As a PM at Instagram, what new feature would you propose to enhance the platform?

Instagram is a social media platform where Viewers and Creators come together. Creators share their creations and Viewers consume them. It also serves as a platform for connecting with friends. The creation aspect is democratised and anyone can share their creations on the platform, publicize their businesses through organic or artificial channels.

Let me try to break down the types of users on Instagram today based on their level of activity on the platform:

Passive Viewers:
1. Consume content by others
2. Share interesting memes / reels/ stories with their own friends through DMs
3. Never post
4. Tend to doom scroll
5. ocassionally may purchase through businesses on Instagram
Casual poster:
1. Passive ++
2. ocasionally posts on stories or through insta posts
3. posts about their life events, trips, TV shows or movies they like
Active poster / Instagram celebrity / Influencer:
1. Regularly posts
2. uses Insta as a professional tool
3. Large following
4. uses following to promote own or other businesses
5. charges for their posts / stories like an advertising platform
6. present on multiple platforms
Businesses: Individual or small D2C brands ; Enterprises
1. Uses Instagram as a platform to engage with prospective audience / buyers
2. Building TOMR
3. Needs marketplace model
4. uses to promote upcoming events / products
5. Does advertising on the platform

For this exercise I would want to focus on individual or small brands as a segment. This is because this segment is fairly underexplored, it has very little organisation in itself, is largely unstructured, and thus has a lot of untapped growth potential.

The major potential competitors for this space are e-commerce platforms, which have a lot of major brands on them already, making it difficult for the smaller D2C brands to come up.

Analysing the pain points of this segment:

Product Selection:
1. Clueless about product market fit
2. What kind of products are users seeking/liking - My own Aunt runs a small handicraft business and discovered a full year into her efforts, at a physical exhibition, that her star product (in her mind) had barely any takers. What worked better was a one-off thing she made on the side
Reach:
1. Don't know how to reach the customers
2. Targetting the right customer segments
Engaging:
1. Don't know how to make the right content to connect with audience
2. Keeping up with new content creation ideas
3. unclear how to get consistent visibility
4. late in following trends, until then the virality ship has sailed
Sales:
1. Don't have own website / website is basic with terrible UI UX
2. Cataloging : Difficult to show entire product selection to user
3. Tend to take orders on phone or through insta chat / whatsapp chat after sharing numbers
Payment and Delivery:
1. Payments are difficult to complete, especially if users wants to pay through cards, netbanking or other such organised methods
2. Order tracking
3. Delivery details
4. Order fulfilment

I would want to prioritise pain points 1, 3, and 4

Why?

Pain point 2 is already solved for by Instagram advertising.

Point 5 is outside of Instagram's core business, and is easily solved by integrating with third party service providers providing out of the box solutions

My solutions for pain points 1, 3, and 4 are as below:

1. Product Selection:

Trend reports from similar businesses about what are users engaging more with - High impact for users, high to effort for Instagram as this is not something that is analysed today, is fairly difficult to analyse for platforms that are not marketplaces
Summarising & suggesting what grabs more attention and how more of similar products should be created - high impact for users, low effort for Insta as Gen AI can be employed to analyse and summarise these trends
Suggesting connects with other similar businesses to exchange learnings and insights - low impact as not many would be willing to discuss their strategies, and low effort for instagram

3. Engaging:

Personal Notifications on new upcoming trends with suggestions on what to do next - High impact as it helps with something that's not the users' own competence, and low effort for Insta as this data is already being analysed very deeply
Weekly/monthly reports on how some other businesses generated traction by utilising trends in time - low impact as this is more a FOMO generating tool, but not many users would bother reading the report
Updates on upcoming trends, evolving best practices etc. - low impact as the trends tend to come up and die down a lot faster than such updates can be created and consumed to be acted upon

4. Sales:

Catalog creation for their products - very high impact as most of the D2C websites are terrible in their UI, at times even failing to load properly, elading to user attrition. This way their products can be displayed in a standard format without even leaving Instagram. Low effort as this is already in use by some bigger brands. May even be monetised as a service
Form filling and order placement help with pre-fills - medium impact as this is easily facilitated through other channels like personal chats
Cart addition facility - very high effort and not as much impact for user as low volumes allow for easier handling on personal chats instead

Final solutions:

1. Summarising & suggesting what grabs more attention

2. Personal Notifications on new upcoming trends with suggestions on what to do next

3. Catalog display for products

Summary:

We prioritise the aiding of D2C businesses/ small handicraft brands users on the platform by helping with their product selection, and their engagement to help their business growth. This will lead to other such users also growing and further democratising the content on the platform, leading to a flywheel effect with both users and creators.

Ancilliary upside: These features / services can also be monetised with a small fee for added revenue

Tradeoff: If enough business subscribe, then the benefits will progressively subside

Ujjwald · Answer 2 · 2024-12-11T04:00:00+0000

Step 1 - Describe the product

I'd like to start by actually describing the product so that we are on the same page and then ask a couple of clarifying questions before delving deeper into this. Instagram is a social media platform owned my Meta. It started off as a social media platform where you can click and share pictures but has now evolved to include many more products. Apart from connecting with people and posting pictures, Instagram also has a short video content format in Instagram Reels where people create and share short videos. There is also Instagram shopping which is a marketplace where businesses can put out products and users can purchase them. In terms of business, there are 3 main stakeholders

The creators who create the content like posting something or creating a short video.
The consumers of the content who consume the content
The advertisers who advertise on Instagram and this is how Instagram makes its money. Instagram has a subscription product for its followers now for which they charge a fee but most of their revenue still comes through advertising.

