25.8k views
-icon.svg){kind=icon}
25.8k views
25.8k views
Access expert answers by becoming a member
You'll get access to over 3,000 product manager interview questions and answers
Recommended by over 100k members
1. Describe the product: FB birthday is a utility/feature used by users in the below ways:
- Save/update their birthdays.
- Wish their friends, famailies birthdays. they can also choose to view previous/upcoming birthdays. They can post a message on thei feed or send a personal message via messenger.
- Fb used to send a personalised video on birthdays to users which they can share with their friends.
2. Assumptions/Ask questions to interviewer:
What are we looking to improve? Is it engagement with the feature or drive revenue? Are we looking to target mobile or desktop users? Is there specific age group of users in mind? do they have a specific goal in mind?
3. Choosing a goal: We want to improve engagement for the feature for mobile users globally. Since FB is a global paltform where people are connected with their families and friends with the intent to share updates about their lives, this can be via sharing milestone like a new job, moving to a new city or even celebrating and wishing on birthdays and anniversaries.
4. Identify the user groups:
- Power users: Who actively use FB multiple times a day and have a friend list of 1000+ users.
- Casual user: Who uses FB once a day and have around 500-1000 frinds.
- Casual users: Who logs in once a week and has very few friends.
- Huge list of friends so difficult to remember and wish everyone. They have a lot of acquaintances (not family or close friends).
- Current FB pretyped message is too generic and does not have a personal touch. This inhibits the user from using the feature.
- The user has to log in everyday and navigate to the birthday feature to check in for birthdays and wish their friends.
- The current feature doesnt work for users who keep travelling and live in different parts of the world from their friends. Ex: A user in USA is notified of a friend's birthday in India when half of the day is over in India. The joy of wishing first or early is lost. There is an opportunity lost here for the feature.
- Also, the responses for the birthday wishes are lost and never acknoweledged in most cases.
- Users should receive recomendations on sharing a picture/ video with the message while wishing. This picture could be a picture they were both tagged in the past. This way the messaging feels more thoughtful and authentic.
- There should be an option of sharing a GIF or attaching an image from device with the message. This is helpful for quick messaging and more creative.
- Users should be able to schedule birthday wishes in advance for their friends. This applies to the reponses on wishes received from friends on birthdays as well. Enables a two way communication channel.
Platinum PM
How would you improve Facebook Birthdays?
1. Clarification
FB birthdays is a feature that allows people to add their DOB to their profile, after which their friends would be notified on that day about the birthday. There's also an option to see a list of friends with upcoming birthdays in a chronological order. Does that summarizes the scope of the feature? Yep.
2. Goal and alignement to mission
The goal is to remind people of their friends' birthdays and thus create additional engagement between the congratulatee and congratulaters. It aligns well with FB's mission of bringing people closer together, since it creates additional conversational topics for people.
3. Metrics
With this goal in mind, the main metric we would want to improve is engagement. To drive it, we'll need to improve the following metrics of birthdays:
- % of users sharing their DOB on FB - that ensures we have enough "material" to work with
- % of users congratulating at least 10% of their friends when their BDs come up - this shows users take action when they see their friends' BDs
a. Sign up w/FB or go to the profile page and add their DOB
c. When their friend's BD comes up, congratulate the friend
| solution | cost | benefit | score |
| a. explanation | L | H | H |
| b. granularity | H | M | M |
| c.1 pre-fill with mutual interests | M | H | H |
| c.2 pre-fill with intro based on past convos | H | L (risky) | L |
| c.3 mute | M | L | L |
I would go for solutions a and c1: "a" is easy to implement and yields high benefit as it creates more people to congratulate.
c.1 helps with the problem of the other side and even though the cost is not low, the benefit is high.
8. Measuring success
To measure success of these improvements, we'll need to track:
- For a - % of users who added their DOB
- % of users who have changed their DOB from a generic 1/1/whatever to a more legit date
- For c - growth in % of users who congratulate their friends.
- % of congratulations that use the pre-filled text, so we know if that feature is working properly
C: Okay, facebook birthdays is a product that allows users to wish people in their social network on their birthdays. It keeps the users enagaged on an important occasion and also makes the network stronger.
I: True, you are correct upto here.
C: Are we looking at any goal for the improvement?
I: Lets focus on engagement.
C: Okay. So, let me begin by describing the User groups first.
There are three main categories of Users:
1. Users who wish others in their network often( more than once a week)
2. Users who wish others in their network sometimes( atleast once a week)
3. Users who wish others almost never( less than once a week).
I see a difference in motivations and user habits here. So i will like to focus on User Groups 1 and 2.
I: Okay.
C: Now , coming over to the pain points.
S.No. | User Need | Impact on User Engagement |
1 | How to filter important birthdays from others? | High |
2 | How to wish friends in advance? | High |
3 | How to plan for friends' birthdays/organise events? | Medium |
4 | How to send a birthday gift? | High |
5 | How to wish friends in a way that stands out? | Medium |
6 | How to remember a birthday | High |
Coming over to their solutions, So, i will focus on High Impact on Engagement needs.
S.No. | User Need | Solution | Impact | Priority |
1 | How to filter important birthdays from others? | Push notification of imp birthdays | High | 1 |
2 | B Day card( auto made) when a person logs in on facebook | Medium | 7 | |
3 | How to wish friends in advance? | In App notification of imp birthdays in advance | High | 2 |
4 | How to send a birthday gift? | Option to send using FB marketplace | High | 4 |
5 | Options to send using third party integrations | High | 5 | |
6 | How to remember a birthday | Schedule a birthday post for the future | High | 3 |
7 | Put a reminder to wish on the right day | Medium | 6 |
I will define important birhdays of those users with whom we have enaged often on facebook.
They will be on a priority for birthday wishes as they matter to the user in real life too.
With these features, i will track Pre and Post behavior of the below metrices:
1. No. of Birthday posts
2. No. of Users posting birthday posts
3. No. of users using Reminders, Marketplace, third party etc.
4. Revenue from birthdays
1. Clarify the product: what is Facebook Birthdays?
A Facebook feature that reminds users of their friends’ birthday:
Every day presents users with a reminder of the day's birthday and prompts them to send birthday messages, either as a post on their timeline or as a direct message
Lets users see all upcoming birthdays by month
2. What do we mean by improving? We want to improve engagement with the feature.
What is the goal of the feature to begin with?
Encourage connections amongst users on the platform
Service: personal reminder, helps users to keep in touch
Ultimately: provide some utility and keep users engaged with the platform
3. User types: who uses this feature?
Superusers: tend to send birthday messages to everyone, even if they haven't been in touch for a long time
Casual users: occasionally send birthday messages to some of their contacts
Passive users: doesn’t engage with the feature
I will focus on improving engagement for the second group, but hoping to group #3 will benefit as well
4. Pain points:
Don't know what to say, doesn’t want to sound boring
Feels that wishing happy birthday on Facebook is impersonal, would rather wish happy birthday in person or with a text
Can’t be bothered/doesn’t have time for typing when they see the prompt
Related to point 3, wants to think of something fun/special to say, which takes time
5. Possible solutions:
Ability to easily search for and add birthday emojis/gifs to a message
Ability to create photo-based Birthday Cards: suggest pictures of you and your friend together (if available) and let users customize them as a personal birthday card
Auto-create a collage of pictures and let the user customize it by adding a message and a song
Ability to remind me later → send me a notification later in the day so I don’t forget
Ability to send gifts → suggest small gifts they can buy and ship to their friends
6. Evaluating solutions:
High value / Low effort
High value / Medium effort
Medium value / Medium-high effort
Medium value / Low effort
High value / High effort
Based on the analysis above, I would prioritize testing solutions 1 and 2.
