If you were the product leader responsible for Facebook search globally, how would you create a 5-year vision and strategy?

1. What kind of strategy - I assume product strategy
2. Any specific goal which over all at Facebook level is a company priority? like driving user growth or monetization or capturing market share etc? u can choose on ur own. Ok so i ll get back to this in some time.
3. Any issue specifically with Facebook search that is being faced? No the product is working fine.

1. ​Facebook search
   1. Facebook is the biggest social media platform that helps a user connect with their loved ones and things that matter / interests to them the most.
   2. Search is a feature with in the social media platform which helps users to quickly find about any topic, person, posts, groups, places, events, item/thing etc.
      1. If u search for something, it gives u suggestions about improving ur search like are u searching for popular news, people names after ur search text or any popular related searches.
      2. It also gives u option to search efficiently by giving filters like:
         1. Search within Posts, Groups, marketplace, People, photos, videos, places
         2. For each category mentioned above, it offers further filters based on the category:-
            1. Post/groups/photos/videos: recency of post, posts seen by you, posts by you or ur friends,specfic person, or n ur groups/pages, public, date, tagged location.
            2. Places: open now, delivery, takeaway, location, status, visited by friends, open at, price
   1. Vision of search would be to help users efficiently and quickly find what matters to them most so that they can quickly connect with friends also with other users with shared interests. This aligns with FB mission to enable users to build communities and bring world closer
   2. 5 yr goal/short term goal can be : Increase quality or efficiency of search such that users are able to find what they are looking for with in the top searched results.
      1. Efficiency can be measured in terms of 
         1. Time to search:- Avg. Time taken to search month on month
         2. Relevancy of search :- Once results are shown, %tile of searches where user ends up clicking the a result from top 5 choices. (month on month trend)
   3. Strategic choices:-
      1. Focus on improving the search for a specific user group
      2. Focus on improving the search efficiency overall in terms of performance
   4. Evaluating the strategic choice based on:
      1. UX
      2. Current state of the product
   1. Option 1:- Focus on improving the search for a specific user group
      1. User experience: high since each category of search has specific requirements and thus requires focus. If we try to just improve the efficiency of seach without focus on specific category then we might miss solving an imp problem as focus is quite narrowed.
      2. Current state of the product: Considering there is no specific complaints or issues with the current search performance thus it further makes sense to improve the product by diving deep into specific category.
   2. Option 2:- Improve search from performance perspective
      1. Ux: imp. If search is taking to much time and is not listing items that are relavent then it would be a bad cust experience
      2. Current state: no complains and the metrics for tracking search product have not seen any drop.
   3. Considering there is no drop in existing search product metrics to depict there is any issue with product performance or usage, we should focus on solving for category specific search so as to improve search quality/efficiency.
   4. Below are the categories for which users might be searching for:-
      1. Searching for specific users/friends
         1. Size: med as 'people u may know' widget exists which is mostly used for finding friends.
         2. Impact - high
      2. Searching for shared interests in groups/pages/events
         1. Size: There are suggested groups, pages, events based on what ur friends are liking, categories and based on ur interest (based on activity on FB) thus it is occasional that u need to search.
         2. Impact: med
      3. Searching for items to buy
         1. Size: high considering no such existing tools for suggestions apart from ads but u cannot refer to ads when u are specifically trying to find an item. Also marketplace like amazon solve for this but now, there are SMBs who promote more on FB and thus people are starting to use FB to purchase as well and this is one opportunity where facebook can capitalize.
         2. Impact : high
      4. Searching for places to go
         1. Size: small. People use Google maps for this use case and this usecase does not align much with FB mission of connecting people to build communities and bring world closer.
         2. Impact : med
      5. Searching for specific posts/Photos/videos
         1. Size: high
         2. Impact: med. Already decent set of tools available for this particular type of search
   5. For selecting a target group lets evaluate based on size of the segment using facebook to search, impact. Based on above evaluation, will select option 3: searching for items to buy.
   1. Pain pts of this user groups:
      1. How to find the item they are looking for in a quick and efficient manner
         1. Impact: high
         2. Reach: high
         3. Market trends: with pandemic, majority of SMBs struggling with footfalls, effificent search can help in driving organic footfalls to SMBs.
      2. How to trust the search results
         1. Impact : high
         2. Reach: med 
         3. Market trends: There is plenty of choice in online but as the user needs to purchase by just looking at the images, they need some mechanism to trust the listing. 
      3. How to quickly scan through the searched items
         1. Impact: med
         2. Reach: med
   2. Considering we are looking at a 5 yr, would look at solving for all the above pain points of the group but in order of priority for prioritizing the pain pt lets look at below criteria:-
      1. Impact
      2. Reach
      3. Market trends
   3. Based on the above lets prio in below order for the next 5 yrs:-
      1. How to find the item they are looking for in a quick and efficient manner
      2. How to trust the search results
      3. How to quickly scan through the searched items

@bijan @marcus looking for feedback on this one since not very comfortable with strategy questions.