Swap 'People you may know' with 'Products you may buy'. As a PM, how will you make a decision to swap an existing feature with a new feature without developing the new feature?

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Swap 'People you may know' with 'Products you may buy'. As a PM, how will you make a decision to swap an existing feature with a new feature without developing the new feature?

Asked at Meta (Facebook) over a year ago

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Lokesh Kumar R · Answer 1 · 2021-07-11T16:28:33+0000

Clarifying Questions:

Just, to make sure I've understood the situation, I would like to repeat the quesiton in my words-" As a PM of Fb how will you decide of you would want to swap "People you may know" with "Produt you may buy". One constraint here is that the feature "Products you may buy" is not built at all.

Yeah, you have got it the right way.

So if this is the case, clearly running A/B tests is out of our option to have a more data centric way of getting into conclusion.

By "Swap" do we mean to remove the former totally from the product or will it be there somewhere else? We mean to remove the former totally. However, the feature kind of will be present under Friends segment.

By "Products you may buy"- Is it safe to assume that to be a feature exactly like "people you may know". Only difference is that it'll suggest you new products and drive engagement specific to Marketplace. And since we are planning to swap, this means that we are trying to place it in the same place as we have "people you may know" now. Yup, that is what we are thinkin as well.

Oh, Okay. Is there any specific Objective/ New goal for the quarter that is making us to think this way? Yeah, Marketplace has been a new major feature release the previous year and we as a team want to prioritize inncreasing its reach and engagement.

Okay so this situation is related to Facebook at a high level and Facebook Marketplace specifically.

With the above understanding, I would like to proceed into the answer now.

The way I would like to go about it is by,

Understanding the Product/ Feature
List the strategic Choices we have
Evaluate with reasonable Factors
Summary

Background:

Facebook is a product that aims at Bringing people of the world together to form more meaningful connections and make the world more accessible and smaller. People you may know certainly helps us in achieving this Higher level goal of us by suggesting new friends to make whom we know in our real life and would feel great to get in touch with.

While like any other product of FB, Marketplace do meet the above High level goal cleanly and this is more specific to connecting people who are in need of selling and people who are in need of buying. The feature will help us drive engagement to our Marketplace and thus help us Move towards the goal as well.

The competition that we have directly are TikTok, Snapchat. While, OLX kind of startups are specific competition to the Marketplace. Amazon, Flipkarts are not our competition here as our major focus here is just connecting people and not the logistics of ecommerce as a whole.

So in short both the feature is going to help us move towards the goal at a higher level.

So for the present situation, the options that we have straightforward-

Swap the new feature with new one
Don't Swap it!

To evaluvate both the options, I would like to talk about how the products woould perform if one of the other options is present alone hypothetically and talk about the pros and cons that we will face. By Product I'm specifically talking about the following feature-Marketplace and Friends.

So to begin with, First let me assume that we have swapped the feature.

The feature will be there in the news feed and will suggest people on what they could buy next from the Facebook Marketplace. So certainly this will give a new bost for us specifically help us improve the Engagement of the Marketplace. The other positive thing about this is that we can understand more about user's preference about different products and comeup with new ads for them that are more and more personalized. Down the line we can also come up ways of creating revenues through the Marketplace apart from the present Ads.

While the concern here is that though this'll help us to personalize ads for the users, No matter howe accurate the users ads are they are always a friction point in their experience. Moreover, by removing the present friends suggestion, we will certainly affect the users journey in making new friends. With lesser growth in new friends, the content that they get to interact will be less, the feeling of community gets disturbed.

So, in short, though the feature helpsin engaging the audience, it won't be able to bring the common person's world together. This'll only be bringing the community of Buyers and sellers- a small subset. Moreover, this factor will convert the FB's environment into a more and more Marketplace than a community like now.

Next, if there is no swapping, the product stays the same and achieves the overall mission more accurately and would be able to address all the subsets.

So, in best interest of Facebook, it makes more sense not to swap the "People you may know" section as the new feature though follows the goal, is not as great as the existing one in driving the firm to achieve the end goal.