7. What metrics should I focus on to measure success?
Overall metric: increase in avg. birthday posts/DMs per user, overall and by segments
Product success metrics:
Increase in conversion from prompt to birthday posts/DMs
Emoji adoption:
% of HP posts including emojis (daily/monthly)
% of users using bday emojis (daily/monthly)
Picture-based Birthday Cards
% of HP posts including emojis (daily/monthly)
% of users using bday emojis (daily/monthly)
My understanding of Facebook Birthdays is that it is a capability to remind users of their friends’ birthdays, and give them a way to wish them. The reason this capability is important for facebook is that it aligns with their mission of connecting people and building a community, and birthday wishes are a good way to strengthen connections and for some users, give them a chance to re-connect.
Having gotten an understanding of the feature, I’d want to understand what about FB birthdays needs to be improved – there could be multiple factors, but the one that I choose is increasing engagement with FB birthdays, by the way of users wishing other users. The reason I chose this as the primary goal is that this aligns with the uber goal of increasing user engagement, and have users rely on facebook as the must-have tool to stay connected with friends around the world. Moreover, increasing engagement is also tied to more ads shown, and thereby more revenue.
Let’s list out a few target user personas that use Facebook Birthdays:
1) Frequent users that rely on facebook to remind them to wish their friends
2) Occasional users that rely on facebook to remind them to wish their friends and family
For the sake of time, I’m going to choose #1.
Now let’s talk about some painpoints that these users face:
1) Notification overload: given that the users are frequent users and are highly engaged with the platform, there are times that birthday notifications to remind users are missed.
2) Long list of friends’ birthdays: these users typically have a large friend network and as it turns out, when birthdays come up, there is no way for the users to easily find out if one of their close friends or frequently connected friends have a birthday that day – it’s a flat list.
3) Tough to come up with something unique to write for everyone – these users don’t necessarily want to write the impersonal “Happy Birthday”; they want to write something that is personalized.
4) Time consuming to write something for everyone that has their birthdays. They have to individually go and write messages for all the folks that have birthdays on that day, and this takes time.
5) Reluctance to write on friends’ walls – these friends prefer sending private messages on Messenger as opposed to writing on their friends’ walls
I’m going to prioritize these painpoints by customer benefit (CB) and complexity (C) both on a scale of 1-5 with 1 being the lowest:
#1: CB= 4, C=2
#2: CB=3,C= 3
#3: CB=4,C=2
#4: CB=4,C=1
#5: CB=3,C=1
With this prioritization and for the sake of time, I’m going to pick #1 , #3 and #4.
Now moving onto solutions for these above pain points:
#1: Different colored, more prominent birthday notifications
Pros: Provides a way for users to get distinct, separate notifications for birthdays
Cons: A new notification type could have short-lived effects
#2: Personalized message placeholders for birthdays, instead of just “happy birthday”. This could be derived from previous conversations between 2 users or could be from a big list of more personalized birthday messages based on context about the users.
Pros: a more personalized message has a higher likelihood of having the user engage and wish the other users on their birthdays.
Cons: might come across as creepy.
#3: One-click auto-populated wishes for everyone that has their birthday that day
Pros: Users don’t have to enter birthday wishes for every user – a couple of clicks could result in all users with the birthday getting the message.
Cons: An automated, non-personalized message wouldn’t necessary be building better engagement and connection between users.
#4: Suggest photos with the user and the friend with the birthday with an animation or an image frame, making it a personalized birthday greeting
Pros: Pros: a more personalized message has a higher likelihood of having the user engage and wish the other users on their birthdays.
Cons: might come across as creepy.
If I were to rank these solutions in terms of cost, benefit and risk, I’d have to go with #4, with the reason being that Facebook can create a “personalized” gift from the user’s side, which will increase the likelihood of engagement and better connections, which will again lead to more conversations and time spent on the platform, thereby adding to the ads revenue.
In summary: in order to increase engagement with Facebook birthdays, we picked out a user persona of frequent FB users, and discussed some painpoints and the solution that we chose was to have Facebook prepare individual, customized, shareable photos/videos/gifs between the two users to lead to a higher chance of the users connecting and communicating.
Follow these steps roughly.
1) Clarify functionality
2) Clarify scope
3) Discuss Metrics to pursue
4) Identify Persona
5) Map user journey
6) Define use cases & weakness
7) Solutions
8) Prioritize Solutions
9) Validate
10) Iterate
11) Launch
12) Measure & support post launch
1) Clarify functionality
Understand how Facebook Birthdays work.
~ User’s friends are notified about birthday.
~ User can post a message for user
~ Friends can also see upcoming birthdays
2) Clarify scope
~ Define improve: What is not working/concern?
~ Are we not getting enough people wishing other people?
~ Are user bored of plain vanilla commenting capability?
~ Do people want to post relevant birthday memes, etc.
~ Is engagement metric dropping?
Let’s say the fix for improvement is: ” we want more engagement”.
3) Discuss Metrics to pursue
~ What’s important: # of birthday posts, # of response(likes/comments) to birthday posts from birthday boy/girl, # of views of birthday posts
~ Segment of users that inform people about birthdays
~ Are birth-dates even correct? How to clean them up?
~ Is birthday functionality successful in some markets such as UK, etc. What is happening right in those markets?
~ Are there other alternatives that people prefer?
~ What other features can/should be built to make Birthdays better?
4) Identify Persona
James: Wishing birthdays to everyones
Age: 28
Access: Laptop, iPhone
Income: $55K
Jenny: Birthday girl
Age: 23
Access: Laptop, Smart phone
Income: $50K
5) Map user journey
~ User is notified in the form of a notification that their friend’s birthday is coming up.
~ User posts a message on the friend’s wall
~ Other people can comment on this post
~ The person receiving the message can comment on the post.
6) Define use cases & weakness
~ A notification is seen about an upcoming birthday of a friend
~ A friend can post on other person’s wall
~ The birthday person can comment on the post from friends
~ No way to schedule ahead of time
~ Fundraising on birthdays for social causes
7) Solutions
~ Do a cleanup by asking people to provide their real birthdays
~ Delayed greeting card on specific day, scheduled to be sent on birthday
~ Automatic greeting card on specific day, rather than waiting till last day
~ Suggest photos of you with birthday person in the post, in case there are photos of both of you
~ Send VIRTUAL flower delivery, cakes, etc. on birthdays
~ Send REAL flower delivery, cakes, etc. on birthdays
~ Send Birthday songs, videos, caricature, etc.
8) Prioritize Solutions
Prioritization should be done based on: Cost to Build, Complexity, ROI, Time to Build
Say, our goal is to find fastest return within the minimum time spent. In other words, fix quickly.
