STRATEGIC Analytical/Execution Product Mock Interview: How to sound more strategic

let's say you're the PM on Instagram reals why did we build this and how would you define success for this product hi everyone this is Diana as you know this channel is for you guys to excel at your product interviews and we have no better person today to show us an analytical and execution interview then Harris so can you give a short intro of yourself hi everyone my name is Harris I spent the majority of my career working at startups in the fintech space and I'm really excited to be uh started at meta taking a

different career chapter and working with some of the best and brightest yay and how did we met yeah so I saw some of Diana's videos online and I reached out for some of the case study questions as I Was preparing for the meta interviews yeah couldn't recommend her highly enough to everyone congrats again on Harris for getting the offer excited to see you spent a career there so with that Harris has graciously offered to give back to the community to show how it's done to pass one of these analytical interviews that you guys struggle with

so the question we have today for you Harris is let's say you're the PM on Instagram reals why did we build this and how would you define success for this product cool um okay so I'm gonna assume that we are new to build it it does not exist yet in this in this question is that cool y works right well give me 30 seconds and I'm going to write down some thoughts on the product and the users okay perfect yeah take your time all right um so first I want to go over the overall architecture

of the product and its users to me short form video content the reason we're building it is because um one we Instagram has been trying to get into get Beyond social media for a little while there was an there was a near acquisition of Vine years ago obviously Tik Tok is huge previously there was lasso this really feels like an integration of lasso into Instagram reals which is ultimately what happened and the reason is is that you know to get more social engagement you actually need to prompt people with entertainment like you see a funny

reel and you do send it to people it's a secondary layer to engaging your users allowing them to become different types of creators rather than just posting static images and also keeping them on for longer so uh there are four sides to this ecosystem for me there's the content creator which is anyone who creates a real right virality is something people achieve it's not a given based on where you came from um there are there's the audience that's the user base that's anyone who's watching reals regardless of whether they create content or not seeing you

know major celebrities comment on reals uh they're the advertisers who are our profit Center for this because we are showing people ads based on their engagement on reals and there's us as the platform and you know we benefit not just from the revenue of advertis but we also benefit from like the cross-pollination of people spending time on reels so I'm going to go through next the metrics for each one of those users okay so the most important of them is actually the user right so the key metric for the user is GNA be uh the

number of time spent on a daily level for the users you could also smooth that out to weekly I'm going to say daily because I definitely dive into reals or Tik Tok and I'm spending like maybe 40 minutes on a a you know on a random day doing that you want to see the number of sessions so this is people opening up the app you can see that the average number of daily reels and then you want to see the number of engagements I'm defending engagement as commenting liking sharing right I definitely have friends who

just like send me content all day and it's just like almost piled up like homework that I have to do that evening to go through it um so that's how I would track the success of the users being entertained and liking this product right they're there for a long time they're going multiple times a day and they're actively engaging with it right it's not like Netflix shows playing while you're asleep it's they're actively sharing the content that's a good point we're making them into addicts okay yeah yeah then there's the content creators and these are

the people who view us as a platform where they can gain like some sort of clout or they can you know engage with an audience or they can be silly on the internet being silly on the Internet is a huge business opportunity so what I would want to look at there is there's two different types of accounts on Instagram there's a Creator account and a user account anyone can upgrade to a Creator account but you want to see that more people are becoming creators you want to see that this is a green field for people

because you ultimately want to keep you want to make sure you have like a bountiful Garden of a ton of brilliant people posting content to your platform and this content can be cross-pollinated from YouTube and Tik Tok to Instagram but you want more of it you want a huge Library I would say that that's weekly because you want to see the number of weekly uh Creator accounts growing right that's your population of creative people having fun and you want to see the number of posts on a daily level right or a weekly level I went

with daily p is I want to honestly track the ritual of when people are posting their content right if it's a daily job that they have I want to know if most people are posting on a Saturday or a Tuesday and what their workflow is just out of curiosity for me as the scientist hat that a PM runs the next um before we get into platform I'm curious yeah the next one we want to do is we want to make sure it's not a toxic space so we want to see reported posts you know the

safety of our uses is really important to the health of an ecosystem so you want to look at the number of reports over a given weekly basis right are people posting illegal content is this becoming a really unsafe space for young people young people in social media is a huge objective for meta and part of that is making sure that you know like it's a sa it's it's safe for people it's not a toxic environment it's you know it's and that will lead into people having more fun spending more time engaging more um another thing

we want to look at and this is a you know this is something that I think I if I went back in time I would change is I want to look at the average time spent um on the platform as well because people are hopping between reals and their feed and I want to see what they're most and how long that's how much that is changing on a weekly basis based on our execution of the reals product weekly advertisers um I would want to see like how much ad spend we have and what that means

to us uh because ultimately this is a huge way for our ad a isers to engage with new content and we want to make sure that they're that they see it as Bountiful too um and I want and I would want to look at the clickthrough rate of those ads right are users on reals just passing through the ads are we still showing them good advertisements it's still engaging content as an advertisement question before we move on are you for Content creators so to your point we want to see more Creator accounts we want to

see see them post more is it important to measure that whatever they're posting is of quality content or do we just care about let's just pump out quantity here so this is an interesting question right because for shortterm video content um some of it can be really expensive to produce some of it can be really cheap like I've seen multi- billion dollar companies produce like Day in the Life get ready with me videos as advertisements for their products we are not the judge of high quality content the users are going to be the judge of

that we'll learn from them but being that we're taking like a green field kind of case study here where reels does not exist we have no idea what that is like the users are going to decide what they like and what's high quality that could be a POV video of someone just ranting about anything um from a poorly lit you know anywhere or that could be like a multi a multi-million dollar you know clip of a TV show that people splice together it's not for us to decide Fair yeah one of my favorite content creators

