As a Meta PM, evaluate and recommend if it makes sense for Meta to converge all their chat products (Instagram Chat, Messenger, WhatsApp) into a single product.

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As a Meta PM, evaluate and recommend if it makes sense for Meta to converge all their chat products (Instagram Chat, Messenger, WhatsApp) into a single product.

Asked at Meta (facebook) in the past year

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srinatar · Answer 1 · 2023-07-20T21:59:58+0000

Clarifying Questions

1. Are there any specific drivers for this convergence? (Increased Revenue etc)? - Nothing specific. Zuckerberg is exploring this idea and he wants your recommendation

2. when you say convergence, you mean to say that all chat will happen on a separate product. all chats will be in a separate app. - Yes.

Structure

1. Facebook mission - empower people to form communities and bring the world together. from a Mission point of view, these products are closely aligned with Meta's mission

2. though, this appears like a 2-way door (that can be easily rolled back) but can only be done with impact to our brand and at the expense of losing the trust our users have placed in on us.

so, let us define factors that we will use to define if we should converge these products and then methodically go about analyzing this decision

factors	explanation	score
user needs -	i want to first understand if there is any strong user pain point around this. I will run surveys and user studies to better understand customer behavior. personally, i think this convergence will impact the user journey because i can DM my Insta friend without opening a separate DM	-1 for convergence
impact of merging nonoverlapping connections	today, users have nonoverlapping connections - WhatsApp friends do not necessarily overlap with Instagram or FB users . so, we will have to work with UX design to explore and minimize the user confusion	-1 for convergence
business value - increased monetization, targeted ads	today, we could not effectively monetize WhatsApp. we could potentially better monetize if we could offer one app. however,	+1 for convergence
regulatory & privacy	we should anticipate both government regulatory and privacy concerns with this and explore if this will	-1 for convergence
brand impact	we will also have to understand what is the brand impact if we go ahead with this decision. key value prop of WhatsApp is to never show Ads and be allowed to share personal pictures and messages with friends and family. this can result in brand impact	-1 for convergence
competition	today, google has attempted to create / unify multiple chat products and has not succeeded.	-1 for convergence.

from the above analysis, it is obvious that there are not enough benefits with this convergence and hence will make a business case for Meta to keep these products separate to drive better engagement.

Thanks