How would you Improve Facebook Stories?
During the product sense interview, it’s commonly asked how you would improve any given product for that company. Here we’ll explore a possible answer to the question, “How Would You Improve Facebook Stories?”
Facebook’s Mission
Founded in 2004, Facebook’s mission is to give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together. People use Facebook to stay connected with friends and family, to discover what’s going on in the world, and to share and express what matters to them.
Product Definition – Facebook Stories
Facebook Stories is facebook’s (Instagram’s) product where you can post a story (defined as a video or photo). The story resides in the user’s story archive. Friends can react or reply to the stories that the user posts. It’s important to define your view of the product so you and the interviewer are on the same page.
Goal of the Product Improvement
- Acquisition – Fairly new product, not as widely used as compared to Instagram Stories. Metric – % Fb users using the feature
- Activation – Fairly new product, not as widely used as compared to Instagram Stories. Metric – % Fb users using the feature
- Reach – % of users creating stories / % of users viewing stories
- Retention – How many users come back to reuse the product Metric – # of stories viewed per session Metric – # of users repeatedly using the feature. Revenue
- Revenue – I don’t see Facebook stories as a core revenue generator.
Chosen Goal : Improve Activation – Since this is a newer product, I’ll focus on Activation (% of users that use it for the first time). Since we are targeting the top of the funnel it will have a greater impact downstream. In practice, I’ll see the metrics in the customer acquisition funnel to see if there is a drop off at any point and focus on the Tieback to Facebook Mission – Increasing activation in Facebook stories will increase interactions between connections.
Personas
- Content Creators:
- Creators that create often (Power User)
- Creators that only create stories sparingly
- Content Consumers :
- Consumers that consume stories but do not post
- Consumers that consume but also post
Chosen Persona – Content consumers that consume stories but do not post. They know the stories feature exist but do not actively produce content. Justification – Most impactful to focus on the user at the top of the funnel, and where there is most impact. This is also in line with our goal of increasing activation.
User Journey
Heres the user journey defined for our chosen persona who is using Facebook Stories:
Viewing Stories: Opens Fb mobile > go on the news feed > stories are shown at the very top of the news feed > clicks on a story > views to the end of the list of stories > continues onto their newsfeed.
Creating a Story: Open the Facebook app/web > finding the create story button in the newsfeed > decide what to share > record the content (video or photo) > add filters > choose privacy > post a story.
Pain-Points
Following each step of the user journey, we can identify multiple pain points or barriers to post a story.
- UX Trigger to post is not on top of the user’s habit (didn’t think to post)
- Want to post, but don’t know what to share
- Uncomfortable in posting a story or sharing
- Don’t know how to create a story
- Not enough filters or editing options
Prioritizing which pain point to fix In order of impact I’ll order it in the following manner, 1, 2, 4, 3, 5.
Chosen Pain Point – We’ll focus on the pain point of wanting to post but user does not know what to share (second pain point). We chose this since it’s at the top of the funnel. Once a user is “activated” and habit is built, they will more likely post. (Verify with available data)
Possible Solutions
User Case : users that want to share but is not great with producing content:
- FB auto story generation, Based on the user content creates an automated curated story (similar to GoPro or apple photos day summary). Users will only need to review and click one button to post the story. This can also add to “rewinds” creating a story from past events for a “throwback” story.
- Give creative prompts to the user to create a story. For example, Today is your friend’s birthday, create a story to call it out. This can also apply to holidays or community events.
- Give geo spatial prompts, if you’re out at a location where there are had been past stories shared, we can show the user public stories that were taken on that location as a baseline for ideas and prompt to create a similar story.
Chosen Solution
We chose the first solution out of the 3 to focus on the chosen goal of engagement, as well as Facebook’s mission to connect users. Through helping the user auto-generate stories, we will encourage them to share their moments with their connections in an easy fashion. This will also have an impact on the other pain points, by promoting ease of sharing, as well as easing the pain-point of content creation. Cons: The user may not like the auto-generated story. In that respect, they will either not choose to post or they may be triggered to create their own.
Metrics to track : % of user post the created story, # of story posts before and after feature launch%, view session length on the created story (know whether it is effective or not).
Conclusion (How Would You Improve Facebook Stories?)
We chose the goal of increasing activation and usage of the stories product. This ties into Facebook’s mission of creating connections and community. We identified a few personas and decided to focus on the one with most impact. This would be the user who is aware of stories but do not currently post. Focusing on the pain point of not knowing what to post, we proposed the solution of having Facebook auto create stories based on historic posts , in a “throwback” story. We can also auto generate stories based off of existing content on their phone.
A metric that we would track success would be the # of interactions with the auto-generated story, as well as # of successful posts. This would tell us if this feature was successful, but to track the overall success of our initial goal, we would track the # of story posts for a user after this feature was implemented.
Additional Thoughts
We could have gone with either of the two solutions. Interviewers are more interested in your thought process. You will do well as long as you walk through your decisions with a clear framework.
For more information on the Product Management Interview Process please check out our post on Studying for the Product Management Interview and other PM interview questions.
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