Meta’s CTO on designing for the next computing era
Andrew “Boz” Bosworth has spent nearly two decades at Meta, building products from News Feed and Messenger to the Meta Quest, Ray-Ban Meta glasses, and Orion AR glasses. As CTO and head of Reality Labs, he now sets the technical agenda for spatial computing. In a conversation with Figma co-founder and CEO Dylan Field at Config 2025, Bosworth outlined ten principles for guiding product teams through a period of rapid change in how humans interact with machines.
Start from a human problem
Bosworth’s first rule is also his longest-standing compass. The starting point for any product is a person with a real problem. The user ultimately decides whether a tool helps them; they will use it if it does and abandon it if it doesn’t. Everything else is just pleasant conversation.
That human-first stance leads to a second rule borrowed from David Foster Wallace’s 2005 Kenyon College commencement address, about two young fish who don’t know what water is. Designers live inside inherited paradigms, Bosworth argues, so they must ask whether the constraints they face are real or simply artifacts of a system that can be changed.
Reconsider the entire interaction model
Bosworth’s third rule pushes that skepticism further: assume the whole interaction paradigm is wrong. To illustrate, he describes the absurdity of trying to listen to music on a run. Doing so requires understanding the rights structures of music labels just to decide which platform streams which artist, and when to switch among Spotify, Apple Music, and Tidal. A simple intention becomes a complex sequence of app decisions. After 60 years of the same computing model, Bosworth believes the time is right to redesign the whole chain.
That effort, however, demands distinguishing between two modes of product work. In “zero to one” territory, there are no customers and no constraints. In the other mode, teams smooth and refine an existing product alongside their audience. Spatial interfaces and AI are the former, Bosworth notes—greenfields free of the old limitations. Knowing which mode you occupy matters.
Taste plays a role in picking the right ground for that work. Bosworth compares product design to constraint optimization problems he studied in college, where the first move is choosing where in the problem space to begin. Starting on the Tibetan Highlands rather than the Kansas plains doesn’t make the climb easy, but it makes it worth attempting. Intuition selects the mountain range; the climbing remains hard regardless.
Prototype early, design the system
Meta has built rooms with mesh walls where participants wear head-tracking hats—crude, rudimentary experiments used only to get a glimpse of whether a technology deserves deeper investment. Bosworth insists there is no substitute for actually trying an idea, no matter how rough the attempt.
And in spatial computing, the parts cannot be designed independently. You cannot hold, say, the visual feedback fixed while changing the gesture, because the gesture, the feedback, and the function it unlocks all have to develop together. Bosworth calls that integrated iteration loop “real design in the pure sense.”
Tools need a theory of mind
Bosworth envisions tools that understand what you are trying to accomplish. There is a degree of agency a tool should have to act on your behalf—not too much, not too little. That balance, having awareness of another entity’s intentions and goals, is what Bosworth means by giving tools a “theory of mind.”
His remaining principles apply that mindset to both work and self. Bosworth says he has never viewed a product as finished, and he approaches himself the same way: this is version 43, and next year’s release will fix some bugs and introduce new ones. The iterative mindset applies equally to personal growth.
On interfaces themselves, Bosworth is unambiguous. As elegant as they can be, they have no intrinsic value. The goal is to make them disappear enough that the tool vanishes and the task itself takes center stage. A bonus rule from the conversation, offered with characteristic irreverence: if given the chance to upload your consciousness, say yes—so you can stick around long enough to see what happens with your kids.
