Question

You are the PM for Facebook, Instagram. You want to add new "Mute showing food" feature. How do you measure success?

Answer 1

Instagram goal is to allow people to share memories through pictures/stories

 

Clarify question:

1. Is the “mute” feature based on the category of the content or based on the hashtags? : The mute feature is based on the category defined at the explore section

2. Does this also applies to the stories? : Nope for now 

3. Does this feature affects only the viewer’s feed or even discovery/search feature?: Feed and discovery 

4. Is this feature specific to “showing food” or in general allows user to mute a hashtag? : let’s say “mute showing food” feature

 

Goal: Mute feature aligns with the uber goal of instagram which is bringing people together/ building community by showing relevant/interested information to the user 

 

Two types of users

1. Creators 

2. Viewers: This feature focuses on increasing the experience of the viewers by allowing them to select the “type” of content they want to see on their feed.

 

Pros

•  Better user experience 

 

Con

• Could affect the feed content, what if the people the user is following posts “food” picutres” majorly then the viewer wouldn’t have enough content to engage.

• Could discourage content creators of “food” channel if there a lot of people muting the topic 

 

Metrics (in order of priority)

 

• # of people using the mute- food topic

• Time spent by the above users in feed / day

• Time spent by the above users in search/explore / day

• # of posts pertaining to feed / user (if there are a lot of users using the mute feature, it might decrease)

• # of likes against the posts regarding food topic 

Comments

You're missing a couple steps (walk through the customer journey, describe the metrics, and evaluate them). See the site's interview guide on how to answer a metrics question https://www.productmanagementexercises.com/how-to-answer-a-metrics-question

 

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I am bit confused by your answer "Could affect the feed content, what if the people the user is following posts “food” picutres” majorly then the viewer wouldn’t have enough content to engage." My understanding is this feature is created to people who do not want to see food content in their feed and they are able to turn it on/off, so for people who follow posts with food picture, they just do not use this feature then they will not be impacted.

Answer 2

Clarity

When you say 'mute showing food' features I assume you're referring to custom filters that lets you filter out 'topics' that you don't find interesting. 

Does this mean users can also set up filters for 'topics' they dont' find interesting outside of food? assuming that's the case

how does it work- does it work off hastag or image recognition, I'm assuming it the latter ( the scope of how that works is outside the scope of this answer)

Does this work on stories or feed or both? I'm assuming both 

Is it for a period of time, similar to how mute on a contact works on whatsapp? yes

Why would we do this?

Users may have personal preferences that are not reflected in the IG algorithms instantly, this signal enables the user to quickly specify a loss of interest in a particular category explicitly instead of gradual learning.

user stories

Rahul recently lost his dog Brutus and he otherwise loved watching dog videos but now they remind him of his dog so he wants to mute the topic for a while.

Rahul is trying to lost weight but all these delicious posts on IG keep tempting him so he wants to mute all food posts.

 

Hypothesis here would be that certain topics were preventing/creating friction to engagements from a certain set of users, if I allow users to weed out specific topics they should be happier and browser for longer.

The risk is that this reduces the number of posts the user can consume so we need to be tracking the impact

Metrics

Primary

(Posts consumer + stories consumed) per user 

This encapsulates impact of post reduction as well so covers risk.

other metrics to look at 

- Adoption rate: Since this is a new feature this is important to track 

- Opt out rate: Since this is a new feature this is important to track , users may try to use the feature and then opt - out for reasons that may range from quality of the product shipped to actually not wanting to use it since they didn't like how strongly it impacted their feed

- Time spent per user : This should ideally go up 

- Like rate/comment rate: This should remain unchanged, hypothesis here is that a group of users will mute topics like food that they enjoy but are looking to avoid leading to a drop in like rate BUT there will be a another cohort of users who will mute topics that they do not enjoy thus enabling them to discover /interacts with posts they actually like

 

 

Answer 3

You are the PM for Facebook, Instagram. You want to add new "Mute showing food" feature. How do you measure success?

 

 Clarify question:

1. Is the “mute” feature based on the category of the content or based on the hashtags? : The mute feature is based on the category defined at the explore section

2. Does this also apply to the stories? : Nope for now 

3. Does this feature affects only the viewer’s feed or even discovery/search feature?: Feed and discovery 

4. Is this feature specific to “showing food” or in general allows the user to mute a hashtag? : let’s say “mute showing food” feature

 

Feature Goal: Improve customer experience by improving content selection. This ties with FB Instagram's mission to connect people that view the world in interesting ways and share that expressions through images.

 

Feature Impact : Allows individuals to mute food category so it does not show up in their news feed. This way they can possibly spend more time in engaging with content that they are passionate about.

Success Metric: So I will want to see if the feature improves enagement and retention of user .

 

Feature Tradeoffs: 1- Reduce the content on the feed which limmits user engagement with other 

                               2- Discourages content creators to create food content if too many people start muting

                               3-  Negativel impacts ad revenue as audeince pool decreases.

Metrics to Track: effect on engagement and retention

# of ppl using the mute feature

% increase in time spent by using ppl DAU who use the feature

% increase of liking, commenting, exploring other categories of DAU who use the mute feature 

# of visitsi in app per day per user who use mute feature

# of visits in app per week per user who use mute future