1) Schedule greeting message for a future date: 2 man months, 2 months implementation, 5% improvement
2) VIRTUAL flowers, cakes, etc: 6 man months, 3 months implementation, 10% improvement expected
3) Send Birthday songs, videos, caricature, etc.: 12 man months, 3 months implementation, 5% improvement expected
4) Send REAL flowers, cakes, etc.: 24 man months, 6 months implementation, 5% improvement expected
5) Cleanup by asking people for provide accurate birthdays: 1 man month, 1 month implementation, 0-15% improvement. This is a bit harder to achieve.
6) Schedule automatic greeting card on future date. This project might be ineffective as it might not give the personalized experience that one would be looking for: 6 man months, 3 months implementation, -5 to +10% improvement expected.
Imagine getting automated greeting message from all your friends on the same day.
9) Design
Start by designing a solution for top 2 as it fits in your budget.
1) Schedule greeting message for a future date: 2 man months, 2 months implementation, 5% improvement
2) VIRTUAL flowers, cakes, etc: 6 man months, 3 months implementation, 10% improvement expected
10) Validate
~ Present the experience to your target audience and see what feedback they give.
11) Iterate
~ improve the design, before starting implementation
12) Launch
~ Launch to a small set of users in a certain country
~ Experiment
~ Get feedback, iterate if needed
~ Launch to smaller audience.
Liked by PM Exercises
In terms of ‘improvement’, do we want to look at a specific platform? Do we want to increase the number of users? Or would you like me to define my own measure of improvement. Ok, sure.
When I think about what we might want to improve about the birthdays feature, I first think back to why the Birthday’s feature exists. I know Facebook’s mission is to connect the world and bring it closer together. Every human on earth has a birthday, and I see that as something that inherently connects us and makes us relatable to one another. The feature fits neatly with Facebook’s mission statement and since birthdays happen each year, for every user, I imagine Facebook originally launched this feature to grow engagement. The more users it can get to come back onto the platform, the more opportunity it has to drive advertising revenue maximizing Facebook’s value as an advertising platform. That being said, I’d like to improve engagement with the Birthday’s feature.
I think it’s best if we define engagement more specifically so we can measure the success of our improvements. If we think of the birthday feature as an engagement loop we can begin to identify what metrics we care about.
1. User makes their birthday visible to friend
2. User’s birthday arrives
3. Friend made aware of user’s birthday
4. Friend engages with the birthday user
5. The birthday user engages with the friend
6. Step 2 happens again
For step one, I think most users birthday audiences are set to friends by default so we shouldn’t focus our time there, and unless time stops we’re also ok with not focusing on step 2. I think the feature today already does a decent job of making users aware of users birthdays with notifications etc. I think where we can have the most impact is improving engagement for 4 because many users that are aware of a friends birthday may not engage.
A good engagement metric could be to look at the % of users that post on at least one friends wall each day.
When I think about who uses this feature I think about a user’s relationships to the birthday user. This may be a friend or acquaintance.
Friends
-These are family members, best friends or people that a user may interact with day to day in real life.
-User may know more about this persons non internet life
-Users that may be interacted with more on facebook than other users
Acquaintances
-User doesn’t know much about this person outside of what they share on facebook
-User may have forgotten how they met
-User is not familiar with this person
I’d like to focus on the second group because I believe these are the users that 1) use the feature the least, and 2) represent a larger amount of users thus improving our chances to make an impact.
Some common pain points for acquaintances include:
a) having too many users to wish happy birthday to
b) not remembering who the users are
c) not knowing what to say to users
d) not wanting to come across as weird
e) not caring enough to wish happy birthday
f) not seeing any value from wishing the user happy birthday
I think if we prioritize these by most important to the user we get a list of pain points in this order: b, c, d, a.
I’d like to come up with some solutions for the top use cases above.
b)
1. Show connection info: surface the date, location, and the connection type (ie college) the connection happened. This will allow users to get a quick refresh of how the connection happened and what it means.
2. Show mutual friends: surface a few names of mutual friends so the user can again get a quick refresh on what the connection means.
c)
1. Show last communication: the last interaction you made with the user. This gives the user an opportunity to think back to what they might’ve talked about with this person in the past
2. Show mutual interests: this gives the user topics of interests to feed off of when creating wish
3. Prefill post: prefill the post with common saying like ‘Happy Birthday’
4. Smart prefills: Look across mutual interest categories to add context to the wish. Example, “{The Lakers lost last night} but I hope you have a great birthday!”
d)
1. Show total birthday wishes count so far: show the number of other people who have already wished this person happy birthday. This will help to show that’s its a normal thing activity to partake in.
a)
1. Recommended birthday list: show a subset of users in a recommended birthday area apart from the other users. This list would be comprised of people that you’ve engaged with in the past year but don’t fall in the ‘Friends’ category.
2. Wish all friends a happy birthday at once with one click.
I’d like to evaluate these solutions in terms of impact to cost ratio and pick the ones that will help us achieve our objective to increase engagement.
b1: Low hanging fruit: Low Cost, Low Impact. While easy to do, I think surfacing this much info may distract the user and isn’t the quickest way for the user to process the connection.
b2: Quick win: Low Cost, High Impact. I think showing other faces is easier to process for the user and similar in cost to implement as the other data points.
c1: Money Pit: Low Impact, High Cost. I think some interactions will be so old that showing them wouldn’t really help. I think how this is presented as well may be a challenge and time consuming addition.
c2: Quick Win: Low cost, high impact. This would go a long way for sparking the conversation.
c3: Quick Win: Low cost, high impact. These phrases would be generic and easy to prefil, but take the time and thinking out of the process., but the more there used the more value that is lost for each post.
c4: Must have: High Impact, High cost. This would provide the type of personalization for each connection that could motivate the birthday user to respond.
d1: Quick Win: High impact, low cost. This total would provide the social proof and make it ‘ok’ for users to post and not feel weird.
a1: Must Have: High impact, high cost. This would really help users to focus on what’s important but if the algorithm to create this list isn’t right, it may be excluding important users.
a2: Low hanging fruit: Low impact, low cost. Easy to post to multiple walls at once, but this would again reduce the value for each happy birthday post because users receiving the wishes will know it’s been automated to some extent.
Moving forward, I build solutions b2, c2, c4, d1, and a1.