Are we good so far?

Interviewer - Yes. Sounds good.

Step 2 - Clarify the scope of the question

Is there any specific part of the app (core product, reels, etc.) you would like me to focus on?

Is there any major area that is a cause for concern with Instagram currently?

There are mainly 2 personas here - the content creators and the content consumers. Is there any specific persona you want me to focus on?

I also want to understand what you meant by 'enhance'. Is there any specific goal you have in mind, such as adoption or engagement?

Interviewer - You can make assumptions and choose accordingly.

Step 3 - Choose a goal

For the purposed of this exercise I will choose to focus on engagement because Instagram has been around for a while, so the issue would be how to retain the eyeballs for the maximum amount of time, given the short attention span of people these days.

Interviewer - That sounds good.

Step 4 - List the user groups

There are primarily 2 user groups - the creators and the consumers. For the purposes of this interview, I would like to focus on the content creators. I also think this will help Instagram because there will be a flywheel effect where more content would lead to greater number of views which would lead to more ads shown which would lead to greater revenue for Instagram. So the content creation is a good place to look for enhancements.

I would like to list down a few pain points next but do let me know if there is anything else you would like me to focus on?

Interviewer - No. Continue.

Step 5 - List and prioritize the pain points

Give me a minute while I write down the pain points

User Journey	Pain Point	Priority
Brainstorming new ideas	Facing writer's/creators block	High - This is very common and could be one reason why creators don't create more content
	Have too many ideas and don't know what to prioritize	Medium - Not as bad as not having any ideas
Content creation plan	Keep missing deadlines	Medium - While this could be worked on, in the context of our goal of increasing engagement, this is not the highest priority
	Unable to estimate how many followers follow this kind of topic	High - This problem actually has an impact on the engagement for creators as well as consumers
Creating the content	Not sure if this content will work	Medium - There are ways around this.
Marketing the content	How to market the content	High - This could be a case of losing engagement if good content is not marketed well enough.

From the above, we have 3 pain points that we want to focus on.

Facing writer's/creator's block
Unable to estimate the impact of creating a certain kind of content
How to market content

Step 6 - List and prioritize solutions

Pain Point	Solution	Impact to User	Impact to Goal(Engagement)	Engineering Effort
Facing writer's/creator's block	Give ideas based on the past work of the creator	Medium - Might get repetitive after a point	Medium - The creator may or may not like the ideas provided	Medium
	Give ideas based on the work done by other creators in the same space who the creator follows	High - This will be good because the creators will also learn from the others that the creator follows	High	Low - this can be in the form of recommendations based on what the other creators do
	Summarize recommendations of followers from which they can get ideas	High - This will be good because it will only strengthen the engagement for both the creator and their followers	Very High - This will likely increase engagement between the fans and the creator	Medium - Llama can be leveraged to build an idea generation engine based on the comments from the followers.
Unable to estimate impact of creating a certain kind of content	Give an engagement estimate in terms of view count/revenue potential for the idea being worked on	Medium - This will help the creator prioritize the content backlog that they may have	Medium - Has the potential to change how ideas are greenlit but manual research can and should also be done to complement this.	High - This will not be that simple, because a lot of parameters go into making a creation viral but we can look at studying the parameters and coming up with an estimate of how whether this will have low, medium or high engagement
How to market content	Recommend hashtags	High - Will help especially when the creator misses a few hash tags that might give it that edge	High - will help push engagement	Medium - This should not be too complicated.
	Recommend time of posting content and schedule the posting accordingly	Medium	Medium	Medium
	Use LLMs to create the post based on the content so that the reach is maximized	High - The post can be created so that it achieves the maximum reach	High - has the potential to maximize engagement provided the right prompts are provided	Medium - Should be doable with Llama.

Based on the above, I would recommend the following in the order of priority mentioned.

Summarize recommendations from followers to get new ideas for content
Use LLMs to create the post based on the content so that the reach is maximized.
Recommend hashtags to maximize reach
Give ideas based on work done by other creators

Step 7 - Define success metrics

I would observe the following to see whether if we are on the right track

The avg. number of videos created by the creators after these features are launched
The avg number of views generated by the content
The number of creators churning from the platform
From Instagram's perspective, it would be good to see the advertising revenue from creators using this feature vs advertising revenue from creators not using this feature

Step 7 - Summary

To improve Instagram, we focussed on the creator side of the story. We ran through the user journey to prioritize the following pain points.

Facing writer's/creator's block
Unable to estimate the impact of creating a certain kind of content
How to market content

We came up with a set of solutions and based on the important parameters, we would recommend the following features to be added.

Summarize recommendations from followers to get new ideas for content
Use LLMs to create the post based on the content so that the reach is maximized.
Recommend hashtags to maximize reach
Give ideas based on work done by other creators

To check if this we are on the right track, we can track the following metrics.

The avg. number of videos created by the creators after these features are launched
The avg number of views generated by the content
The number of creators churning from the platform
From Instagram's perspective, it would be good to see the advertising revenue from creators using this feature vs advertising revenue from creators not using this feature