You are the PM of Facebook Lite. What goals would you set?

Context

First off, let's just establish a common understanding of what Facebook Lite is and how users use it. Facebook Lite is a mobile application that aims to deliver the same quality Facebook experience in a less computationally expensive manner. This is really designed for users who may not have unlimited data or the shiniest new smart phone. Some of these users may be in less developed countries with not as strong cellular or internet infrastructure.

In order to further frame this question, Facebook's mission statement is to bring the world closer together and give people the power to build community. Facebook Lite directly relates to this mission statement by making Facebook more accessible to those who may not have access to the best cellular data network or phones with the best hardware.

I am unfamiliar with the current state of Facebook Lite, but for the sake of this question let's assume it has recently launched.

Goals / Primary Metric

Since Facebook Lite has just very recently launched, we are going to want to focus on it's adoption. Are users finding the product and using it? As a north star metric we could measure adoption and thus success of Facebook Lite by looking at the total number of sessions per week. To get even more granular we could define a session as being >20 seconds and requiring one interaction like a view or reaction.

Secondary Metrics

In addition to general adoption of the app, I would want to dive in further and focus on examing a couple things:

Who are these users and why are these users using Facebook Lite?

• Number of New Users
  • Are we truly able to expand and bring new users to our already ubuquitous platform?
• Number of Existing Users Now Using FB Lite (Users who have installed Facebook Lite but have also had a FB mobile app sign in within the last month)
  • Is our service providing any value to any users who may have still been using the existing FB mobile app, but suffering through slow load times and high data consumption
• Number of Returning Users (Users with a FB Lite session and a FB account who have not used the FB Mobile app within the last two months)
  • Are we able to bring back users to the platform who previously swore off of it due to the negative user experience caused by the aforementioned slow load times and high data consumption?

The above four metric do a great job of monitoring our progress towards our goal of increasing adoption in the sense that they monitor how many and what kinds of users are we bringing to Facebook Lite, but the last piece of the adoption is puzzle is engagement. When you introduce a new product to a market, you want to aggressively monitor whether or not you've found product market fit. To be more specific, is FB Lite succeeding in offering users a less data and computationally intense version of the FB app? The best way to evaluate that is through engagement, if users are actively using the product they are getting something out of it.

A few metrics we could use to monitor engagement are:

• Average number of posts viewed per session
• Average number of posts created per session
• Average number of interactions per session (comments, likes, shares, reactions)

Downsides

I'm confident in the above set of metrics' ability to monitor our progress towards our goal of increasing adoption. With that said no set of metrics is perfect and I think it's worth spending a few minutes talking about any downsides.

We haven't discussed what product compromises were made to make Facebook Lite less data intensive to run. We don't know what features are missing and how it's impacting the platform overall. For example, maybe video uploads are disabled on Facebook Lite so we might see a decrease in video content on Facebook in general. It would be a good idea to monitor the health of the platform overall and in areas where features were changed in order to accomodate the Lite capability.

Our above metrics cover the consumers, but don't touch upon advertisers which are a core part of Facebook's business. For example, maybe advertisers prefer video ads but video ads are not displayed on Facebook Lite due to bandwidth constraints so there is less inventory and advertisers are having a harder time getting their campaigns fulfilled. 

Summary

We are going to monitor a collection of metrics in order to assess the performance of Facebook Lite towards our goal of increasing adoption as this is a newly launched offering. We will both make sure users are aware of and trying out Facebook Lite by looking at the number of users and sessions and then assess Facebook Lite's product-market fit by examining engagement.

Interviewee: By Facebook Lite we mean the streamlined, smaller footprint version of the Facebook app which is targeted towards the low bandwidth, feature phone users in the developing countries like India. Users get to use a stripped out feature set, however I would assume all the core features like posting and checking updates are available. But the app uses less of all three key primitive resources i.e. bandwidth, computing power and storage. Is that correct? 

Interviewer: Yes

Interviewee: Great. One further clarification, what do we mean by setting goals? To me it means defining metrics and then setting targets for it for a given timeframe. 

Interviewer: Yes, that makes sense. 

Interviewee: Great. Sorry, one more question I had is are we talking about the product as of now or when it was launched?

Interviewer: Let’s assume that we are talking about the current product. 

Interviewee: Great. Now that we have defined the Facebook Lite product, I would like to lay down the structure that I would like to follow for here. Can I proceed?

