Project Context

Meta is preparing a redesign of the Instagram Reels creator onboarding flow in an effort to increase the number of first-time creators who successfully publish their first Reel. You are the lead designer working with a cross-functional team of 10 people: 1 product designer (you), 1 content strategist, 4 engineers, 1 product manager, 1 data scientist, 1 user researcher, and 1 QA lead. Leadership wants a launch-ready recommendation in 8 weeks because a broader creator growth initiative is scheduled for the next quarter.

The current flow has multiple steps: permission prompts, template selection, music selection, editing, privacy settings, and publish confirmation. Early usability reviews suggest users are dropping off before publish, but the PM wants to avoid delaying launch unless the design risk is material. The question is not just what is wrong in the flow, but what implies the biggest execution risk and how you would de-risk it before launch.

Key Stakeholders

The Instagram Reels PM wants to ship in-quarter and prioritize measurable creator activation gains. The Engineering Manager wants to avoid late design changes that create rework in the final sprint. The Data Science lead wants enough instrumentation to isolate where users fail in the flow. The Legal/Privacy partner is focused on permission disclosures and does not want experimentation that weakens compliance language.

Constraints

• Timeline: 8 weeks total, with design sign-off required by end of Week 3
• Budget: $60,000 for research, prototyping, and usability testing
• Engineering capacity: 4 engineers, with only 2 available full-time after Week 4
• Dependency: event instrumentation in Instagram analytics must be finalized by Week 2
• Launch requirement: no more than 5% regression in Reel publish success among existing creators

Complications

1. A parallel Instagram camera team is changing media permission prompts in Week 5, which may alter the onboarding entry experience.
2. Leadership is pushing for a high-visibility launch in one major market first, but localization for 6 languages is only partially complete.
3. Existing funnel data is incomplete because privacy settings and template exits are not consistently logged.

Deliverables

1. Identify the single biggest risk in the current onboarding flow and explain why it is the top launch risk.
2. Propose an 8-week execution plan to validate or mitigate that risk before launch.
3. Define what you would ship now versus defer, including explicit trade-offs.
4. Recommend launch criteria, monitoring, and a rollback trigger for the first release.