LinkedIn's My Network tab is crucial in helping members feel connected to their professional network. It accounts for nearly 50% of weekly active users and 15% of all sessions on LinkedIn. My Network aims to meet members where they are and help them get the most out of their connections, whether through learning from peers or reaching out for career opportunities.

From April 2022 to September 2023, I worked as a staff designer on the My Network team, crafting the vision and delivering several high-impact projects:

1. Contextual invitations: Added personalized messages to connection requests, providing important context for recipients.

2. Follow ecosystem: Built a system to support creators in growing their reach through content.

3. Scalable design components: Developed versatile components for connecting, following, joining groups, attending events, and subscribing to newsletters across the platform.

4. Network nurturing features: Implemented lightweight methods to engage with connections, such as acknowledging job changes, anniversaries, and milestones.

5. Job opportunity networking: Created a module to identify jobs in companies where connections work, with automated contextual messages for outreach.

Key challenges included collaborating with multiple partner teams and understanding the complexities of networking across diverse global audiences.

Our design approach focused on short experiments to test key hypotheses about members' networking goals. We viewed My Network through the lens of three core actions: grow, nurture, and leverage.

Impact

• Increased member engagement through 'Catch up' tab nudges, resulting in an uptick in messages sent.

• Streamlined the development process for new experiments by creating scalable design components, leading to faster iteration and deployment.

• Won the "Just Ship It" award at Company Connect for a hackathon project showing members what they have in common when connecting.

This experience helped me grow into a staff designer role and deepened my understanding of facilitating meaningful professional connections through thoughtful design.