When Apple's iOS 14 update let people opt out of tracking, a lot of them did. Almost overnight, advertisers lost sight of a big chunk of what happened after someone clicked an ad. Did they buy something? Sign up? It got a lot harder to tell, and budgets were being spent half blind.

There was a fix. Instead of relying on the phone, a business could send its conversion events straight from its own servers to Meta. The catch was that setting that up was a full engineering project, with APIs, server config, and debugging that most marketing teams had no way to touch. I was one of three designers building Signals Gateway, the product meant to take that whole process and hand it to the people who actually needed it, not just the developers.

My real job was making infrastructure feel approachable. I designed a setup flow that walks you through connecting your data one step at a time, in plain language, instead of dropping you into a wall of technical settings. The part I'm proudest of is the diagnostics. When something breaks in a data pipeline it usually fails quietly, and you only notice weeks later when the numbers look off. I built a way to actually see the health of a connection, spot exactly where events were getting lost, and fix it yourself, without filing a ticket and waiting on an engineer.

We also shipped a set of features we called Signal Resilience that recovered events that would otherwise have slipped through the cracks. That sounds like a small thing, but for an advertiser it is the difference between an ad system that is guessing and one that is working from the full picture.

The result was a setup that went from weeks of engineering work down to roughly fifteen minutes, run by the team itself. And because the recovered signal fed back into how ads were delivered, it helped bring cost per action down by around 13% for the advertisers using it.