Manager transitions
Facilitating seamless team transitions for enterprise employees — so a new manager never means starting over.
- Company
- Meta · internal tools
- DURATION
- 4 months
- Team
- Co-designer, PD manager, cross-functional partners
- My focus
- Manager persona
Manager transitions happen often at Meta
A transition happens when an employee moves from one team to another and gets a new manager, or when a manager leaves a team and a new manager backfills their position.
We designed for two personas: direct reports going through a transition, and managers with direct reports. HR business partners were also named in the product requirements document (PRD), but the team agreed to focus on direct reports (DRs) and managers for this phase.
Employees change managers often, and many feel unsupported when they do — which can slow their career growth.
What is causing employees to feel a lack of support when switching between teams?
Two pain points stood out
Difficulty building rapport
- Employees can be attached to their old manager.
- Employees feel a lack of support from skip managers.
- Expectations from the old and new team are unclear.
Decreased promotion rates
- Manager overwhelm leads to minimal engagement.
- More manager changes tend to mean lower performance-cycle (PSC) ratings.
- Context gets lost when PSC notes are exchanged.
Before designing, I asked: does this surface already exist? Has this effort been attempted before — and if so, how far did it get?
Four themes, one goal: minimize the knowledge gap
Personas in perspective
My co-designer and I mapped DRs and managers across three teams to see who moves where and who supports whom.
How might we…
…help a new manager build trust and understand a report’s needs? …help the old manager set their team up for success and hand over context?
Journey map & user flows
I captured stages from awareness to accounting for the next change, then we went heads-down on flows, logging open questions in our design brief.
Three flows for the manager
I focused on the Manager persona while my co-designer focused on the Direct Report. Each flow starts from the person’s internal home profile.
- Flow 1OffboardingAn old manager preps for the manager taking their place, with an overview of what they can access and links to related surfaces.
- Flow 2OnboardingA manager enters their new team. This sparked conversations with the Onboarding New Hires team because of overlapping concepts.
- Flow 3WelcomingA skip manager supports an incoming manager, reviewing information in the upcoming-actions widget on their home profile.
A company re-organization changed the plan
With an upcoming company re-organization and urgent time constraints, our Product Design Manager stepped in to support. We re-prioritized P0s and fast follows, and P0 became a performance-cycle-focused feedback experience.
My focus moved to notifications for the old manager, new manager and direct report — across emails, bots, banners, widgets, status and actions.
Refined notifications for P0 hand-off
Old manager
Intro and reminder emails, plus a toast when feedback is complete. I also gave our content designer notes on suggested tones, per tone standards.
New manager
An intro email about incoming reports, and a status update when performance feedback arrives from the old manager.
Direct report
An intro email about the move, and a status update once their new manager has received performance context.
To reduce dev effort, everything leveraged existing templates, the Experience Design System (XDS) and its People theme — email templates, collection-page templates, and header and right-rail patterns.
Testing varied concepts under an urgent time constraint really did help narrow our focus.
Even more jam sessions with cross-functional partners to increase alignment and understanding of the P0 design focus.