AI · Finance Case Study · NDA

Budget Dashboards & AI Assistant

Budget tracking dashboards and an AI assistant for Finance Business Partners and org leaders managing spend across Meta.

Company
Meta
Role
IC6 Product Designer
Scope
Strategy · Design 0→1 · AI
Team
Financial Planning
Year
2025–2026
Domain
Enterprise · Finance · AI
Budget Tool OpEx dashboard interfaceIllustrative data

Illustrative data: every figure, name, and org shown in these screens is fabricated. See the full NDA note below.

0.2% → 63%
Budget coverage across 4 launches
8.6K–33K
Hours saved annually via AI
44%
Reduction in travel reporting effort

Finance Business Partners (FBPs) and org leaders managed multi-billion-dollar spend across OpEx, headcount, and travel without dedicated tooling, manually stitching together Concur exports, Workday ledgers, and FP&A data in spreadsheets. Budget coverage sat at just 0.2%.

The goal was twofold: build a unified real-time tracking foundation, and then leverage AI to automate the routine financial questions that consumed hours of manual effort.

Finance Manager persona
Finance Manager
"I need to see the full financial picture across every pillar to catch risk early."
Org Leader persona
Org Leader
"I'm accountable for my budget, but I don't have time to become a finance expert."
Org Delegate persona
Org Delegate
"I manage day-to-day budget details while my leader needs summaries."

Budget accountability at Meta flowed hierarchically, moving from company-wide down to pillars, org leaders, and individual positions, trips, or purchase orders. I designed every surface to mirror that exact shape.

Whether monitoring the whole company or a single pillar, users operated at different altitudes within the same mental model. By establishing identical component structures, summary cards, variance framing, and drill-down patterns across Travel, OpEx, and Headcount, users could navigate new spend categories instantly. Furthermore, this consistent foundation was critical because an AI assistant is only as trustworthy as the structured data underneath it.

Each tracker (Travel, OpEx, Headcount) operated as an independent pod with its own PM, Finance partner, 5 to 7 engineers, and shared UX research support. As the sole consistent design thread across all three, I drove cross-surface consistency in practice.

While another designer originated early concepts for Travel and Headcount, I independently designed OpEx from 0 to 1, establishing the component patterns and system foundation used to elevate Travel and Headcount in Phase 2.

NDA note: Screens for this project are confidential under NDA. Everything shown here was rebuilt from memory to convey the design decisions. Every figure, name, org, and data point in these screens is fabricated and does not reflect real Meta budgets, headcount, financials, or organizational structure.

Travel Budget Tracker (Phase 2)

Delivered 8 design enhancements and 11 new capabilities focused on data visualization and resolving reporting discrepancies.

"This is looking really good... you guys should package it up and sell it to other companies."

— VP of Finance, Meta

OpEx Budget Tracker (0–1)

Led the 0 to 1 design of a comprehensive budget owner dashboard, streamlining planning and increasing expense visibility by roughly 22 percent.

Headcount Budget Tracker (Phase 2)

Delivered Phase 2 enhancements covering approximately 40.4 percent of Meta's budget. To close a major data gap, I introduced headcount debt, tracking positions still open after a plan committed to closing them as a first-class metric alongside Filled and Unfilled roles.

Component Standardization

Partnered closely with design and engineering to unify the tool experience across all three surfaces into a single consistent shell and navigation pattern.

AI Budget Assistant

Co-led strategy and design for an in-workflow AI assistant. Because financial decisions carry high consequences, the interaction model prioritized trust and transparency through several principles:

  • Show Your Work: Responses broke down reasoning by org with exact underlying numbers.
  • Actionable Outputs: Answers surfaced direct next actions, such as opening an affected org or modeling a fix.
  • Proactive Anomalies: Flagged purchase orders at risk of bad accruals directly inside data tables with exact dollar impacts.

Before leaving Meta, I was co-leading exploration into an AI-first budget transformation, shifting from an assistant sitting on top of tools toward autonomous budget management and personalized financial dashboards tailored to how individual leaders plan.

This work sits at the intersection of making complex systems feel simple and operating at the strategic layer where product direction is set. Building these budget trackers from scratch required deep engineering collaboration and close partnership with Finance. Layering high-stakes AI trust models on top of that foundation represents some of the most forward-looking work of my career.

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