To drive more meaningful engagement among LinkedIn members, we set out to build a robust content ecosystem where content creators and consumers could come together, share ideas and actively engage with their professional communities.

I led a team of ten across San Francisco, Sunnyvale and New York. Together, we continued to optimize our core sharing and feed experiences, while helping creators better express themselves through more content formats and making the feed more relevant by extending the follows graph beyond just people.

Research Insights

To better grasp how members used their feeds, we conducted a two week diary study during which participants conducted a daily inventory of feed posts and identified which they found to be valuable, not valuable, or neither and why. Two main insights were born from this study:

• Mindset Matters: factors such as personal values, professional goals, and context affect how people perceive and assess value in their feeds
• Topic + Actor + Form: the intersection of these three factors make up the most valuable posts in the feed

Strategic alignment

To better position my team, I focused on a few strategic initiatives to ensure alignment to the bigger picture and promote cross-team collaboration.

I mapped out the content life cycle to help us identify existing areas of investment and gaps in our product offering. Establishing design principles ensured focus in the experiences we created.

I restructured the team into the content platform and content formats teams to better deliver on the product life cycle and continue to create new content experiences for our members.

I brought the team together in a full-day design workshop to gain alignment on the overall vision of the content experience, provide context to individual product areas, and foster collaboration across teams.

Featured work by the team

Here are just a few samples of project wins within the Content Experience team born out of the renewed alignment and focus.

Conclusion

Many of these initiatives were directly responsible for a steady and substantial growth on the platform—a 20% increase in content consumption and a 60% lift in engagement via comments, likes, and shares.

Our ultimate vision is to evolve the ecosystem to help LinkedIn members engage with their communities and find what they value most: belonging, helpfulness, empowerment, and fulfillment.

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