Imagine you're a PM at Amazon and you're working on a partnership with Facebook that has the goal of leveraging FB's friend network to drive Amazon sales. Walk through the lifecycle for building this integration/partnership.

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Imagine you're a PM at Amazon and you're working on a partnership with Facebook that has the goal of leveraging FB's friend network to drive Amazon sales. Walk through the lifecycle for building this integration/partnership.

Asked at Meta (Facebook) over a year ago

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Kishore Penumuru · Answer 1 · 2019-11-19T12:46:09+0000

Answering this type of product strategy interview question starts with asking clarifying questions.

Clarifying questions

What category should I be focusing on for this partnership? Assuming I'm a product manager over books
What markets should I be focusing: U.S. or Worldwide - I'd look into data to identify regions where the book sales are high. For this interview, I'm assuming the U.S

Goal: To increase sales

Go through Pros/Cons of the partnership

If the benefits outweigh costs of the partnership, I'd first identify potential integration points with facebook along the customer journey

The customer journey to purchase a book on Amazon:

A Customer uses search to find a book-> search results page->Navigates to the book listing-> Reviews->Cart->Purchase

A Customer uses search to find a book-> search results page->Navigates to the book listing-> Cart->Purchase

A customer is redirected straight to the book listing page->reviews->cart->purchase

A customer is redirected straight to the book listing page->cart->purchase

Possible Integration points to drive sales

Search results - Add additional info at each of the search result showing "X number of your friends have also purchased this"
Book listing - Add product info showing "X number of your friends have also purchased" or "X number of friends have written a review about this product"
Reviews - Show reviews by FB friends
Order confirmation - "Share this with your FB circle"

Now go through why you will choose one or two integration points from the above list. I'm going with 2 and 3 that will impact our goal of driving the sales the most.

In order to achieve it, I need the following integration points with FB

Connect Amazon and FB profiles
Get access to FB friends list
Identify FB friends that share similar interests
Show purchase information with friends that share similar interest

Integration steps:

Set policies and guidelines to share info, partnership agreements working with the legal team
Identify teams in FB that can help us with 1,2 and 3
Identify technical integration points and APIs to use
Setup security audits
Share product roadmaps, meeting cadence, success criteria

Ram G. · Answer 2 · 2019-11-16T19:09:27+0000

Situation: I will ask if Amazon will treat FB as a collaborator or competitor. Recently recall FB listed Amazon as a competitor based on both going after the Advt pie. For now I will assume that Amazon will treat FB as collaborator.

I will also ask size of FB and Amazon. Assume Amazon has 200m worldwide users and FB has 2 Billion. i.e. FB has 10x more than Amazon.

I will ask this partnership is for World or US. For now I will assume it is Worldwide.

As this exercise is in role of Amazon PM (Assume similar activity done by FB PM).

Pros: assume it will generate incremental revenue Amazon. Significant new volume.

Cons: Assume that there is cost of doing biz wih FB leading to lower margins.

Amazon can be tagged with any FB facing issues.

Amazon will have to share customer info with FB.

Now Assuming this pros outweigh cons.. I will look at following steps for the integration/partnership.

Tasks: Establish dedicated team in Amazon and expect similar from FB to work on integration.

Set rules and guidelines regarding working model for sharing of info and keeping NDA agreements, common repositories, sharing of trade secrets, meetings frequency, location etc. with legal involved.

Do baby steps - start with limited market or set of customers that wont cause lot of issues if deal is withdrawn.

Define the success criteria.. incremental revenue, timeframe, costs for the market trial.

assuming the results are positive. then work on larger scale integration of tools, procedures and roll out to additional markets.

Gaurav P · Answer 3 · 2019-11-20T19:18:26+0000

Imagine you're a PM at Amazon and you're working on a partnership with Facebook that has the goal of leveraging FB's friend network to drive Amazon sales. Walk through the lifecycle for building this integration/partnership.

Goal - increase profits

Revenue > Increase amazon’s sales using Fb data.
Cost > Facebook will charge for data shared per user per hit.

Users to target (on amazon)

Fb data will help amazon understand user’s likes, dislikes, interests (from pages followed, type of post shared, photos, location, status of relationship)

Inactive users > to retarget them to active (purchase again)
New users > make 1st transaction
Active users > become power user
Power users > make more transaction w/ Amazon

Assumption - since all these goals are important; due to lack of data & time in interview, let’s focus on case 2 & 3 (as data will help amazon to push user to purchase faster). Case 1 can still be solved via personalized campaigns based on data amazon already have for the user.

Critical data points to collect

Interests - Pages, groups user is part of
Location - user went & tagged for himself
My friends - list of friends email
Marital status, doB - to understand if needs to partner & kids for shopping
Friends tagged in posts.

Assumption - there will be many other data which fb can give let’s focus on Case 1, 3 & 4.

Solution:

Use Case - New user targeting

Collect interest data so that recommendation & sponsored products can be more targeted to user’s interests. [content filtering]
Interest data can also help me show products on cart / detail pages which have matching interests.
Collect martial data to cross products my partner will like.
This data will help me predict customer CLV better and customize discount for user.

Use case - Active user targeting

Use friends data to bring social elements which will help user tell what products your friends have bought in the category you are seeing.
Friends can help each other decide together what product to purchase.
Friends data can help define better cluster of micro segments and up / cross sell products which my friend also bought in recent past on amazon (closest to user product category needs)

Prioritize

Use cases	Value	Time to implement	Score
Similar category reco	8	7	56
Cross category reco	6	9	54
Family product suggestion	2	5	10
CLV prediction	3	1	3
Friend purchase	9	10	90
Social purchase	7	4	28

Summary

Product features to build

Friend purchase
Similar category reco - based on my interest w/ matching product type
Cross category reco - based on my other interest w/ matching product type