypes. I didn't present concepts for reaction. I gave them paper and pens and asked them to draw what they wished existed.
What happened next is something I've thought about almost every day since.
They drew a feed. But not a feed of status updates or photos of people's weekends. A feed of things their neighbors were selling. A feed populated by proximity, not connection. You didn't need to be friends with someone to see what they were offering. You just needed to live nearby.
The insight sounds simple now. Obvious, even — with the benefit of hindsight and the fact that hundreds of millions of people use Marketplace every month. But at the time it was a genuine rupture. We had never seriously considered designing for people who weren't already connected to each other on the platform. The whole grammar of Facebook was built around the social graph — around people you knew. These users drew us a product for people you didn't know yet. Strangers who might become neighbors, or at least transact like them.
They drew what we couldn't see because they needed it in a way we didn't.
I've told this story many times, and people often respond by praising the research method — the participatory design, the co-creation session, the pen-in-hand technique. And yes, the method matters. But that's not actually what I learned that day.
What I learned was something quieter and more unsettling.
I learned that my job is not to have the answer.
My job is to create the conditions in which the answer can appear — and then to be humble enough to recognize it when someone else draws it on a piece of paper in front of me.
That's a harder thing to accept than it sounds. Design training, at its core, is about developing judgment. You spend years learning to see problems, synthesize complexity, generate solutions. Your expertise becomes your identity. And then you sit in a room and watch someone with no design training sketch the exact thing your team has been struggling to find — in twenty minutes, with a ballpoint pen — and you have to decide what that means about you.
I decided it meant I was doing my job right.
Years later I found myself leading a team working on what would become our creator monetization program. We had the broad brief — help creators earn from their content — but the specific opportunity was unclear. I could have run the same playbook I'd always run. Directed the research. Shaped the exploration. Brought my own hypotheses to the table.
Instead I gave the team the pen.
I told them I didn't know what we were building yet, and that was the point. I wanted them to go find it. One of the researchers had deep roots in Southeast Asia and a strong sense that the creator economy there looked nothing like what we assumed it did in the West — that the side-hustle model, the relationship between creator and audience, the meaning of monetization itself, was different in ways we hadn't mapped.
She was right.
What came back from that field work shaped the entire product. The insights were specific, culturally grounded, and completely outside the frame we would have brought to the problem ourselves. We built from those insights — and the program went from zero to four million participants in weeks.
I don't tell that story to credit myself. I tell it because I almost didn't let it happen. There was a version of that project where I led from the front, where my experience felt like an asset rather than a liability, where we built something competent and forgettable.
The thing that made it extraordinary was choosing, again, not to know.
I think about these two stories together often, because they're the same story told at different scales.
The first time, I gave users the pen and they drew a new product.
The second time, I gave my team the same freedom and they found an entire market.
The instinct is identical. Stop assuming you're the one with the answer. Create the space. Trust the people closest to the problem — whether that's a user sketching on paper in a research session, or a researcher who grew up in the culture you're trying to understand. And then build from what they show you, rigorously and precisely, with everything you've got.
This is what I mean when I say I design with people and not just for them. It's not a methodology. It's not a workshop format. It's a decision you make, repeatedly, to put someone else at the center of the work — and to find out what they see that you can't.
AI has changed a lot about how I work. The speed of synthesis, the scale of what's possible, the ability to test ideas that would have taken weeks in an afternoon. But it hasn't changed this. If anything it makes it more important. Because AI can generate a thousand concepts from the patterns it's learned. What it can't do is sit in a room in Southeast Asia and feel the gap between what exists and what someone actually needs.
That still takes a person with a pen.
Or, if you're doing it right, a room full of them.