Gold PM
- What does improvement mean? i am guessing it is engagement
- Yes
- Facebook birthdays - Basically it allows your to keep a track on your friends birthday, you get notified and you can wish on birthday too. The User will have thw ability to hide the birthday notification with friends, public/anyone, friends friends, Aquintance, Specific List of people is this correct, also it allows you send birthday card to users - yes
- Geo - india and than we can extend to other users
- No contraints to the project - yes
- Also becuase we are focusing on facebook birthday we will not get in to other bussiness like ads or shopping coz and will focus on social side of it is that ok ? - yes
- Mission - Of Meta and entire family of apps like facebooks whatsapp is to bring people closer to one onether and build a community
- Type of users
- Not focusing on B2B but only B2C
| Type of users | Reach | Impact |
| High Frequency users - Young age adults, majority of life on social media, tech savy individuals, FOMO genz and Mileendials (18 to 27, 28 to 43) | H | H |
| Mid Frequency - Would be posting only when they feel like sharing on social media site and are bit prefer privaacy over FOMO , GenX (44 to 59) | M | M/L |
| Low frequency - Hardly any post on 59 & above | L | L |
Considering the above factor the high freqyency users have higher reach and higer impact so i will consider this segment
What are the a pain points
| Pain point | Depth | Size |
| Lack patience | M | M |
| Mind share is divided between multiple apps | M | M |
| looking for innovation or else they loose intrest (Same boring mechamism of wish birthdays has made them move to insta stories) and than FB also has stories now | L | L |
Based on the above factors i wil focus on innovation will result in loosing of intrests
| Sol | Reach | Impact | Effort | Phase |
| 1) Use of LLM/AI to Draft a Birthday card for a friend along with a music and text | H | H | M/H | 1 |
| 2) My friend is big fan of eminem so can AI create a rap song about our friendship and create a audio in the voice of the artist | H | H | Quite high | 2 |
| 3) Becasue its birthday along with wishes you can invoke chat where AI can recommend best places to have dinner/party in town | H | H | H | 1 |
| 4) AI assitant can book a table for the party witha special cake | H | H | H | 2 |
Sucess metric
- No of wishes done through AI birthday card /total birtdays
- 100 birtdays per day how many ended up wishing through LLM/AI let us say 70 so 70/100= 70 % is the north start
- Other metrics
- Places visited and taged basis recomendation
- DAU
- MAU
- time spent
Step 1: Describe the Product
Facebook is a popular social media platform where users share part of their life with others using images, text, video etc. to stay connected with family and friends.
It has multiple elements such as market place, jobs, games, Facebook Stories, Facebook Birthday etc. but we will focus only on Facebook Birthday.
Facebook Birthday allows the users to add their birthday in their profile and control who can see it.
Facebook Birthday is an important feature of Facebook which allows the users to wish people in their network on their birthdays.
Users are usually notified about their friends’ birthday through notification. Users can wish their friends on their birthdays on their wall or send them a personalized message from Facebook messenger
Step 2: Ask clarifying questions to narrow down the scope of the problem
Before moving ahead, I would like to ask few clarifying questions
Me- Are we focussing on any specific platform such as Facebook mobile app or Facebook website?
Interviewer - Let's focus on Facebook mobile app for the time being
Me- Are we focusing on any specific platform such as Android or iOS or we need to consider both Android and iOS?
Interviewer- You need to focus on both Android and iOS
Me- Are we focusing on any specific geography?
Interviewer - It is up to you to decide
Me- Are we focusing on any specific user group?
Interviewer- It is up to you to decide
Me - What aspect of Facebook Birthday do you want to improve?
Do you have any specific goal in mind?
Improve user engagement
Increase user retention
Increase user base
Increase revenue
Interviewer- It is up to you to decide. You are free to choose
In that case I will focus on Improving user engagement
Step 3: Define the Goal you want to achieve
Facebook's mission is to bring the world closer together. I feel user engagement closely aligns with the mission of Facebook. So, I will focus on increasing the user engagement
With the increase in user engagement the user retention will also increase which in turn will increase the revenue also
Step 4: List down the user segments
There are multiple ways where we can divide the users into various segments
Based on User roles
Birthday User
They are the users who receive birthday wishes from their friends via wall post or direct message on the messenger
Birthday Wisher
They are the users who send birthday wishes to others via wall post or message to the friends or acquaintances
Based on feature usage
Super User
They are the users who often wish other Facebook users on their birthday almost every day
Causal User
They are the users who sometimes wish other Facebook users on their birthday almost once a week
Passive User
They are the users who rarely wish other Facebook users on their birthday once in a few months or so
Based on User types
Friends
These are the family members, friends, co workers or people with whom the user might engage regularly in real life
Users know this person outside the Facebook life
Acquaintances
In this case the user is unfamiliar with the person and doesn't know much about this person outside of Facebook.
Select the desired user segment
I would focus on the Birthday Wisher user segment as my target segment as the majority of the users belong to this category. Also, if we are able to solve the issue of this groups then it helps the other groups also
Step 5: List down the Pain Points
1) Users having too many users to wish for the birthday
2) Users may miss the Birthday notification as they keep getting multiple notifications
3) Users are not able to remember who the person is or how they are related to that person
4) Users are unable to come up with something unique to write for everyone on their birthdays
5) Users don't want to appear weird by wishing others on the birthday
Step 6: List down the solutions for the Pain Points
1) Recommended Birthday list: This list will be a subset of the users and will include only those people with whom the user has been engaging or interacting in the recent time
b) Wish all the users at once with a single click without having to worry too much about it
2) Notification Overload
In this case we can have separate different colours more prominent notifications for the birthdays so as to ensure that users don't miss it and wishes the other users on their birthday
3) Show connection details
In this case we can show the user connection info about how or since when the two users are connected to each other. This will severe as a quick recall to the user of how they are connected to the other user.
Along with that we can also show the list of mutual friends so as to give the user a better idea about their connection.
4) Auto Populate birthday wishes
In this case we can display the auto populated wishes for the users to choose from so that they don't have to think too much about it and select any one from the list
Along with that we can also provide the user a option to wishes all the users with common wish at once on their birthday
5) Showing count of users
In that case we can show the user the total number of people who have already wished Birthday to the other person so that the users do not have any weird feelings.
This will help the users realise that it is a normal thing to wish the other person
Step 7: Evaluate the solutions and prioritize them
Solution 1: Too many users
Impact: High, Effort: High
Priority: P1
Solution 2: Notification Overload
Impact: Medium, Effort: High
Priority: P2
Solution 3: Showing connection details
Impact: Low, Effort: Low
Priority: P3
Solution 4: Auto populated messages
Impact: High, Effort: Low
Priority: P4
Solution 5: Showing the count of users
Impact: High, Effort: Low
Priority: P5
Based on the above criteria I will go with the following solutions
Notification Overload
Auto Populated messages
Step 8: Define Metrics to measure the performance
Number of Birthdays notifications received per user
Number of users wishing birthday to other users
Average number of users sending auto populated messages
Number of auto populated message sent in a day/week/month
Number of birthdays messages posted in a day
Step 9: Summarise the answer
We were asked to Improve Facebook Birthday. We focused on improving the user engagement for Facebook mobile app. We Identified various user segments and selected the Birthday Wisher segment as the target segment. We identified various pain points and selected the pain points such as users may miss the birthday notification due to multiple notifications, users do not anything unique to wish to other users on their birthday
The solutions that we proposed are sending separate notifications for birthdays, auto Populating birthday messages
Clarify:
Birthday: your own birthday and your friend’s birthdays
Are any other life events in scope? - No only improve birthdays.
Is there a specific business goal for this improvement such as increasing user adoption, engagement, and revenue? - let’s focus on the engagement.
Structure:
Goals:
FB's mission is to connect people, and make interactions easy.
Currently, the birthdays feature on FB is lacking the excitement observed in other FB features where there are reactions, there are suggestions for user actions. This type of feature takes away the shyness and encourages users to interact more- resulting in increased engagement.
There are two types of users, one whose birthday it is and Friends who have a birthday.
