Travis Hutchinson’s mission is to keep media and education from being “divorced from one another.”
The Yale University graduate and Brooklyn, NY, native studied behavioral economics to understand how people make decisions and, when technology is added to the equation, how they “decide about what their experience is like overall,” he told AFROTECH™.
In 2019, he began working as a product manager at Instagram, initially focusing on “how do we create representations of human beings,” he said while speaking on a panel at the 2026 AFROTECH™ Conference. He specifically worked on Explore Relevance and multimodal video understanding for Meta AI. He was also part of the team that launched Reels, which he described as a “phenomenal opportunity.”
“We essentially launched Reels from zero, and I was sitting with engineers building out, ‘Hey, you know, what does the relevance stack look like? What signals are we using?’ … That was such a really, really cool opportunity. So I think it got me really interested in machine learning and the way that machine learning is essentially behind everything now,” he explained to AFROTECH™.
“I think that’s why I work in relevance, which is like, ‘Hey, what’s appropriate? What are things that are maybe not appropriate? And for like whom and what, how do you think about all of these things coming together?'” he added.
Hutchinson spoke Wednesday in the LinkedIn-led session “Getting Discovered In The LinkedIn Feed” at the AFROTECH™ Conference, which is celebrating its 10th anniversary in Houston. The conference runs through Friday, Nov. 6, and tickets are still available for the rest of the week.
In 2022, LinkedIn recruited Hutchinson, impressed by his understanding of the recommendation space and machine learning. He also noted that he joined the company to explore content trust and safety more deeply. In 2025, his role transitioned back to traditional relevance. His current title is senior product manager focused on conversations, AI, and growth.
“My task is, how do we make comments to be the most relevant experience overall. So, let’s say [someone] comes to the platform. What kind of comments should [they] be seeing. When should [they] be engaging with the comments [and] conversations? When we have the opportunity to show people comments, we know that they tend to have a significantly better experience overall. So getting people to engage in the conversation and actually use social media, not as media where you’re just like looking at things but to actually engage in conversations, that’s like my favorite part of the job,” he said.
Nearly 700 million comments are viewed daily, according to insights shared on the AFROTECH™ panel presented by LinkedIn. More than a quarter of Black professionals credit commenting, sharing, and joining professional conversations with access to additional opportunities — the highest among any other racial or ethnic group surveyed, according to LinkedIn data.
“This is how people land roles and jobs,” Hutchinson’s explained. “Commenting on someone’s post, and then somebody sees something, and they reach out to you and get to make a relationship. I focus on what’s the machine learning underneath what comments we show you.”
Other areas Hutchinson has worked on with his team include LinkedIn’s newest feature, pinned comments, which was developed in response to creator feedback.
Additionally, the platform is working to mitigate AI slop to keep authentic conversations at the forefront of the feed. He said LinkedIn has made several architectural improvements for this reason.
“We call that just a general quality push, and it’s been really kind of helpful overall. And we’re seeing massive strides on the platform overall,” he acknowledged. “The industry standard is you focus on classifiers and feed ranking … to make sure that people are seeing high-quality posts and comments.”
Speaking to the importance of representation and ensuring diverse groups are among the builders in tech, he acknowledged its importance in mitigating biases and ensuring “all our algorithms cover a bunch of different bases.”
He added, “Being a Black person in this space and, and thinking about kind of those problems, creates a much more robust experience for most of our end users.”