You're the PM for a new Meta product called Audio Rooms. What goals would you set for this product?

Understanding the problem

First off, let's briefly establish a common definition of what Audio Rooms is and how users use it. Audio Rooms is a recently launched Facebook mobile app specific feature where users can find and join live audio rooms hosted by certain groups and public figures. The hosts control who can speak in the audio room. The audience members can send reactions. Users are made aware of Audio Rooms through notifications and their feed. 

In order to properly set the stage for this question, it's important to examine Audio Rooms in the context of it's parent company Meta and it's mission. Meta's mission statement is to bring the world closer together and give people the ability to build community. Audio Rooms directly supports this mission statement by letting public figures and leaders do live broadcasts to their follower communities. 

Metrics

It's worth noting that there are two distinct users here, the listeners and creators (audio room hosts). Both are important, our metrics and goals should encapsulate success for both of them.

There are a bunch of different metrics we could use to track how users are interacting with Audio Rooms, in order to stay organized and provide structure I like to group metrics by the different steps in the user lifecycle. 

Awareness 

• Listeners: # of listeners who have seen an audio room notification or post in their feed, # of 
• Creators: I'm not sure how creators are made aware of the ability to make an audio room, maybe we measure something like the number of opens on the newsletter announcing it or look at product update notification views

Activation

• Listeners: # of listeners who have joined an audio room at least once
• Creators: # of creators who have created an audio room

Engagement

• Listeners: # of listeners who have spent at least 30+ minutes in an audio room / week, Average time spent in audio rooms per listener,  # of listeners who have joined 2+ different audio rooms / week, average number of users in an audio room, average number of reactions per user in an audio room
• Creators: # of creators who have created 2+ audio rooms / month,  average audio room length, average # of audio rooms created per user / month

Retention

• Listeners: % of listeners who spent at least 30 minutes in audio room last week who also spent 30 minutes in an audio room this week
• Creators: % of creators who created 2+ audio rooms last month who also created 2+ audio rooms this month

Monetization

• Listeners: # of ad impressions from audio room pages
• Creators: average promotion revenue per audio room (assuming creators can pay to promote their audi rooms in the newsfeed)

Referrals

• Listeners: # of times listeners tagged other people in Audio Room posts, # of times audio room links were shared by listeners
• Creators: This is really more of a niche scenario, maybe we could track the number of times the product update post announcing this creatoe feature was shared

My framework for answering this Facebook PM interview metrics question.

FB’s mission: To give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together.

Describe FB audio rooms:

• creators can create a live audio room where they can have real-time conversations with their peers and fans, without the pressure of being on camera.
• Only hosts can create a live audio room.

FB audio rooms’ goal:

• Provide users with a social audio platform to engage with others in the community and facilitate meaningful conversations.

Business benefits:

• engagement & retention: give people more value they can use FB for and increase the stickiness of FB
• monetization: FB takes a cut from FB Stars

Users groups:

• Hosts
  • public figures
  • creators
• Speakers
• Listeners

User actions:

Before the audio room begins

• Hosts
  • create/schedule a live audio room
  • invite speakers to your room
  • publicize the event to their followers
• speakers
  • publicize the event to their followers
• listeners
  • RSVP to event

When the live audio room is in progress

• hosts
  • keep live audio room for a decent amount of time to provide more chances for meaningful conversations to take place
  • moderate the live audio room
  • invite listeners to be speakers
  • end audio room
• speakers
  • participate in the discussions
• listeners
  • listen to the discussions
  • react to discussion through comments, reactions
  • purchase “stars”
  • send “stars”
  • make donations
  • request to be speakers

Metrics:

• The average duration of the live audio room
  • this is a guardrail to ensure conversations are meaningful, a live audio room that only lasts 5 min may not be meaningful to the creators/listeners
• Engagement rate of the live audio room, weighted scoring based on
  • number of engaged speakers (e.g. joining, unmuting to speak, time spent)
  • number of engaged listeners (e.g. joining, reacting, commenting, requesting to be a speaker, tipping, donating, time spent)
  • duration
• % of live audio rooms with a high engagement rate
  • I’d break down the engagement rate into buckets of High, Medium, Low.
  • Work with data science to determine a baseline of what represents a high engagement live audio room (e.g., at least 20 minutes of duration, 2 speakers, 10 listeners, etc.)
• Creator conversion rate (number of users who create or schedule a live audio room/number of users click “Create live audio room”
  • This will help us determine any bumpy steps in the UX of creating a live audio room. Live audio rooms are essentially a 2-sided marketplace, and audio room creation is our Supply, so we have to maintain a healthy supply to keep the market going.
• Number of hosts creating live audio rooms per month
  • If the conversion rate is one of your key metrics, it's important to balance that with overall volume as well to make sure you aren't missing the full picture

North star metric

For this, I would choose

% of live audio rooms with High Engagement Rate

Since not everyone is eligible to become a host, my primary concern is not the acquisition of hosts or the overall creation of live audio rooms. My primary concern is when a live audio room is in progress, how engaged are the speakers and listeners, how is it driving towards the overall business goal of providing a social audio platform for meaningful conversations.