Own birthday: let friends know of your birthday, connect with friends on your birthday, celebrate
Friends birthdays: remember your friend's birthdays, send wishes, connect with friends/celebrate.
Pain points:
users may not always want to share their birthdays, adoption could be an issue.
users tend to connect when notified of birthdays via posts, or messenger, no way to take it beyond this level
No group interactions for birthdays
A birthday person doesn’t always know how to react, or how to respond.
Solutions:
Offer incentives to share more information on the profile
Add your birthday to unlock more birthday features for your friends
Encourage users to celebrate birthdays with a group of close friends
Offer events suggestions for birthdays
Reminders ahead of close friend’s birthdays
Automated ways to schedule video calls/ virtual birthday celebrations
Local events celebration
Quick Ways to respond to friends /well-wishers
text/ content suggestions to reply
Reduce time required to respond to each message/ post on the wall
Self-reflection:
some additional Pain points: Not remembering users > what was the last communication, how did you connect?
Decscribe product
FB birthday is feature where you can see your friend's bday and congratulate them on their timeline.
Goal
To stay connected / letting someone know you care about them.
Internal goal: increase engagement / retention
User segment
1. Birhtday person: receives congratulations from friends
2. Friends of birthday person: sends happy birthday posts/messages.
Will focus on user #2 since they are the acutal users of the feature.
Pain Points
1. Don't know what to say other than happy birthday, but also want to make the birthday wish special.
2. The two users could be in different time zones.
3. Want to send a birthday gift to friend but it's too late (already the day of)
4. You turned of FB notifications and missed your friend's birthday.
(I would normally try to prioritize but there aren't that many so I'm going to lay out solutions for each pain points)
Solutions
1.a. Template: Make a template of thoughtful messages so that user doesn't have to think about what to write other than happy birthday.
1.b. Customized cards: User can draw/ add stickers and make a customized birhtday card. It is fun and personal.
2. Notify the birthday that is the correct timezone of where the birthday person is located. (e.g. if birthday person is in Asia and friend is in America, notify them a day in advance so the birthday person gets the message on their actual birthday not a day after their birthday)
3. Gift cards: FB can partner with various companies so that the friend can send birthday person a online giftcard right away. (E.g. Starbucks gift card, Target giftcard).
4. Calendar link: FB birthday connects with your most used calendar (i-calendar, outlook, google calendar) so that you don't miss your friend's bday.
Prioritization
1.a. Easy to implement / Medium impact - downside could be that the people might know you used a template and it doesn't seem personal.
1.b. Hard to implement / High impact
2. Easy to implement / Medium impact
3. Hard to implement (more so for negotiating with companies) / High impact
4. Medium to implement/ Medium impact - risk of user not using FB as a medium to wish their friends happy birthday (good idea to A/B test before launching fully)
I would prioritize 1.a and 2 as it is very easy to implement and would be a quick win, and also focus on 1.b. for a unique experience and also matches FB's goal.
Success Metrics
# of birthday wishes before and after the launch
# of times the template and card features are used
# of time birthday person visits FB to check their timeline
Time spent on FB
PM
Context/QQ:
- Why improve, what is not working
- Goal (engagement)
- FB birthday - people can add, view birthday reminders. Goal of this feature is to help people connect with their friends by wishing them on their special day
- Can we think of this more holistically? beyond bday - other life events and reminders around them? For eg: college graduates might want to reconnect with their peers on the aniversary of graduation, friends and faamily might want to wish on wedding anniversary.
- Users looking to connect with close friends and family
- Users looking to connect with with broader network (aquantainces)
- Small local groups/communities looking to stay in touch
- View birthday reminder (currently this is displayed on the right hand side of the page on the web and in the NF on mobile)
- Recall how/when we know the person
- Feel connected but not too intrusive, depending on the relationship
- Live board of wishes from everyone else
- Pre-made card with message pompts (AI based)
Gold PM
1) (same page) First of all, I would make sure that we are talking about the same product/feature.
- "So, Facebook Birthdays is that feature/functionally that you receive notifications of people's birthdays on a daily basis. You also can see these brithdays on your Newsfeed and have a quick way to send messages to them. On the other side, you as user can also inform your birthday on your profile so that people can write to you when the day comes. Is that right?
2) (clarification) I would try to investigate what "improvement" actually means, but I would do in a more active way.
- "I understand improvement in basically two ways. The first one is something that is not doing good, so that you want to improve it. The other one is that something is not necessarily bad, but you want to boost its impact, thus improving it. I am assuming we are looking at ways to boost the feature. Does it sound ok?"
- "There are plenty of alternatives to improve a feature/product, such as segregating users by demographics (countries, cities, continents, ages, gender, etc) and/or behavior (interests, usage, jobs, etc), and platforms (mobile, web), user exprience, or revenue from company point of view. I am also assuming that we want to improve the feature in a general way focusing on user experience, not looking to any specific division. Is that ok or do you want me to focus on something else?"
3) (repeat new question) After making sure about the product and questioning the meaning, I would rephrase the question.
- "Perfect, so we trying to improve Facebook Birthdays, which is a feature that remebers people of their friends' birthdays, in a more general way focusing on user experience."
4) (state macro goal) I believe that this is the most important thing answering any question - the ability to correlate that feature to the company's goal.
- "Broadening the view to Facebook/Meta, its goal is to connect people all over the word. Birthdays helps Meta in this goal because it's a a very important topic that generates interactions, conversations, and connections among people. Remebering people and motivating them to talk about it increases engagement and therefore their time and experience while using the product."
- "Therefore, any improvement that we can think of from now on must be connected and help on that goal."
5) (brainstorming ideas) Now, it's the time to think about ideas that could improve the feature. Thinking about pains, I would use the Rule of Three to keep it simple, effective, and clear.
- (pain 1 - notif. overwhelming) "Some people do not use this feature because they might get overhelmed by how many birthdays/notifications they receive each day. It's hard to find their true friends to send messages."
- (pain 2 - awareness) "Others do not even know how to insert their birthdays, but send message to their friends every day."
- (pain 3 - behavior) "And other might not use the feature because they are more reserved people, but they would like to participate in it in a closer circle".
a) "Firstly, the platform should be able to send notifications from friends that interact the most with that user. For instance, friends that are tagged in photos together, engage in posts (like, shares, comments, etc), something like that. Moreover, it should send these notifications in a period that the user would have the highest likelihood of being logged in. Ultimately, the goal is to send more accurate birthdays notifications in terms of time and from whom. Some metrics to study this idea further would be: notifications read/unread, % engagement of these "true friends", photos tagging, period of day logged in, messages sent on brithdays, etc...
b) "Secondly, we should help people who do not fill their birthdays. Analyzing who engage with others in their birthdays but do not have their own filled would be the target. The idea is to send notifications/"onboarding" of how to complete the birthday field in the profile".
c) "Finally, motivating these users to use favorites can be a good strategy. We could do it by suggesting some friends to be added directly on the Newsfeed. Then, these users would start receiving notifications of birthdays only from those people. Additionally, these users should be able to select the friends to whom they want to show their birthdays. Regarding metrics, we can look for people who interact with the same people only on a daily basis around birthdays. The same way to other interactions."
