Building Instagram’s Creator Crediting System
Company
My role
Cross-company alignment
Full system design
Core interaction model
Overview
Built a Platform-Level Crediting System for the Creator Economy
Structured attribution embedded into Instagram’s core creation flows
As Instagram’s creator ecosystem scaled, collaboration became central to content creation — but credit, visibility, and opportunity did not scale with it.
I led the system-level design of Instagram’s first structured creator crediting model, enabling reliable attribution across Feed and Reels while aligning with platform incentives at global scale.
Outcome
Shipped a Foundational Attribution System Used at Global Scale
Adopted by creators and brands across Instagram
The system launched across Feed and Reels to 1.5 billion users and became the foundation for future discovery, attribution, and monetization work.
Credited collaborators gained visibility and recognition that previously concentrated with primary account holders, strengthening trust in collaboration across the platform.
Challenge
Collaboration Scaled Faster Than Attribution
Virality without credit reinforced inequality
Behind every viral post were stylists, photographers, choreographers, and other collaborators whose contributions became invisible once content took off.
Manual crediting through captions or comments was inconsistent, socially fragile, and invisible to Instagram’s discovery systems — making attribution unreliable and impossible to govern at scale.
Strategy
Treat Credit as Infrastructure Not a New Surface
Create new value using familiar, trusted components
Rather than introducing a standalone feature, structured credit was designed by extending existing tagging mechanics creators already understood.
By working within familiar components, the system unlocked new attribution value without increasing cognitive load, fragmenting workflows, or compromising long-term scalability.
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1 day ago
paisley.print.48
Angeliki Stander
Costume Designer
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Travis Ramos
Music Director
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super_santi_73
Apostolis Kimura
Cinematographer
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Execution
Design a Role-Based Crediting Model With Intentional Constraints
Clear enough to trust, simple enough to scale
Crediting was embedded directly into the tagging flow using a role-based model that balanced expressiveness with clarity.
Several teams pushed for more expressive crediting to cover edge cases, but I constrained the system deliberately — prioritizing adoption and trust over completeness, knowing the trade-off would be visible.
Limiting collaborators to a single role per post reduced decision friction, supported backend scalability, and made crediting fast enough to become a default behavior.
My Role
Product Design Lead & System Architect
Owned system strategy, trade-offs, and execution
I led the end-to-end design of the crediting system across product, engineering, policy, and legal, shaping the role taxonomy, interaction model, and constraints required to ship a durable platform system under ambiguity.
Impact
Shifted Instagram Toward a Creator Ecosystem
Credit redistributed opportunity, not just recognition
By embedding structured credit into everyday creation, the system increased visibility for historically under-credited creators, reduced attribution friction outside the product, and established a foundation for future discovery and monetization systems built on attribution.
Reflection
Adoption Creates Impact
By choosing clarity over perfect expressiveness, we built a crediting model that fit naturally into everyday creation.
Simple, trusted defaults enabled the system to work in real-world usage rather than just ideal scenarios.
It reinforced that adoption-driven design is what turns infrastructure into impact.
User Researcher @ Meta
"Angelina is an exceptionally strong product design leader with a rare ability to operate at both system and execution levels. Her ability to organize complex ideas and guide teams to strong decisions consistently elevated both our product and our process."
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