You're the PM for newsfeed and you have to decide whether to show more videos or more events. What do you do?

Question

You're the PM for newsfeed and you have to decide whether to show more videos or more events. What do you do?

Asked at Meta (Facebook) over a year ago

2.1k views

Asked at

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hajarmel · Answer 1 · 2020-11-26T20:15:21+0000

My methodology for answering this Facebook product strategy question would be to clarify the objective of these changes, try to put it into perspective with FB's mission, and compare their performance : For that, we would need to find a common metric for both features to be able to compare them equally and decide.

FB's mission is to bring people closer together and help them build communities. Both features allow users to fulfill this goal :

Events : Here we have both, events created with users where they can invite their friends, or events created by businesses that a user can choose to attend depending on his interests and invite his friends to. Users can interact with each other, RSVP to events and engage with their friends and brands
Videos : Here users consume content that might be of interest to them, he can react to it, comment, share with his friends, get to know new brands and new creators

These two features clearly aim to engage the user and enrich his experience on FB. So the trade-off between showing more of one feature or the other should take into account which change will allow to enrich the experience of the user and FB's business KPIs.

To do that, we need to identify a common metric for both features. Both features have different metrics, but both of them aim to increase user engagement, so what are the metrics tctive engagemenhat allow us to do that, and which one should we choose as a north star metric ?

Time spent on the platform
# passive engagement per user (like reactions)
# active engagement per user (comments, shares) : For videos, that would be commenting or sharing it with friends. For events, that would be RSVPing, posting on the event or inviting/sharing it with friends
# visits par user. Does this change impact retention and incentivize users to coming more
$ gained per user. Users coming and engaging more, means they are exposed even more to brands and ads on FB. So does the change bring an impact to this metric ?

To be able to make a decision between the two features, I suggest to prioritize two metrics : # active engagement per user and $ gained per user. We want to enrich the user experience, and for me this KPI is the strongest one because user make more meaningful interactions on the platform and communicates more with his circle of friends, which is FB's goal. The $ gained per user metric is mostly a counter metric : We need to make sure that this change doesn't impact negatively FB's bottom line.

Once I have my KPI, I would suggest running an A/B test to validate our hypothesis and determine which one is best.

For that, we would need to analyze the results of the test on different user populations. Indeed, a new user with few friends will not behave the same as a user that has beenon the platform for a while or has many friends to interact with.

I suggest working with the Data Science teams to segment our samples into three categories, depending on 2 variables (profile creation date and number of friends) :

New user (profile newly created and few friends (<20 for example)
Medium user : has been on the platform for sometime and a medium size friend pool
Power user : A great pool of friends and uses FB for sometime

I would then split the experiment, and for each pool show three scenarios :

The control : No change to the actual experience
Variant A : Showing more videos to users
Variant B : Showing more events to users

Once the test has run for some time (period to define with the team) and the results are statistically significant, I would then compare the results of each experiment on the user segments and metrics chosen.

We will choose either the variant with the best result or neither if we see that the experience is downgraded with this change.

The business metric ($) will also help us to decide, if we see an increase in user engagement but decrease on the business : what trade-off are willing to take ? How much loss are we willing to accept if the metric is negatively impacting business ?

MythicCabbage · Answer 2 · 2020-11-20T07:13:16+0000

Facebook wants to build community and bring the world closer together. To determine whether I would choose to show more videos or more events, I would first determine what my northstar metric is. Let's say that is improving engagement. So I would determine an engagement metric for both videos and events, and then compare the two features through a similar metric.

Is there a desire to increase one feature over another to increase long-term market share?

Is there a particular Facebook user segment for whom we are deciding whether to show more videos or more events?

Which user segment can we compare?

Let's choose active users of Facebook, with approximately 2-3 posts per week.

Let's assume videos and events are regular posts in the Newsfeed.

Choosing between videos or events depends on which has a higher impact on their common metric for each different segment. What is each feature's impact toward a common goal - their impact on the business?

1. Northstar metric for videos: videos watched. The product goal is to increase engagement by getting users to watch videos, as well as react, share and comment on them. We should compare the time on the site for users who watch videos compared to users who don't watch videos.

2. Northstar metric for events: events interested in. The product goal is to increase engagement by getting users to click that they are interested in events, as well as share them. We should compare the time on the site for users who say they are interested in events compared to users who don't say they are interested in events.

