Most product leaders in digital advertising build for one side of the marketplace. Lukia Xu has spent nearly a decade building for all three — the creators who make content, the brands that want to reach audiences through them, and the platforms that need both sides to trust the system enough to keep transacting. That work, spanning TikTok/ByteDance and now Pinterest, has made her one of the relatively small number of product leaders in the industry who has built creator-brand marketplace infrastructure from first principles at global scale — and whose recognition has recently extended beyond the platforms she works on.
Xu, a Staff Product Manager at Pinterest and former Group Product Manager at TikTok/ByteDance, was recently credited as a collaborator on LORE — an IP licensing marketplace designed to help creators structure and commercialize their intellectual property — which took a Silver Award at the 2026 NY Product Design Awards in the User Experience (UX) – Product UX category and a Silver Winner at the 2026 TITAN Innovation Awards in Innovation in Innovation Design – User Experience Design. The recognition reflects expertise that Xu has built across years of designing the creator side of marketplace interactions: the onboarding flows, the matching mechanics, the submission and selection experiences, and the payment infrastructure that determine whether creators participate at scale or opt out. That domain knowledge is precisely what LORE — which addresses a persistent gap in how creators manage and license their intellectual property in the age of AI — required.
She was also recently admitted as a Fellow of Beta Fellowship, a selective innovator community evaluated through an expert panel review process, whose alumni include senior professionals from Google, Amazon, Meta, and TikTok.
Why Creator-Brand Marketplaces Are Hard to Build
The creator economy is a vast and promising field, with Goldman Sachs projecting it could reach $480 billion by 2027. But the actual infrastructure connecting brands to creators — and ensuring both sides of the transaction can trust the outcome — remains technically complex and largely invisible to the public.
The core difficulty is a three-sided alignment problem. Creators need income that is predictable and fairly matched to their audience and content category. Brands need reach that is measurable, brand-safe, and delivered at scale without proportional operational overhead. Platforms need both sides to stay engaged enough to sustain the ecosystem. Engineering a system where all three conditions are simultaneously true requires solving problems in ML matching, experimentation design, ads delivery, and product UX — across a single coherent architecture.
This is the problem Xu has spent her career on.
Building the Trust Layer: Verification and Measurement at TikTok
When Xu joined ByteDance in 2018 as TikTok’s first product manager in ads measurement, the platform had none of the technical infrastructure that enterprise brand advertisers required. Viewability verification — the baseline standard demanded by major brands before committing a significant budget — was entirely absent.
Xu identified that the IAB Tech Lab had just introduced the Open Measurement SDK (OMSDK): a new standard allowing a single SDK integration to support all measurement partners simultaneously, replacing the expensive server-to-server approach that required separate integrations with each vendor. She led the integration, worked directly with IAB Tech Lab to define viewability protocols for TikTok’s then-unprecedented full-screen, sound-on video format, and secured IAB certification for ByteDance in November 2018 — making TikTok one of the first Chinese platforms to achieve it and unlocking the enterprise brand budgets that had previously been inaccessible.
With verification established, Xu went on to design TikTok’s first-party Brand Lift Study (BLS) system from scratch: a TikTok-native in-feed survey experience with a custom pop-up card, served through TikTok’s own ads delivery infrastructure via a dedicated research account. The experimentation layer used pre-allocation to designate control group users before campaign launch, with user IDs passed between the experimentation and delivery systems to ensure clean separation. A full reporting interface was built natively into TikTok Ads Manager. Crucially, the system ran at zero additional cost to advertisers — a deliberate product decision that drove rapid adoption. Adweek covered the global rollout.
Xu then tackled the deeper architectural problem: TikTok’s lift infrastructure could only measure standard paid ad products, but TikTok had a growing class of formats — Hashtag Challenge, Branded Effect, Branded Mission — that blended organic and paid traffic. She led the redesign of TikTok’s core lift infrastructure, separating the experimentation layer from the application layer, introducing salted hash randomization to support tens of thousands of concurrent study layers, and — most distinctively — extending measurement to non-standard products by moving randomization upstream to all eligible users and suppressing organic campaign content for control group users at the content ranking step. This made TikTok the only platform capable of measuring the incremental lift of hybrid organic-paid products with scientific rigor.
The Marketplace Layer: ML-Powered Creator-Brand Matching at Scale
Xu’s most consequential work at TikTok was taking ownership of Branded Mission — described by TechCrunch at launch as an industry-first solution for creator marketing at scale. The structural problem it solved: brands wanted to work with thousands of creators simultaneously, but no automated system existed to make that operationally viable.
The matching engine used machine learning to identify and invite relevant creators for each campaign based on follower composition, historical engagement rates by content category, audience demographic overlap with the advertiser’s target, and creator-brand affinity signals derived from prior performance. The workflow — from ML-driven creator selection through in-app invitation, video submission via TikTok camera, organic distribution, advertiser review in Ads Manager, and one-click boosting as paid ads — ran as a single integrated system with no manual coordination required at scale.
The delivery side used predicted engagement rate as the primary optimization signal, with a self-correcting pacing mechanism: if creator submission volume fell below campaign projections, the system automatically expanded invitation volume and frequency to maintain delivery targets.
The results were significant. The product revenue almost tripled from 2022 to 2024, expanded into dozens of markets, and regularly activated thousands of creators per campaign in the US alone, bringing hundreds to thousands in payout to everyday creators for a single campaign.
The connection to LORE is substantive. Where Branded Mission operationalized the brand-to-creator transaction at platform scale, LORE addresses the upstream gap: helping creators organize, present, and license their intellectual property as structured commercial assets — defining royalty rates, licensing periods, product applications, and approval terms — so that the transaction layer Xu built at TikTok has the rights infrastructure to support it. Her contribution to LORE’s UX drew directly on that experience designing the creator side of marketplace interactions.
Premium Format Strategy at Pinterest
As Staff Product Manager at Pinterest, Xu leads the company’s flagship Premiere Spotlight ad format — owning strategy, format design, advertiser experience, pricing, and reporting end-to-end. She is currently leading the development of a new addition to Spotlight, using Pinterest’s state-of-the-art computer vision and content understanding models to help brands better reach users on the most contextually relevant sessions.
She also mentors through ADPList – recently recognized as top 100 new mentors in UX design – and AIGA New York’s Growth Programs, working with emerging product and design professionals on the practical, unglamorous knowledge that determines whether careers compound over time.
“The creator economy only works when the infrastructure on both sides is sound,” Xu says. “Creators need reliable income and clear terms. Brands need measurement and scale. The product challenge is always building the system that makes both true at the same time — and the platforms that figure that out are the ones that sustain.”
Lukia Xu is a Staff Product Manager at Pinterest. She holds a Master of Arts in Communication from the University of Southern California and a Bachelor of Arts in Economics from Peking University. Connect with her on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/lukiaxys/
