Privacy Work

End-to-end Encryption

Project Armadillo began with me and 3 people in a room, and after years of effort from a large team of dedicated and talented people, we brought the privacy, safety and security of default end-to-end encrypted messaging and calling to Facebook and Messenger. More than a billion people can now know that only they and the person they’re talking to have access to their personal conversations.

I’m incredibly proud of Meta for taking the time to do this responsibly, completely rearchitect the service, rebuilding 100+ features on each app, and doing all this without disrupting people’s critical ability to connect with the people they care about.

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Edit Messages

We introduced the ability to edit your messages after you’ve sent them. My team and I built this much requested feature for your personal conversations as well as your business and community chats.

Press Release

Read Receipts Controls

My team and I gave people the ability to control read receipts. If you turn them off, people won’t be able to see when you’ve read messages they send you. This can be done for all threads at once at the account level or on a per-thread basis.

Press Release

Message Delivery Controls

In concert with the introduction of cross-app communications, I led a team that gave the billions of people who use Facebook, Instagram, or Messenger control over who can reach them. This privacy settings empower you to decide whose messages reach your Chats list, your Message Request folder, or can’t message or call you at all.

Press Release

How I Got Here

I’m often asked to share the story of how I made it to this place in my career. My story does not follow the path of top universities and prestigious early jobs. It’s a story of creativity, perseverance, hard work, and a bit of luck.

I grew up in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina, ran a small landscaping business in high school, studied international business at a small liberal arts college, and worked as a designer and engineer to pay for my degree. After graduating in 2014, I moved to Houston to work for HP as a project manager.

Things took a difficult turn in 2016. A month after my wedding, I was laid off from HP alongside thousands of my colleagues.

We moved to South Carolina where I joined a less-than 10-person startup as its first product manager. The team and I built automation tools for enterprise customers including Microsoft and Wells Fargo.

At the same time, I co-founded a product studio called Nicer with 4 friends as a way to build our skills with a wider variety of work and make extra money. We all had other full-time jobs, but we unexpectedly saw quick growth because of a guerrilla marketing campaign that I worked on.

As the year came to a close, the automation startup hit a rough spot, and I was laid off for the second time that year. A few weeks later, 3 of the co-founders forced me and the 5th co-founder out of Nicer Studio.

My wife and I moved to San Francisco and for the next several years, I was laser-focused on personal growth, finding stability, and building legitimacy in the highly competitive technology industry.

I worked as a product manager for a small green energy finance company in Santa Rosa, commuting ~3 hours a day. After two years, I moved to another green energy finance company. This time in Oakland, commuting ~2 hours a day. In my time there I worked my way up to Head of Product for the Home Improvement business line. I will forever be grateful for the opportunities I was given to learn and grow at those two companies.

While I was learning how to be a great product manager, I was also extremely active building and shipping personal projects (Fitness Totals, Decline Stickers, etc). I blogged regularly, and I had two podcasts that turned out to be incredibly important for my career.

I started an interview podcast called UNCO as an excuse to talk with interesting people in the technology space. It worked, and I was able to interview 49 leaders from companies like Google, Amazon, Apple, Etsy, MailChimp, Khan Academy, BuzzFeed, The Verge, and Automattic. This built my network, grew my confidence, and helped me learn from a wide variety of incredibly-talented people.

In parallel, I started a show about accessibility in tech called Accessible, with my good friend, journalist, and accessibility expert, Steven Aquino. We saw success among an important group of technologists who deeply care about accessibility. One of those listeners was the Head of Accessibility at Facebook. He recommended me for a role at the company. Facebook reached out to me about it, and I ended up taking it.

I spent my first several years at Meta focused on improving user privacy. In that time I introduced powerful new privacy controls and transitioned into managing other PMs. I also started a multi-year initiative that ultimately brought the privacy, safety and security of end-to-end encrypted messaging and calling to Facebook and Messenger.

I’m now responsible for generative AI in Messenger and Instagram Direct.