You are the PM for FB Story. What metrics would you pick for success?

Clarifying question: 

My understanding is that Meta (Facebook) story is a place where individuals can create posts using text or pictures that would stay alive for 24 hours. Stories disappear post that and are available in the user’s archive. Can businesses create FB stories?

I am going to start by making sure I understand how FB Story aligns with the broader FB mission. Then we will do a quick review of the user journey and see how metrics can help us improve the user experience. We will prioritize one key metric. We will then discuss risks and identify counter metrics to summarize.

FB Mission: The goal of FB is to give the power to the people to build communities and bring the world closer together. FB story enable people to share something they care about with their friends and family. It also helps people stay up to date on what is happening around their social circle. The 24 hour timer encourages people to log in once every 24 hours to catch up. 

Product Objective: I believe the objective for the product is to drive the FB mission by bringing more people together. If we have a good user-base then monetization will follow.

Users:

• Creators

• Viewers

We can segregate the user in many ways (Businesses, Engagement level etc.). For the sake of time, I am going to pick regular users (not businesses). Also, in the case of a broad feature such as FB Story that is being rolled out WW, I would categorize it using a fairly broad bucket: creator and viewer. 

Creator would log into the FB story from many entry points (app, web, mweb) etc. They would then proceed to create a story (text or image) and share with their network for the next 24 hours.

The viewer would log into FB from multiple entry points and see a story displayed in their newsfeed. They may react to the story but either liking, commenting or sharing it.

I would categorize the user journey as acquisition, engagement, retention. 

Now lets prioritize the most important metric. Both creators and consumers are central to the eco-system but if I have to prioritize one, I would go view the viewer. If viewers have a great experience then the creators would benefit as well.

I would prioritize engagement as #1. Engagement is a leading indicator of retention. Users have to find the value in the product and have to get to product market fit first. User adoption is an awareness problem.

There are few downsides. No 1 metric can give a full picture of the business and that is the problem with the metric we have selected. It has 3 problems

1. It does not give the creator side picture. Also it does not show view acquisition and retention

2. It does not show why a viewer likes the story

3. It does not show what happens to the broader FB eco-system. Does the overall time spent on FB goes up or down.

To summarize, I am a PM for FB story, my mission is to create a product that brings people together through daily moments. We looked at various metrics in adoption, engagement, retention. We prioritized the viewer-engagement metric of % of people who react to comment on a story. We also discussed some downsides of this metric. It doesn’t tell us the full picture, it doesn’t tell us what drives this metric and it doesn’t tell us what is the health of the FB ecosystem and we identified some counter metrics to prevent that.