3. Single common metric: ad revenue based on more impressions (# of views per ad) from more time on the site. I would choose a duration to measure this in - one month. And then month-over-month.

I would do an A/B test to do a final determination of whether viewing videos or saying you're interested in events would cause more time on the ad. I would probably choose videos over events because it is likely that users who watch videos would spend more time on Facebook compared to users who say they are interested in events.

Nitnan · Answer 3 · 2022-07-13T15:28:57+0000

Clarifying Questions:

Is the primary goal to increase the user engagement? Yes

Do we need to consider the suggested reels? No, just focus on videos

Product:

Videos allow for the users to watch a variety of content from friends, groups and communities in the form of already recorded or live. A video can be posted from a page, group and live

Events allows for the users to be updated on both the private and public events and futher can decide on to where attend or not attend based on their availability

Value Proposition

Videos

1. When a user naviages through the facebook news feed autoplaying the vidoes would get some attension from the user and thereby it increases the time spent by user in Facebook

2. Scope for engagement: People would mostly like, comment and share a most of the videos provided the content given to them would match their taste

3. Upto date: While watching the videos the scope for being up to date about the world situation, happening topics, relational topics etc

4. Scope for more advertisements: While a video is played due to the engagement we can insert more ads and that helps the user discover more products they require

5. Having the live videos in the news feed increases the feel for connection and acts as a motivation for the video creator

Events

1. Access to more events can help builing a healthy community by attending online and offline events

2. Online events may invlove the user spend more time in FB

Metrics:

In order to arrive at a conclusion we need to find out metrics that contribute overall health of the facebook ecosystem

1. Average time spent by users in Facebook

2. Average number of interactions (Like, Comment, share) by a user

3. DAU\WAU

4. Increase in the number of videos created per user

5. Increase in the number of events created per user

6. CTR of ads

7. CPC and CPV

A/B Testing

Once the metrics are defined I would want to run an AB testing among three control groups of the same cohorts to see which one of these approach would satisfy some main metrics listed above. The user segmentation is important before be decide on the control group

1. Power Users (Who spend more time on FB Newsfeed already 3 to 4 hours per day)

2. Normal users (Who spend an avaerage amout of time in facebook (30 minutes per day))

1. Control Group A: Show more Events

2. Control Group B: Show more Videos

3. Control Group C: Show equal amount of events and Videos

I would want to prioritise 1, 2 and 6 metrics listed above

Conslusion:

Based on the A/B test results if we would decide to go ahead and finalise a feature that needs to be more in numbers that the other.

Himani Singh · Answer 4 · 2020-08-19T06:53:56+0000

FB mission is to bring the world closer. Keeping this in mind, the prime goal as a NF PM is to provide valuable and relevant content to the users which they can share among themselves and keeps them connected. Hence the prime goals of the NF are:

1. Boost Engagement – A user find a funny video and instantly shres it on his NF or shares privately with his friends.

2. Boost Retention – User find more relevant content on NF as a result spends more time on FB

3. Boost Revenue – Targeted Ads shown to the user on NF.

Key metrics to be considered for videos are:

- Number of videos watched / shared /commented/liked/ %completed by each user

- Avg time spent by a user watching videos

- Avg revenue per user generated from FB Video ads

Key metrics to be considered for events are:

- Number of events in which user is interested/going

- Number of Events shared by the user

- Number of event specific pics/posts shared by the user

- Number of location and friend tags w.r.t events

- Number of likes/reshares generated on the events

- Number of new friends made by the user after attending an event

There is a difference between the goals of video and event posts on NF. Events mainly target user engagement as it helps in growing the user network, user interaction with friends and family. Videos have a much wider scope.

The decision would be based on the kind of impact we want to create on the user and the key goals which we want to achieve on NF.

Since the goal of NF is to increase engagement, retention and revenue, all 3 goals can be achieved via Videos so I would opt for showing more video content.

On the contrary, I can also carry out 2 separate experiments (A/B test) where I can select my target group and split it into test and control and randomly assign users to the 2 tests.

Test 1: Control – no change in NF, Test – more video content on NF

Test 2: Control – no change in NF, Test – more event content on NF

Measure the engagement metrics for the 2 tests since engagement is a common goal between the 2 and see which experiment shows a better lift / or no effect at all in engagement metrics