1. Comprehend Situation
- FB vision is to bring the world closer together
- FB Birthday asks users to enter their birthday on the profile page. Then you and me in a social circle gets a reminder to post on that user's wall when their birthday gets closer. The birthday bear can choose to start a fundraiser to celebrate their birthday. We can see in the News Feed about such activities.
- Goal - Users connect with others on special occasions and share positive vibes. I'd think the goals here are engagement and say reactivate dormant users who were drawn to other social apps
* Are we speaking of the FB main application, or also include Messenger and Instagram? Let’s keep it to FB + Messenger
* Are we focusing on the web app or mobile app? Just so I know. You decide.
2. Identify User Segments
- Individual
· New: account created within 3 months or <200 friends
· Power user: > 10hr last week
· Casual: 2-10hr last week
· Dormant: < 3hr last week, <10 new friends this/last year
- Orgs
· mid to large org, e.g. media
· SMB nonprofits
For the purpose of this exercise, I'd like to focus on casual users since some of them might become dormant users in the future, and Birthdays would be a good way to engage with them.
3. User Needs / Pains – what prevents people from interacting and connecting on someone’s birthday?
A. Reluctant to reconnect – awkward
B. Don’t know what to say beyond formality
C. It takes high effort to see who posted happy birthday messages and react/respond to them on a personal level
At first sight, solving problem A would really aligns with FB’s mission to bring people closer together. I’d argue that it’s beyond FB’s control if people had a relationship that grew up naturally or due to a major fall out. It’s ultimately up to the users to decide which relationships to cultivate more going forward.
Problem B and C are intertwined. They are common pain points shared by most of user segments, so the opportunity size is big. And I’d argue that it’s urgent to improve user experience in general for FB Birthdays in order to keep our users engaged and not becoming dormant in the next 3 years or so.
4. Potential Solution
· Birthday pokes
o Eliminate simplify formality of saying happy birthday on the wall. Instead bring back the legacy feature, pokes, you know, as cute icons to pick from. Make it easy to see friend’s thumbnail / name who celebrated a user’s birthday. Visible to everyone in the social circle.
· Birthday doodles
o Each user may draw doodles for the birthday guy, or organize a group to co-create doodles. The birthday bear may get to rank them and comment on them.
· Birthday DM
o Instead of leading users to post on each other’s wall for birthday wishes, start a DM via Facebook Messenger with a set of prepared happy birthday messages and interesting topics/articles to choose from.
· Birthday causes/themes and fundraising lottery
o Birthday bear suggests 3 causes to their social circle and pick the final choice one week in advance. Others may participate in the fundraising lottery to either donate $1-5 or engage in other mini games and craft activities.
5. Prioritization
I am going to prioritize the solutions following this thought process: looking at impact on user experience, engineering effort and risks. I will take a simple t-shirt sizing approach and rank them below this way.
1) Birthday pokes: Impact – L, Effort – L, Risk - L
It’s a UX redesign, would be nice but doesn’t solve the problem of how to engage beyond formality
2) Birthday doodles and mini games: Impact – H, Effort – M, Risk – L
This may bring delight and increase engagement through word of mouth.
3) Birthday DM voice: Impact – L, Effort – L, Risk – L
This is 1 on 1 voice messaging, so the impact on overall engagement is lower. Voice messaging may be awkward for people who haven’t spoken to each other for a long while.
4) Birthday causes + fundraising lottery: Impact – H, Effort – H, Risk – M
This requires the highest engineering effort, and people may not trust the fairness or the lottery algorithm when donation money is involved.
To summarize, my prioritized list is
1. Birthday doodles and mini games: Impact – H, Effort – M, Risk - L
2. Birthday causes + fundraising lottery: Impact – H, Effort – H, Risk – M
3. Birthday pokes: Impact – L, Effort – L, Risk - L
4. Birthday DM voice: Impact – L, Effort – L, Risk – L
6. Success Metrics
· Interaction using the new feature - adoption rate
· Weekly hours spent on Facebook immediately after using the new feature
· Total weekly hours of user and their friends who logged at least 3 times that month
7. Pitfalls
· Mini games UX are different across different devices.
· Engagement is not easy to sustain, might need to send reminders or feature them in FB News, that’s another trade-off to consider.
Platinum PM
Me: Let me first make sure I understand the feature, FB Birthdays. Per my understanding, FB keeps a track of all of my connectios birthdays so I can navigate ahead of time who all has Birthdays in MArch, April, etc. It also notifies me of someone's birthday and easily enables me to comment on their story line. All of this drives engagement for FB. Am I missing something?
Interviewer:No, I think you got it.
Me: Great. Whenver we want to improve something, it means something is missing rather some higher level business goal needs to be achieved that either can be capitalized on or is completely missing. Is there a goal that we are trying to attain?
I: Upto you. We just want to make things better for our users.
Me: Ok. So let's see. FB earns from advertising and for that FB needs user engagement. Engagement enables users to look at various feeds that are on FB which brings CTR and Impressions based business. But then, FB also has events and such that also generates revenue for FB. Those all require engagement. So let's focus on that.
I: Ok.
Me: There are 4 different user types of of FB a)Consumers like me and you b)Businesses who want to advertize their events c)Business who want to advertise their brand/products (this includes musicians, etc.) d)Content creators. Let's focus on #1 since that's most of FB users evne if you belong to hte other user type as well + since we are talking about Birthdays this user group makes the most sense to focus on.
If I think about pain points 1)when I get notified of a friend' bday all I can do is say happy birthday and stuff but that's what everyone one is doing as well. I want a way to distinguish myself. 2)Inspite of birthday notifications, I forget to wish them. 3) I get lost in the crowd of so many people wishing Happy Birthday.
Let's pick #1 and #2 since #3 is more like #1 and considering limited time. I want to see how we can support FB's monetization strategy by increasing user engagement and yet address pain points.
1a)Integrate using API integrations with e-card companies so I can create a e-card (personalized) and mail it privately or have it be publically posted on FB to their storyline. This helps generate more engagement from other uses since everoyne else will see the card and comment something about it. (F5,V5,C1)
1b)Enable sending money via Paypal / Venmo integrations or even bringing VISA / Mastercard and other retail vendors to offer their gift cards to be chosen as a present for a friend I am wishing. (F5,V5,C3)
1c)Enable creating surprise event by picking already created event on FB and AI can suggest which one of the upcomign events is my friend most likely to like. Here, FB can suggest which one of my freind's friends are most likely to attend which of the event and which of my friend's friend usually attends events with him/her. So even if I don't know my firend's friend, I can still organize a bday event for my friend with all of his/her friends. (F5,V5,C2)
2a)Use AI to auto send birthday wishes and learn overtime from my typing style per friend how I generally wish him/her. This could be even a reate a message and ask for my permission to post before posting it. (F5,V5,C3)
I have also posted rating along side each feature. Value Add is value add to the user, FEasibility and complexity considers aspects of technical complexity and how feasible it is to implement them in a short time frame. If I had to pick just 1 out of the 4, I would pick 1a because it's a fast implementation while we work on other features and it ties in very nicely with goal to increase user engagement.
All in all, I think there are many more things that can be doen beyond just wishing a friend Happy Birthday and be notified about his/her birthday.
