You are a PM for LinkedIn Trust Team. A number of senior influencers at LinkedIn have complained that they receive innumerable spam connection requests and they threaten to leave the platform or launch a tirade against LinkedIn. What do you do?

A few clarifying questions before answering this problem solving question:

1. What is the role of the LinkedIn trust team? Assume: they are responsible to make sure there is no abuse of the platform (Rg. trolling, bullying, cyberattacks etc.)

2. What does senior influencers meas? assume: people with  1000+connections and 10 posts per month

3. How many accounts are receiving spam? assume: assume less than 10

4.   What is the avg number of requests per day? what is the scale of increase? assume 100 assume 10x

5. Are all requests originating from the same set of user accounts: assume: yes

6. Are the connection requests originating from real linkedin users? assume: yes

7. Is this a new trend? Assume : yes, just started this week

8. Is there a specific geography where the requests originate from ? assume: global problem

9. Is there any message included in the  connection requests?  assume: no

10. how old are the accounts from which requets are made? assume: not new

Summarizing the problem: there is a 10x spike in connection requests;(i.e., increase from 100 to 1000 requests per day) for <10 influencers with spam messages originating from a small set of user accounts

First, I'd like to make sure that the influencers know that we are on the job and and calm them down.

user journeys: sending request: user logs in to their account, they see posts in their feed from from people, they click on the person's name , visit their profile and click connect. Alternatively they could search for the person and send a conncetion request

on the influencer side, they get an email, a notification letting them know that someone has added them. They can login and navigate to their network and coose to add,ignore or view the request

Internal:

1. Was there any new update to our UI that makes sending friend requests easy?

Actions: work with engg to understand what changes were made in the most recent release

2. Is there any change in the feed algo to make these influencers appear more frequently than others?

Actions: work with the feed PM/engg lead to understand any recent changes and look through logs to understand if these requests originated feed or other cases

3. Is there a bug in the system that is sending automatic requests?

work with QA to try to recreate or understand if such behavior was reported by other type of users in addition to influencers

4. What is the  status of the accounts  making requests? was there a hack?

check fraud system analytics to see if theose accounts were flagged any unusual activity

5. Were there any new features launched recently that added  new ways of sending requests?

work with requests PM to understand if tehre were any changes here

6. experiments/tests on friend requests?

actions: work with dev to  understand ongoing A/B tests and other experiments  to understand if anythign was currently ongoing that could cause this effect

External:

I'd investigate the following questions

1. Were these influencers in the news?

2. Was there a conf or trade show where they or someone like them was a guest?

3. Did they post any content that went viral?

based on this investigation I hope to narrow down source.

Assume cause was a tradeshow.

potential solutions: communicate cause to affected influencers and assure them that this was a limited time issue and would soon resolve.