LinkedIn
Selling the dream of maintaining your network, without the actual functionality
LinkedIn is the world's largest professional networking platform. It connects global professionals to help them build their careers, find jobs, and develop skills.
The app
Key Friction Points:
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No private grouping or tagging feature for connections (something equivalent to phone contact groups)
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You can't search or filter your actual feed by anything meaningful, so everything blends into one stream
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Searching and filtering connections leans on job title and company name/industry instead of skills or expertise, but titles are becoming increasingly poor proxies for what someone actually does (multi-hyphenates, career-pivoters, entrepreneurs)
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If you want to quickly find “everyone in my network who does X type of work,” there's no clean and intuitive way to do it, even though that's arguably the core value proposition of a network. The closest you can get is through searching by very broad industry categories, which are buried and hard to find.
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A platform built for networking and staying meaningfully connected to people you've met throughout your career is still very feature-light on ways to actually deliver on that value proposition.
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LinkedIn's mission revolves around networking, job-finding, and staying connected to the numerous professionals one meets along their career journey. Unfortunately, it tends to treat the connections as one big rolodex.
There is no way to organize connections by how you actually relate to them (college classmates, former coworkers, industry contacts from conferences) or by what they really do (skills, expertise, & experience, independent of title).
The result is a messy feed full of people you've lost context on, and a network you can't actually use when you need to find something specific.
The gap
I used Claude to help me crawl Reddit, X, and professional forums like Blind to find out of I was alone in my critique. I wasn't.
A recurring theme across hundreds of posts was that people don't recognize a large portion of their own network anymore, and LinkedIn offers no tools to help.
Without a way to meaningfully manage their network, the utility is lost for overwhelmed users who opt to stop using the platform altogether until they need to job hunt, because that's an area where they find clear & meaningful value.
Validating the problem
LinkedIn could stand to see significant growth in user engagement and subscription retention if it adds features that allow users to more fully customize their networking experience.
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Things are shifting greatly in the career space, but LinkedIn is still largely stuck in the past. It's time to embrace features that complement a network of real, whole people and not just corporate titles.
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LinkedIn's value is built on its network effect, and it is very effective at the discovery function for things like suggesting new connections, showing you people who may be hiring in your network, etc. However, its tools to help users sort and manage the connections they've already made fall flat. An undifferentiated network simply doesn't have much value.
At the same time, the workforce itself has shifted. More people hold multiple roles, freelance across projects, or have expertise that doesn't map cleanly to a single title or job. A platform still organized around “title = identity, one feed = your whole network” is increasingly out of step with how people actually think about who they know and what they do.
Why this matters
Proposed Prototype
Introduce Network Segments, which are user-created, private groups for organizing your connections by relationship context (e.g., “College,” “Ex-Deloitters”) or by skillset/expertise (e.g., “Product Designers,” “Founders To Watch”). I used Claude & Figma to help me prototype the solution:
Adding segments to my network
My Network now features a network segments pane
The My Network page is slightly redesigned, with the left pane now holding a space at the top for users to view and manually add segments to their Network
AI can be used to create new network segments
Segments can also be added via AI-suggested groupings (e.g., “We found 12 people in your network with Product Design experience — add to a segment?”). You can see an example of this in the blue Suggested For You box on the bottom left. AI reads existing profile data, such as job history, roles, and listed skills, to suggest segment-ready groupings which helps to reduce the manual burden for the user
Network segments are private and highly customizable
Segments are entirely private; they are visible only to the user who created them, with no signal sent to the people being categorized. A connection can belong to multiple segments simultaneously (e.g., someone can be both “College” and “Product Designers”)
A new way to search my network
AI can be used to power the network search
A user could search “people with startup experience” or “product designers” and get an accurate result pulled from their existing connections, based on AI's read of their actual work history. Skill and experience signals are inferred from profile content (titles, experience descriptions, project history).
Segmenting brand new connections
AI can make segmenting new connections easy & seamless
When new connections are made, LinkedIn will immediately prompt the user to add the connection to a segment based on AI's analysis of the connection's profile. The user is still given space to add their own segment manually if they so choose.
Filtering the feed by network segments
Introducing the ability for users to filter their feeds by their self-created network segments
The existing filter options for My Feed, which are currently limited to “Top” and “Recent”, gain new options based on the user's segments so the feed can be filtered to show only posts/updates from people in a given group. Filtered feed results are a lot more useful to the user, allowing them to navigate their feed in a way that is meaningful to them.
Without appropriate messaging, users could read these features as added complexity, but the framing matters: using these features is the difference between a confusing network & feed full of people you can't place, and a network you can actually navigate with intention.
The bigger product challenge isn't whether this is useful, it's communicating that value clearly enough that users don't skip or dismiss it. A big marketing push and formal rollout to highlight the utility of these features in relatable ways might be a necessary touch.
Tradeoffs
Adoption
% of users who create at least one network segment.
Utilization
% of users who use the network segment filter on their feed & their frequency of use
Engagement
Active session duration for network segment users vs. non-users
Engagement
User engagement (likes, comments, shares) on feeds filtered by network segments vs. unfiltered
Adoption
Number of network segments generated from AI suggestion vs. manual entry
The overall adoption of Network Segments, how often the feed filter actually gets used, and whether users who use segments stay more active on the platform than users who don't would be a few key indicators of success.
How I'd measure it