You are a product manager at Facebook when Facebook Reactions was only a thumbs up, Facebook has decided to launch multiple reactions. How would you go about doing that?

Clarify the new feature, the hypothesis for the change, and the goal associated with it

1) The new feature would increase the number of reaction options that a Facebook user has for each post/comment coming across on his wall. In addition to a simple thumbs up/down, the user can now love, care, be angry, and cry over the content of the post/comment; So once the user clicks on the thumbs-up, a pop-up would appear with a list of 5 emoji out of which any 1 can be chosen by the user

2) Hypothesis: Facebook users have a range of reactions to the posts/comments that they come across on their respective walls and the current thumbs up/down feature is binary in nature and doesn't capture the exact emotion of the user. So, either the user skips the post or proceeds to the comment section so that he can express his emotions via words/stickers. The new reactions have been added to capture the user's emotion towards the post and thereby enabling better communication among the post creator, other commenting users on the post, and the concerned user

3) The goal of the feature is better user engagement by enabling better communication of emotions over the post

Target persona

·      Passive viewer who never reacts to any posts/comments

·      Nominal engagers just react with emojis.

·      Active engagers are the customers who want to express themselves beyond their current emoji by using other  

Functional changes

The new feature must be vetted by the technical team and estimations have to be made for the time required to develop the same

1.    Infrastructure changes to include the new feature

2.    Performance effect due to the new emoji

Promotional changes

The new feature needs to be made known to the customers and the word needs to be spread regarding the procedure to use the same

1.    New feature announcement

2.    Interactive walkthrough of the feature to the user to spot the starting point for the feature and its usage; this in-application guidance shall allow us to showcase the new feature and avoid any confusion that a user might have after the old thumbs-up feature is disabled

A/B testing

The new feature shall be released via an A/B test so that the effect of the changes can be compared against the current version of the like/dislike feature. Only if the changes show significant improvement in user engagement, then the feature would be rolled over to the entire set of audience

Success metrics

The new feature needs to be crosschecked after release to confirm if the hypothesis is correct

The primary metric for the multiple emoji reaction over a post or comment would be a % increase in the number of reactions per post (including the comment reaction)

Timelines 

This would include the timelines for the feature development, rollout dates in phases, and metrics monitoring

Trade-off

The new feature has the potential to degrade the following parameters which need to be monitored and in case the same happens then the decision needs to be taken if the increase in the number of reactions as a goal can be prioritized over other parameters

1.    The average time required to react to a post/comment can increase as the new feature requires the user to choose from the list of the emoji in place of a binary click on the thumbs-up icon

2.    The increase in emoji reaction by the users can potentially reduce the number of comments that the user would otherwise have posted

Feedback

User feedback over the new feature can be obtained via a user survey which can be done via a short binary question asking if the user’s experience has been improved or degraded after the launch of the new feature. This feedback can be rolled out to the users’ timelines after the week from the launch.

Based on the feedback and the metrics monitoring the success or the failure of the feature can be determined and the corresponding measures can be taken to finetune the feature if required