Interviewer: Yes, please.

Interviewee: I would first want to talk about Facebook’s mission and how Facebook Lite’s mission ties back to it. Then I would like to talk about the maturity of the product. The mission and the maturity would help us define the product goal. Based on that I would like to define the NSM and any additional metrics I would want to track. I would then prioritise a few metrics and then try to set goals for them. Does that sound good to you?

Interviewer: Yes, that makes sense. 

Interviewee: Facebook’s mission is about connecting people and getting them closer. Now, for the developed market, FB already has matured in terms of adoption. Almost everyone is using FB there and are covered in FB’s 3 billion MAP. The next billion users can only come from the developing and under-developed countries and that’s where FB lite is key from a strategic perspective. The other aspect is the 3rd world population has leapfrogged the developed west in terms of mobile phone penetration, and a big share of them in Tier-2 , Tier-3 cities and villages using feature phones or low-end smartphones. So, the bed is hot for FB to grab the next billion users from there. Does that make sense?

Interviewer: Yes, that makes sense. 

Interviewee: Next, I would like to talk about FB Lite’s maturity stage. I believe Facebook Lite has been in the market for more than 5 years now. I think it has got decent adoption, however I would think there is still a significant growth opportunity in the TAM. With that assumption, I would think the product goal would be to increase adoption. Does that make sense? 

Interviewer: Ok. go ahead.

Interviewee: From adoption perspective, the North Star metric would be similar to Facebook’s, i.e. Monthly Active User and Avg time spent per user. However, I would propose to extend the Monthly Active User as MAU over TAM. We can get a sense of TAM from the various device adoption data and bandwidth usage data from Telcos.  This would actually tell us how much incremental inroads we are making into our target segment. So, the NSM would be:

1. Monthly Active User / TAM

2. Avg time spent per user

Does that sound good to you?

Interviewer: Ok. Do you see any concern with the NSMs?

Interviewee: One concern I have about just looking into MAU is that the users might not be from our target segment, for example a user with a high-end smartphone and having high bandwidth using Facebook Lite and hence not getting the high-quality experience of the Facebook regular app which she could have got. So, when looking into MAU / TAM we should try to specifically look into the users from the target segment. Also, I would also track the counter metric to track users outside of the target segment. 

Interviewer: Ok. Any other metrics you would want to track?

Interviewee: Yes, I would actually look into the user funnel and bucket the metrics into each bucket as follows. Also, I would want to look into metrics at both user and event level.

Other than the NSMs I would also prioritise the Activation Metric “No. of new users who signed up OR logged in the FB Lite app” as this would help us track how many new users are adopting the FB Lite. 

Interviewer: Ok, that makes sense, any other thing you want to add.

Interviewee: I would also want to set some goals for these metrics, maybe quarterly goals. I would prefer to have more aggressive targets than what was previously met to motivate the team. 

Interviewer: Great. Thanks for your time and best of luck for your next set of interviews.

Interviewee: Thank you.

Facebook mission is to connect and bring people and their social circle together virtually. Facebook lite is an established product which already has the core set of facebook experience related to friends, feeds, messaging etc., already working well. The vision for facebook lite should be to scale and grow facebook presence to broader markets and increase usage among the overall facebook lite userbase. The core market for facebook lite would be developing world or tier 2-3 cities where people have limited or unaffordable bandwidth and limited storage space. Given this, is the segment for facebook lite, below can be the two major goals.

• Acquire next 1 bn users in X years- say 4 years
• Increase DAU to x% to y% of overall userbase. Assuming DAU for facebook lite is 10% - increasing it to say 30% of userbase in 4 years

• Overall facebook has already reached 1bn+ user base. Facebook lites strategy should follow overall facebooks strategy of extending its footprint to an absolute reach of people.
• Given facebook lite users are unlikely to spend screen time in videos, games etc., constrained by device bandwidth and graphics constraint, we cannot expect users to spend significant screen time. Instead users are likely to keep look back within their friend circle to understand their what they are upto, local news and happenings which can should increase DAU, there by effectively measuring engagement.

How to start about achieving the user goal ?

• Partner with existing facebook products like instagram and whatsapp by circulating feedlinks, and content tieing back to facebook lite
• Remove barriers of bandwidth and space by partnering with telcos, device manufacturer and also by reducing app and cache size. 
• Increase network effect by promoting country and region specific local content and local language features.