You are a PM for Instagram stories. You are considering increasing the expiration time of the stories. What metrics would you look at to make this decision?

Clarifying questions: 

My understanding is that stories posted by users expire today in 24 hours and we want to analyze if it makes sense to increase it to say 36 or 48 or some other higher number hours?

I am assuming that current goal of stories is to increase Engagement?  If yes, in my analysis, I will check if changing 24 hour limit to a higher number will increase user engagement without creating any adverse impact on any metric.

Goal: Increase Engagement

User Journey:

2 types of users: Creators and Viewers

Creator creates a story.

Within 24 hours, the viewers have access to view the story, may add reaction/comment or take no action. This is done in 2 ways

1. User logins the app and sees the stories section at top and clicks.

2. User gets email notification or bell icon notifcation on login and user clicks these notifications to see the stories.

In the second case, if the clicking is done sfter 24 hours, the links will not work.

Creator get reactions and comments for their stories.

Metrics that are expected to improve with this change are:

1. DAU, MAU

2. # of stories posted on a daily, monthly basis

3. # of impressions per story should increase as assumption is viewers have larger window now .

4. % of user click on Expired notification links to all Story notifications should decrease.

5. Average time spent on app should increase.

Next step will be to conduct AB Test to help find out what is optimized story expiration time.

• Hypothesis: Increasing story expiration time to say 36 hours will help increase user engagement.
• Experiment: Decide user group for conducting the experiment. 
• Success Criteria: # of stories posted on a daily, monthly basis 
• Trade Offs: Impact on # of posts created needs to be evaluated. If the average story count/user increase leads to decline in average daily  post count/user, that will not be true reflection of the success.

Clarification Qs:

1. By expiration time do you mean the 24 hours that the story is up for? Assuming yes
2. Is there a particular reason to increase this time, as in do we have data on why this time doesn't work?
3. Do we have a particular goal to do so?
4. Are we targeting this change towards a particular user segment/geography/platform?

Check the understanding of the feature: The expiration time of stories currently is set to 24 hours which means that after 24 hours, the stories vanish from the consumers' stories feed but are saved in the creator's archives.

Am I correct in thinking this? - Yes

The mission of Instagram is to enable the users to visually share their life's moments easily with their connections and discover new connections/content based on one's interests.

I believe that the overall business goal for Instagram as a platform is to increase engagement and retention for the stage that it is now at and considering the maturity of the product.

List of criteria that I would prioritise:

• Retention of users
• impact on user satisfaction
• track the health of Instagram post feature change

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So the overall metrics which should increase/not be impacted are:

• DAUs and MAUs for Instagram stories should increase - prioritized
• Churn rate for Instagram should not increase
• Time spent per user on Instagram as a platform should increase
• NPS metric for stories and Instagram as a whole - prioritized

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Creators:

-No of users who posted at least 1 story per day

-No of stories created per user per day - prioritised

-No of Instagram app opens per user per day -

-No of sessions used for creating Instagram stories/ no of all Instagram sessions per day

-Increase in followers for the creator

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Consumers:

-No of unique users who saw a single story per creator -

Should at the very least stay constant but over time should increase - to consider implementing this change

-No of unique users/story (per hour, per day, per hour after 24 hours)

-No of unique stories/user (per day) - prioritised

-No of unique global consumers per region

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Health of the app:

1. Avg time taken to open the app: To check if this feature change caused the app to become slow
2. No of data centres required

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Prioritization : I will pick the following metrics as the top most metrics to look into

• DAUs and MAUs for Instagram
  • Reason: overall retention
• NPS metric for Instagram
  • Reason: overall satisfaction
• No of stories created per user per day
  • Reason: engagement of creators
• No of unique stories/user (per day)
  • Reason: engagement of consumers
• Avg time taken to open the app
  • Reason: health of the app and customer experience

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Strategy:

1. I will start with A/B/n testing with different expiration times - to get a sense of what the new expiration time should be
2. I will analyze the data per user segment - to decide if this should be rolled out to only a particular user segment - eg businesses first etc
   1. SMBs, big businesses
   2. Based on age brackets
   3. frequency of usage
3. Get direct user satisfaction feedback through surveys - to see if this should be a choice to the user or a permanent change to the feature for all users
4. Should there be additional features implemented in recommendation system to make sure newer content is shown first to the user
5. See if this should be only for photos or also videos - as more storage is needed
6. if the order of stories posted per creator should have any relevancy like newest posts first, shortest posts first etc - since number of live stories per creator at a given time will increase