As PM of LinkedIn feed, what would you show on the top right of the page-"Sponsored ads" or "People you may know"?

For me, it's natural to address this LinkedIn product strategy question by first understanding the intent of the company. LinkedIn's goal is to connect the world's professionals so as to make them more productive and successful.

Next, let me clarify what is a LinkedIn's news feed:

It is the first page that is shown to the user. User's can view at network's activity. 

Users can View post from their group. They can stay connected with colleagues

and post something new or reply to a post

On LHS there are some important actions that user can perform and RHS is more dynamic that shows news and ads.

What is the goal for introducing new feature ? 

Increase engagement and monetization

From business standpoint: ads provide monetization, PYMK know provides more engagement

Pros and Cons of both features

          Pros                         |     Cons

Ads    Increase monetization           |   Distract users, finds annoying

PYMK    Increase engagement & retention  |   No monetization, people with mature network may not use this feature

Now I will categorize users 

as High frequency users (Active)  - They use LinkedIn a couple of times a day and are active with creating posts

Casual users     -   They use Linked maybe few times a week. They view newsfeed and not very active posting new comments

New users      -  Just got started and are building new connections.

The PYMK feature will be very useful to the new users as they are getting started and want to grow their connections.

Since I want to understand how showing ads may help or deter users, we can proceed with an A/B test hypothesis:

Hypothesis 1: user's who are actively engaged and already have social interactions on a regular basis are good candidates for targetted ads.

   To evaluate this hypothesis, I will measure CTR on ads for this segment of user and measure engagement rate whether it goes up or down during the introduction of ads

   Tradeoff - If active users, see ads every time they login it may annoy them and reduce their engagement rate

Hypothesis 2: Casual users who are not very active and do not post much, may like to see targeted ads and find something cool and new. 

   To evaluate this hypothesis, I will measure CTR on ads for this segment of user and as they are not daily users, this test will run longer. I will compare the WAU before, during and after the ad to see the engagement rate among this user type.

   Tradeoff: If users see ads everytime they login, it may annoy them. But if the ads are placed right and targeted correctly there is huge potential to increase engagement.

Hypothesis 3: New users would like to connect with more colleagues so the People You May know will be very useful to them

   To evaluate this hypothesis I will collect data CTR for PYMK feature, new connections created through this feature. I will also measure engagement rate before, during and after this test period to measure the engagement rate.

   Tradeoff: The new PYMK feature will help increase engagement but it may not increase monetization. We could be losing out on new avenues of monetization.

I will run these 3 test and measure different engagement ratio such as WAU, DAU, CTR of ads, CTR of PYMK links, new connections created during the test period.