You are the PM for a COVID-19 information portal. What are the goals that you will set for the team?

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You are the PM for a COVID-19 information portal. What are the goals that you will set for the team?

Asked at Meta (Facebook) over a year ago

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Joe_riley · Answer 1 · 2022-07-21T16:05:48+0000

Context

First off, let's briefly establish what this COVID-19 information portal is and more importantly why users use it. I'm imagining the COVID-19 information portal as a browser accessible resource dedicated to displaying accurate information about the state of COVID-19 in the world as it evolves over time. Users can visit the portal for a variety of reasons including:

Up to date information on the # of positive cases
Safety Guidelines and Recommendations
Vaccination and Testing Site Locations

Product Goal

I'm envisioning the goal of our product is to increase the overall health and safety of our users and the greater community by providing access to reliable information on the disease.

Metrics

In order to measure our success towards our goal, I would want to focus our efforts on two things.

The first is, are we effectively meeting the needs of our users? More specifically, are we able to concisely and clearly provide them with the COVID-19 related information they are looking for. The best way of measuring this is through looking at both engagement and retention. Metrics we could monitor include:

Average number of pages viewed per session
Average session length
% of users who viewed 5 pages last week who also viewed 5 pages this week

Once we've established that users are in fact engaging consistently and repeatedly with the COVID-19 information we are providing, I would want to focus our efforts on making sure our information portal is in the hands of everyone who wants it. To measure that we could look at:

Page Rank for Common Search Terms
Unique Weekly Active Users
# of unique referral sources

Tradeoffs

While I'm confident in our above goals and the metrics we will use to measure them, they aren't perfect so I think it's worth spending a minute to briefly touch upon some of the down sides.

The metrics we're looking at to monitor our goals are high level and don't give us much granularity into how certain aspects of the portal may be performing. For example, maybe 90% of our traffic is coming from a single state or 95% of the time spent on our site is people finding testing sites. We wouldn't know.
We are measuring our ability to provide helpful COVID-19 information by looking at engagement, but there is the counter argument here that users could be spending more time on the portal or looking at more pages because they can't efficiently find what they are looking for.

Summary

As the creators of a COVID-19 information portal we are going to focus our efforts on two primary goals:

To effectively and efficiently deliver helpful information about COVID-19 to our users
To put our portal in the hands of everyone who wants it

Harpreet Kaur · Answer 2 · 2021-10-22T02:12:00+0000

Clarifing question

COVID information Portal: As I understand, this feature provides authentic COVID information to users

Users visit directly to help ceneter and look for information
Users when post anything related to COVID are directed to COVID portal for moe information
Any controversial information posted by the user is flagged for fact check.
Some posts are also added in user timeline related to updates

Is this understanding of COVID portal correct or am I missing any important detail?

Objective:

If this is correct, then the goal of this feature is to provide accurate verfied information related to COVID and reduce the spread of false information.

Metrics:

This portal was created in the last year as there were so many questions in the mind of people regarding COVID.Since, this is not around for a longer time, I will first focus on Awareness and adoption metrics

Awareness and adoption metrics:

1. % of FB users who have clicked on this PORTAL. This helps us to know how many people are aware that this feature exists.

2. % of unique users who clicked this portal also searched/read some information

3. DAU and MAU using this feature.

4. Retention over 30 days.

5. Average time spent per user on this portal

6. Average number of articles read per user

7. % of time users click on Fact check warning message and read why this post is flagged

8. # of shares of posts that are flagged for fact checks . Trend with time should be decresing

Prioritize: #1 and 2

Lokesh Kumar R · Answer 3 · 2021-06-20T10:08:12+0000

Before jumping in to answer the question I would like to Improve my understanding of the question through some clarification and validating some assumptions.

Assumptions/Clarification

Is this website a part of Government Body's Awareness or a Private Entity's product? Government Body's Awareness
Are we catering to only one type of Information sharing like the Count updates or are we also dealing with creating awareness on the necessarry precautions, Symptoms and everything related? The latter case is true
Are there any pre-selected goal we have decided? No, we want you to select.

With the above information, I would next want to decide upon our goal, as with the goal, we can understand the actions of our users and can measure it with metrics.

Since, the whole product is a part of Gvernment project, there is no sense to talk about Monetization as the whole information is solely for user's knowledge. So this is directly out of our consideration. At the same time, it is certain that we would want to have a check on the users engaging with the information and make sure this to be accessible to everyone so that spreading of false propaganda and information can be controlled.

Though this is more of a qualitative goal, I would like to fix engagement as the important goal that we should measure as with that increasing, People would get to know where to find the "Actual" Information and help us attain our actual goal. Thus in short, Awareness and Engagement can be used as a proxy for what we need.

So in general actions that user would take or basically the user journey will be:

Search for information through various browsers
Lands in our page
Finds what is needed by going through numbers, or graphs, or just the dashboard with few important metrics, or informations on how to stat safe and sound.
Leaves the website

Metrics:

Traffic source (if the source from different search engines, then the performance of our site is extremely well)
Impressions on the Home Page per day
Avg. Time spent on Home Page and the time spent by 99%ile visitors in the home page
CTR to the graph pages
CTR to the Data
CTR to Information page
Avg. Time spent on different sections and the time spent by 99%ile visitors on different sections
% of people downloading the visualizations out of 100 impressions on the site
Bounce Rate
Heat Map on where users clicked, scrolled etc..

Out of the above set of metrics, I wouuld like toprioritize metrics on the impact they have at end user, Easiness to calculate.

So the metrics that I'll look out for are:

Avg. Time spent on different sections and the time spent by 99%ile visitors on different sections
Traffic Source

1 will help us to find how easy it is for users to find what they came looking for and how easy it is for users to understand the visualizations

While 2 lets us understand the awareness that we have and as mentioned before if the trafic source from different search engines being high means that we are doing great.