PM
Improvement of Facebook Birthday means 2 Things
Increase Users of Facebook Birthday- Top of Funnel
Increased Usage of Facebook Birthday – Engagement of the Users
How Facebook Birthday Works is
A) Makes a Template for Users whose Birthday is about to arrive.
B) Users can customize or post the OOB Template on the Users Facebook Page
C) The Birthday person can reply to the Template
Lets Talk about how Top of Funnel can be Improved
BUILDING AWARENESS: Users wouldn’t be aware of Upcoming Birthday or miss them completetly
Facebook can point out Notifications for upcoming Birthdays
Facebook can make 3 Parties like Instagram and everyone to post it and they can use it
REMOVING FRICTION :
Facebook can allow the users to customize the Birthday as per user and can even open it to Third Party Templates
Facebook itself can make stories and allow the Users to post it
Users wouldn’t like the Templates for Facebook Birthday and hence will not post the Facebook Birthday
MAINTAININGG PRIVACY Facebook Users may not like wishing someone in open
Facebook can allow the Users to post it either in Private OR ANONYMOUSLY
How can Engagement of uSers be increased
Notify Other People in the Network that A has wished B on his birthday , have you ? Build peer pressure ?
Give the ability to the user to respond to the Facebook Greetinsgs with a custom card back when some one wishes?
Remind the User that A had wished you on your birthday and wont you wish him back ?
Give users an ability to launch an online birthday celebration – Online Event in which you could invite everyone from his network
Give Tips to Wishers based on his feeds in Instagram/Facebook Feeds – what are his tasted and you should buy him this on his birthday and one click purchase to Facebook Stores
Bronze PM
Facebook Birthdays has two sets of users: the birthday person and the friends of the birthday person. The friends get reminded of the birthday on the Facebook UI, have a prompt to write on their timeline, and the birthday person gets greetings on their birthday.
Which users will I address and why? During the time of this pandemic, it is difficult and unsafe for people to meet in person. But friends of people having birthdays want to throw a birthday party for their friend, so Facebook with its goals of connecting people and providing them the tools to connect people is the perfect venue. Instead of just providing the opportunity to write a greeting on a timeline, Facebook can surface a prompt in the birthday reminder dialogue box to create an online birthday event.
I'll focus specifically on the friend of the birthday person who is creating the online birthday event.
Needs when creating a birthday event would be to easily be able to invite the birthday person's friends. The friend of the birthday person may not know who the closest friends are of the birthday person, so the birthday reminder should surface 10-20 suggested friends of the birthday person who interact the most with the birthday person, and three suggested dates of the online birthday event based on the times the birthday person is typically on Facebook. There could be a "surprise party" when all the birthday person's friends are pinged that the birthday person is online, are prompted to join a video room (Facebook Messenger Rooms?) and have an option to choose a "gift" (an animation of confetti or balloons) that will play as a video overlay. There can also be an option for a scheduled birthday online video event.
One issue I can see with my idea of surfacing 10-20 suggested friends of the birthday person who interact most with the birthday person is privacy concerns, so instead the feature should allow the friend of the birthday person to select friends from a public list (if exists) of the birthday person's friends, or add other friends the inviter is friends with. For now let's focus this feature on those users having a birthday who have a public friend list.
Another issue is that the "surprise party" is a fun idea, but hard to implement in reality, due to people's busy and conflicting schedules. So instead I would allow the birthday party creator to schedule the online video party for a specific date and time. Since the birthday person is the key guest, if the birthday person doesn't accept, the birthday person will be prompted to select from a list of alternate dates/times, and the friend of the birthday person will receive a message to change the date/time and resend the invitation.
I choose a video conferencing room because it will best feel like people are "there" compared to just texting. Also because Facebook has built out video meeting technology in Facebook Messenger Rooms, so perhaps this technology could be used.
So to sum up, this feature will allow a friend of a birthday person to easily create an invite to a video conferencing birthday party. The invite besides including a date, time, and link to the event should also allow the friend of the birthday person to choose a "decoration" option, which would then enable a link for each invitee to choose a video overlay animation for the party such as balloons or confetti. I would include the latter feature because the friend of the birthday person has a need to make a video conferencing room feel special for a birthday, not just like a business call.
What metrics would I use to measure the success of this feature? How many birthday events created, ratio of birthday events to birthday timeline messages, avg # of event attendees, how long the birthday event is, video quality, whether non-friends in the event become connected (more friends increase engagement on Facebook which would support Facebook's goal of connecting people), %age of users choosing video overlay animations and which type (could be monetized later).
How would I roll out this feature? I would choose a small percentage of users (2-5%) and roll this out to them, and measure adoption over 3 months, including month-over-month adoption (as more people find out about this feature, does usage increase?). After that I would decide whether to roll this out more widely.
Bronze PM
Just to be on the same page, I would like to first discuss about Facebook Birthdays Feature. There are two ways which I can think of in which this feature creates delights for customers is - To add your birthday on Facebook to let world know & another way is for well-wishers who can send their wishes to birthday person either through posting on FB Wall or by doing DM to the person.
I would like to take following approach while answering this:-
- Goals & Constraints
- Users & Use cases
- Prioritize Use cases
- Brainstorm Solutions
- Birthday Guys :- Their need is to let the world know about their special day and expect some good wishes from their friends
- Well Wishers :- As a well-wisher, they want to take this as a moment to celebrate their friendship & make the day special for their very close friend
I would like to choose well-wisher as my desired persona to improve this feature. I can think of follwoing solutions to bring delight to well-wishers:-
1. Video/Photo Collage Maker :- Using various Algorithms, Facebook can identify close friends in social circle of upcoming birthday people. FB will let these close people knew about the same in advance. FB can create a platform where users can create a special photo collage/video for their friends using existing photos on FB or Instagram in past. FB can collate all these photos in a place and empowers users to easily create collages from the same and share with their Friends on FB/Instagram on D-day
2. Gifting Recommendation Engine :- We all struggle with buying a useful/memorable gifts for our friends & relative.FB with its vast amount of data can guide users to buy the gift for their friends.FB tracks user searches/information on their platform.Apart from this, FB can easily recognize the various products/wishlist of birthday guy using their Facebook ADs platform. Now, FB can provide a number of recommendation basis their search & ADs to their very close friends, who can then order the same for Birthday guy.
3. Trait Personafied:- Here well wisher while posting on brithday can select a trait among various options along with stickers related to that option. Well wisher can write examples abt the same on birthday guys' post along with posting these. This will create nostalgia among friends and will start remembering from the first time they met to today and how their friendship has sailed through.
I will like to use Engagement,Customer Satisfaction, Ease of Implementation as my compass to prioritze the solutions
Solutions Engagement Customer Satisfaction Ease of Implementation Overall
Collage Maker Med Low Med C
Gift Recommendar High High High A
Trait Personafied Med Med Low B
Note:- In Overall Column, A means highest priority & C Means lowest priority
I would like to propose Gift Recommendar engine that will provide huge source of satisfaction to both well wisher as well as birthday guy. This will also create a sweet spot for FB too among both of the friends. Hence, I think this is the best solution that can be implemented to increase engagement, brand value of Facebook among people.
