Case study · a global advertising business
How a team at Meta built an audit system by mapping a process no one could see whole
No new tool came first. A room did: the people who each knew a piece, and the whole process drawn on a wall.
The situation
The business needed an audit process for its ad sales operation: a reliable way to verify the numbers moving through it. Simple to state, harder to act on. We had to design the audit process along with the tools and the role of the auditors that would use it. It was a challenging project to see as a whole, as folks across the business only understood their piece.
This work is from my years as a product designer at Meta, where mapping a process end to end was my regular practice; this is one map among many. The scale is different from a Hawaiʻi shop’s; the shape of the problem is not.
What we did
Put the right people in a physical room
The product manager, the program manager, a wall, and some printouts. Together we mapped the entire end-to-end flow by hand: the ticketing system, the teams working in it, every email and system handoff in between.
Turned the wall into one clean artifact
The hand-drawn mapping was stitched into a single, shared map of the process, the first complete picture anyone on the team had seen.
Built the new system from existing parts
Only after the map existed did the building start, and almost nothing was built from scratch. The ticketing system was customized to carry the new process, and the review teams Meta already had in place staffed it. A new system, made of parts that already worked, with every change reviewed, logged, and visible.
The result
End to end
the first complete view of a process no one had seen whole
One artifact
a shared map the team could design and build against
Under 6 months
from first mapping session to shipped audit product, fast for an organization that size
The unlock wasn’t the software. It was the map. Once the team could see the whole process, the product that had been stuck for want of a shared picture came together quickly.
Why this is how Kuriri works
This is what Kuriri does with a local business: get the people who each hold a piece of the process into one conversation, map the whole thing before anyone proposes a tool, and build the new thing out of the systems already in place. The vocabulary changes between a global ad business and a four-person shop; the move doesn’t.
Systems before software.
What’s the process in your business no one can see end to end?
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