Asking how you would measure success for a product is a common product metrics question asked during Product Management Interviews. Here is a flavor of a product metric interview question that is common with Facebook PM interviews. We will take a deep dive into how you would measure success for Instagram Stories.
These product metric questions will test how you think through actual product decisions as a Product Manager. For the framework, we would first reiterate the understanding of the product. Secondly, we will pick a goal metric to improve Instagram Stories. Third, we define the personas, user journey, and then dive into the metrics and prioritization.
Product Definition – Instagram Stories
First, in the framework, we define our understanding of Instagram stories as a product. Instagram stories are where users are able to post content, both video, and photo to a portion of their profile. These “stories” are temporary, but the creators can opt to save them as a featured story on their profile. The Instagram news feed is mainly for photos. Instagram stories are mainly for videos and spontaneous sharing of the user’s daily experiences.
Defining The Mission – Facebook’s and Instagrams Mission Statement
Defining the company’s mission helps to guide the goals and focus of a solution. Facebook’s mission is to provide a community and bring the world closer together. Users of Facebook stay connected with friends and family to discover what’s going on in the world, and to share what’s important to them. (Discover and share)
Goals – Goals of Instagram Stories
Define The Goals of Instagram Stories If we take a look at the original launch release messaging. The Goal of IG stories was to allow users to share moments from any time during the day. It seems to help promote a habit of sharing. For people that worry about their Instagram feed, stories help by promoting randomness and being separate from the feed itself. “Don’t worry about overposting”, minimizing a friction point to post.
Personas – Instagram Story Personas
- Content Creators – Users who create stories to share with others
- Casual Creators – everyday content creators, your friends
- Merchant creators – businesses who create content to promote a brand event
- Influencers – individuals who have a high amount of followers
User Journey
User Journey For Creators
Open IG > click on your profile picture + > choose video or photo > edit (add filters, stickers custom apps etc > post > receive reactions from friends > respond to reactions
User Journey For Consumers
Open IG > click on a profile in the story feed up top > swipe through stories > send message reactions > close out of stories
Define Product Metrics
Keeping the Goal and facebook’s mission in mind, the goal of IG stories aligns with Facebook’s mission to foster sharing and connection between friends. For people to share, and others to discover what’s important to them.
If we view this through the lens of user behavior, how do we define an engaged user? An engaged user for stories can be one that uses the feature often, and frequently. Diving into the product in more detail, an engaged user would not only post frequently but spend time crafting the right story. In terms of # of stickers added, # of edits, time spent before posting. Given now that Instagram Stories is a more mature product, engagement can be defined as the use and adaptation of additional and new features such as new filters and stickers.
Chosen Persona – Content Creators – Behavior we want to track to measure how engaged and habit forming the content creators are.
These metrics should relate back to the user journey to track the behavior at each step.
Acquisition
We’ll define acquisition by a user opening up the IG story feature.
Activation
We can define Activation as the number of people that has posted a story at least once.
Engagement
- # of stories created per day
- The time between story creation
- Length of time spent creating stories (editing adding music/gifs)
- # of custom edits per story (gifs/ custom drawings/filters)
- Length of video stories
- # of stories created per week
- number of stories saved to highlights
- # of viewers to their stores
- # of user replays per story
- Stories to IG posts ratio Retention
- # of stories created DoD, WoW , MoM per cohort
Success Metrics Prioritization to Measure Success For Instagram Stories
The measure of success for Instagram Stories we defined is increased engagement between connected users. I would mainly focus on the views/replays and reactions to each story. This will help measure how engaged users are in creating the story and if it has been turned into a habit. Also, I would track the usage of stories vs scrolling the traditional newsfeed per session. This would help to see if the user has been spending more time on Instagram and if so how much of it is devoted to using stories. Check out other PM Interview questions here.