Define the product/feature in your own words
Thank you for the question. Let me start by stating what the Facebook birthday feature is. It's this:
"As a user, after logging in to Facebook and landing on the homepage (Feed), I can see the profiles of my friends who have birthdays today. I can click on a name and send a quick birthday wish"
Ask clarifying questions to narrow down the scope
- Why do we want to improve this feature? What is currently not working as intended? Are there any particular metrics that are affected or we want to improve upon?
- For this exercise, do you want to focus on any specific end-user segments? By demography or usage etc.
- Would you prefer I expand the vision of the feature to include not only birthdays but more? or should we stick to birthdays only?
- Users don't notice the birthdays as they are distracted with the continuous stories on their feeds and other feature.
- Users view the birthdays clearly but they don't care about using the feature/wishing birthdays through them as they seem impersonal
- Users don't care about most of their Facebook friend's birthdays as they are not close to them, most of the people in friendslist are typically acquaintances or friends of friends.
- #User interactions per celebratory post
- %Increase in interactions per user
- %Increase in celebratory posts per user
Solutions
Here are some of the features I'd suggest:
- Feature#1 Apart from birthdays, users can themselves enter what they are celebrating and that shows up for the friends that they interact with on Facebook usually. Users might care about congratulating an acquaintance over the celebration of personal achievement rather than birthdays. It just improves the scope of the interaction depending on interests.
- Feature #2 Users can choose to wish on Facebook or be redirected to Whatsapp if they find it more personal. Facebook can integrate whatsapp to improve these types of interactions. It certainly gives users more private/personal options to wish as well.
- Feature #3 Introduce personalization features such as collages, video messages, collective wishes from group of friends/ colleagues to share with everyone.
I would use an Impact vs Cost model to prioritize the features. Here is my assessment:
- Feature #1: High Impact, High cost
- Feature #2: Medium Impact, Low cost
- Feature #3: High Impact, Low cost
DEFINITION OF THE FEATURE:
- Facebook birthdays is a feature where users are notified about friend's birthday. They can easily send a message into the wall of them and also check a page with the details of their friendship. Right? Did I miss something? Do you have any goal in mind to improve in Facebook Brithdays?
If not... As the Facebook's goal is to give the power to people create community and bring people closer, facebook birthday encourage people to send a message to their friends. So I would say that our main goal should be increase the number of contacts between friends made after our reminder.
User Groups and behaviours:
- UG1 - Friends:
- UG1.1 - Friends who are remember though Facebook Birthday
- UG1.1.1 - Write message in the Facebook Wall
- UG1.1.2 - Send message via Whatsapp/Instagram
- UG1.1.3 - Post pictures in Instagram Stories
- UG1.1.4 - Send message via other social media
- UG1.1.5 - Call to the friend
- UG1.1.6 - Don't do anything
Pain Points:
- They are afraid friends won't see in the Facebook Walls
- They think text is not enough to express their praise
- They would like to hear the voice of their friend/see the friend
Some solutions:
- Add a fast button to call in the Facebook Birthday page
- Allow them to send a meme with the message in the Facebook Birthday page
- Allow them to share the photos together in the Instagram stories.
I would use a Impact*Reach / Effort analysis.
- Add a fast button to call in the Facebook Birthday page (I=2, R=1, E=1) [ just good friends would like to call to people without arrange the time before]
- Allow them to send a meme with the message in the Facebook Birthday page(I=1, R=1, E=1)
- Allow them to share the photos together in the Instagram/Facebook stories. (I=5, R=2, E=4)
- Send a message directly in Whatsapp (I=5,R=3, E=3) [i am not sure if that is viable in terms of allowance, so i wouldn't go with this option]
Then, as my first priority i would develop the feature which allows the user to share the photos together in the Instagram/Facebook stories. And I would measure sucess:
# OF USERS GIVING BIRTHDAY PRAISES (before and after)
# OF PHOTO POSTED IN STORIES THROUGH FB BIRTHDAY PAGE
# MESSAGE IN FB WALL (before and after to check if there are any canibalization)
INCREASE OF INTERACTION BETWEEN USERS (RESHARE, START OF CONVERSATION..)
PM
Overview
First, I'm going to make sure I understand the Birthday product correctly and also define what specific business metric we're trying to improve.
Second, I will focus on defining the target user for which we want to improve the product and brainstorm what additional user problems we could solve.
And third, I will generate solutions for these problems, prioritize them, and make a recommendation.
Before moving forward, I want to make sure I understand the FB birthday product and its users. FB birthdays promote fb users' bdays by letting people know its their friend's birthday and encouraging them to engage by sharing a birthday message, allowing friends to send birthday gifts, and making them feel special on their birthday.
Goal / Metric
I think the metric we want to optimize for here is engagement around a birthday. This can be measured by comments, likes, or gifts sent around an individual's birthday. We can measure success by comparing the increase in engagement around someone's birthday relative to previous birthdays. We can consider the person who is having their birthday and their network of friends.
Lets talk about the users here
People having birthdays
These can be people who are active participants on FB
These can also be people who are more passive
Friends of people having birthdays
Family of people having birthdays
Pets with birthdays
I think of all of these, it makes most sense to think about the birthday boy/girl themselves. If we can get them to engage, it will create a network effect for their circle of friends.
Looking at the needs of users
They want to feel loved, special and appreciated on their birthday
They may want to organize and event but dont have the time to put one together
Sometimes people dont want the attention on their birthday
They may want to connect with friends they haven't seen in a long time
They may want to thank people after their birthday has passed
Based on some of these wants, users
On the day of someones birthday, give them the option to have a 24 hour birthday profile pic
Have a surprise birthday message from friends. Friends can organize a surprise group message / prerecorded video that shows up in the users timeline on the day of their birthday.
In approaching a birthday, provide birthday ideas based on the users personal interests. Like prebuilt event ideas that they can pick from and customize to organize a birthday party.
Give users the option to hide their birthday messages if they dont want the public to know its their birthday
Give users the option to throw a virtual birthday party with FB groups with friends that arent close in proximity
Give users the option to send pre-authored customized notes to everyone who engaged with them on their birthday via FB
I would suggest we prioritize these solutions based on value/effort to keep it simple.
Birthday profile pic
Prebuilt birthday party ideas / events
Surprise birthday messages from their friends
Virtual birthday party with friends
Prebuilt thank you card
Metrics to evaluate
Engagement around a birthday relative to past birthdays
Top Meta (Facebook) interview questions
- What is your favorite product? Why?89 answers | 263k views
- How would you design a bicycle renting app for tourists?62 answers | 82.5k views
- A metric for a video streaming service dropped by 80%. What do you do?50 answers | 135k views
- See Meta (Facebook) PM Interview Questions
Top Product Improvement interview questions
- How would you improve Google Maps?53 answers | 228k views
- How would you improve YouTube?29 answers | 81.3k views
- How can you improve Facebook Stories?22 answers | 45.5k views
- See Product Improvement PM Interview Questions
Top Product Improvement interview questions
- How would you improve user engagement on WhatsApp?18 answers | 25.1k views
- How would you improve Amazon?14 answers | 35k views
- How will you improve engagement on LinkedIn?14 answers | 14.2k views
- See Product Improvement PM Interview Questions
