Visual search
A tap opens products and related posts, and a follow-up search narrows the results. The hard call was whether the suggestion helped enough to interrupt the reel, and how specific it had to be to feel worth tapping.
Francisco Guzman
Senior Staff Product Designer
I design new products and the systems behind them, from startups to Instagram scale.
Today I lead product design for Instagram Shopping as an IC. I set direction across teams and design key parts of the product. Before that I was Nuro’s first designer and Instacart’s second, after studying engineering and HCI at Stanford.
Instagram01
Design lead2020–2023, 2025–now
Making shopping work inside an app people don’t open to shop.
A dedicated shopping destination didn’t work. People open Instagram to be entertained, then shop when content inspires them. The job is to make that moment easy to act on.
I’ve worked on Shopping twice. The first time, I designed seller onboarding, then managed the team bringing shopping into Feed, Stories, Reels, and Live. Today I’m back designing the product, focused on making anything you see easier to shop.
ScopeHands-on product design and direction across several teams.
01 · Selected work
Business AI
Small businesses are strapped for time. Business AI was made available to millions of businesses on Instagram so people could get help deciding what to buy even when no one was available to reply. The chat clearly said it was AI before the first answer.
Creator monetization
Creators could tag products from across the web and choose when each card appeared.
Seller onboarding
Sellers could set up a shop in the Instagram app, through a web tool, or through Shopify. Their catalog and payment system still had to connect to checkout inside Instagram.
Shoppable formats
Feed could use a product tag. Live needed a card timed to the broadcast. Each format had to make products easy to reach without interrupting the content.
The team had a vehicle that could drive itself. No one knew whether the product was an ice cream truck you walked up to, something you hailed, or a fleet behind someone else’s app.
As Nuro’s first product designer, I worked on the customer app, vehicle interface, remote operations, fleet tools, and field research. That meant working directly with autonomy, hardware, operations, and engineering.
02 · Selected work
Remote vehicle startup
One operator could remotely start multiple vehicles and see every readiness check or blocker.
Grocery service pilot
Real shoppers and drivers fulfilled customer orders, while a Nuro vehicle sometimes handled the final handoff. That exposed what the service needed before the vehicle could do the whole job.
Fleet scheduling
The calendar put every vehicle, operator, and task in one place, from mapping runs to build tests. Each operator got a daily schedule. Later, it could suggest the schedule itself.
Field research
Sessions in daylight, at night, and in the rain showed that people were nervous approaching the vehicle, especially the doors. Sound, voice, and the screen had to explain what was happening before anyone touched it.
Instagram03
Design lead2023–2025
Building a subscription worth paying for.
Meta Verified has one name but is really five products: a creator subscription and four business tiers, from $15 a month to about $500. Creators and businesses want different things, and every tier has to earn its price.
Instagram hadn’t sold its own subscription before, so the basics had to be built from scratch. I owned the Instagram experience and pitched and designed the core benefits. I guided designers across Meta and partner teams on other parts of the product, including onboarding and account management. Facebook adopted the same benefits.
Live nowMeta Verified ↗
03 · Selected work
Links in Reels
Links became the top reason subscribers upgraded to a higher tier, without turning every reel into an ad.
Why people paid
The subscription helped professionals grow an audience, prove who they were, run an account with a team, and protect their work.
Notability
Once anyone could pay for a badge, users needed a way to tell the well-known account from a lookalike. We explored a lot of ways to do this and landed on a simple follower count next to the name in search.
Shared accounts
Big accounts had been sharing passwords. Now owners could add people, see what each person did, and keep messages and stories private unless they chose otherwise. Another designer led the detailed design. I set direction and reviewed the work.
Links on profile
People were already paying link-in-bio services to turn one profile link into a page with several links. Instagram’s version became one of the top two reasons people signed up.
Original credit
Automatic detection ran for everyone. Subscribers could request a human review when another post reused their work. If the claim held up, the copied post was labeled with the original creator’s name.
When I joined, the customer side had a designer. The people doing the shopping had none, and in-store shoppers and drivers ran the whole operation on mobile web.
As Instacart’s second product designer, I focused on the people and tools that got an order from the store to someone’s door. Our team built the first native app for shoppers, drivers, and cashiers, plus systems for everything from applying to getting paid.
04 · Selected work
Replacements
Preferences already in the order let the shopper keep moving when an item was out of stock and the customer didn’t answer.
Shopper app
The app became the shopper’s list and map through each store. When an item was out, it suggested replacements from that customer’s history and what other customers had accepted.
End of the order
Picking was only half the job. Each bag was barcoded and its location recorded so a different person could deliver it.
Shifts and pay
Shoppers used the same app to set availability, pick up shifts, and see delivery pay and tips each week.
In-store fieldwork
Butcher and deli counters were among the slowest parts of a shop. The prototype carried the customer’s exact request into the store instead of forcing it into a standard quantity field.
The face of Instacart
I owned the early shopper experience and worked shifts myself to understand the job. The photo from that fieldwork became the shopper signup site and ran in recruiting ads for nearly two years.
Career
2013–nowI’ve led teams while staying close to the work.
I’ve managed twice at Instagram, leading teams of up to seven. I hired four designers and coached three to promotion. Today I’m an IC again, setting direction across teams that don’t report to me.
| Instagram2020–now | 2025–now | IC |
|---|---|---|
| 2024–2025 | IC + Manager | |
| 2023–2024 | IC | |
| 2021–2023 | Manager | |
| 2020 | IC | |
| Nuro | 2018–2019 | First product designer |
| Instacart | 2015–2018 | Second product designer |
| Prismatic | 2013–2014 | Interaction Designer |
| Stanford UniversityEducation | MS Symbolic SystemsHuman-Computer InteractionBS Management Science & Engineering |