I forgot his name but he is filming in the bathroom I don't know if you've seen guy oh um is he the guy who like with glasses yeah I have seen him he's funny the librarian looking guy and I'm just like how is this content becoming viral but that is his design and style and you were saying the users are the judge of how good the content is how might that be reflected yeah so bad content while people definitely send cringe things to each other bad content will get less engagement right and it's because and

but like even defining what is bad is very hard for me right because bad can be like overly commercial to some people I have no idea what those are and but I will know by watching this data the data as in the number of engage that you have there number of Engagement time spent what people are sharing how they're talking about it um you know and there's more granular data that I didn't put up here but that we would see if we had like a healthy you know 30 40 different measurement dashboard we could check

check on things we're just engaging with the product ourselves like any product manager who doesn't use the product they manage is a bad product manager I always say dog food your products even the most senior level executives at Facebook our dog fooding their products awesome all right so these are the key metrics any other metrics you want to introduce maybe we could talk about yeah Downstream yeah uh absolutely my North Star I'm gonna say is like daily time spent because I want to see that going up on each individual day or smoothed out over weeks

is what I would have and that would be like if I see a ton of time spent on a like within then I know that the product is engaging in addictive um I do want to talk about some counter metrics just to make sure that before the counter metrics I actually had an additional question going back to the last slide okay so here I'm aligned uh on the first users piece we want to see more people spending time we want them to see to see them coming back and also engaging I'm curious if this is

happening let's say we see okay a million minutes and that is coming from 10 users would that still be successful for Instagram reals that is a really good call out yes I would want to see the population of people engaging with that um it would be interesting to break out that 10 users spending a million minutes the number of sessions they have so there's a little bit of guard reiling by monitoring the sessions but I agree I see your point there um yeah maybe time spent may not be the correct North Star let's go with

number of sessions then as uh to guard rail it right we want to see more sessions going up I think I was getting less to the point that that's not a good North Star moris around are there additional metrics we might consider to make sure we're seeing the whole picture right cuz now with those three metrics it could be coming from five people yeah what might we consider as additional metrics to make sure daily active users let's say um to make sure that that number goes up so that's individual unique accounts that are engaging mats

on a daily level that's a great call out okay yeah why do you think that's important to track also Suess we want to make sure we haven't built a product for just five users right like popularity is not just the depth of loyalty of a customer like this is not going to be a niche uh product this has to have wide appeal and we need to measure that wide appeal by having a ton of individual daily active users right that's um people individually out of their day just opening their phone and checking it they can

have one session but we want to see that that number is so you know correlated to the time spent that there's a healthy amount of time spent across many different users creating a healthy audience for our content creators for our advertisers as opposed to just five die hards spending all day let's say we had to present so beyond the nordstar we had to present the top three metrics whenever we have our uh let's say bi-weekly product review with leadership which those top metrics would you choose so I would narrow it down to probably time spent

number of sessions daily active users and then I would want to monitor I would want to monitor the number of posts that we have a week and then um the probably the weekly advertisers just like this is how many advertisers are buying within this ecosystem this is the health of the ecosystem creating new content this is the amount of you know eyeball attention that this ecosystem is getting from users so for the content creators while it's really important to have a number of new accounts once we do have a ecosystem of existing content creators it's

going be really important to make sure that our library of content is always expanding for the number of weekly advertisers we want to make sure that advertisers are still finding this to be a valuable resource for them to tap into because it is still ultimately about like what is the health of this product for us as a business that Revenue positive all of those things rely on users spending time across multiple sessions on a daily or if not daily then weekly basis to show that it's still valuable for a content creator to develop content and

share it with people and that advertisers want to be part of that mix all right because we're now creating a new different type of connection on on Instagram where we have short form Video Entertainment um I think Downstream M would be like the F the purely social photo post kind of Life update may take a backseat and I'd want to check the measurement of this so I'd look at like real posts versus photo posts and I would also want to check like so a lot of content that leads with an image can actually have very

long written essays underneath it on Instagram it's a it's probably the most predominant way of communicating right now especially sincere you know attached to a human individual communication as opposed to being a little bit more silly uh like short form video content might I would want to look at how the introduction of short form video which doesn't necessarily have to be entertaining but often is uh affects this other ecosystem right like do people who want to communicate with images still think Instagram is a good place to be to do that that we are only predominantly

adding to our ecosystem as opposed to replacing or taking away and a question that you had mentioned reals is coming in to provide entertainment a lot of that entertainment is coming from creators that are not necessarily your friends and family yeah I guess initially Instagram was created and things with stories or to connect with close friends and family totally the mission statement of Instagram is to connect the world's moments right or to share the world's moments um this is I you're still able to share the world's moments with short form video but it is a

shift from posting an individual memory of me and my friends together and sharing that to my friends and family now it is um you know a different of media a different type of communication how do we think that is going to impact the platform I think it actually makes people more readily an audience so because people if reals replaces Instagram photo engagement we might actually see that photo posts go down like people are less interested in just taking a photo and posting it as an update especially because they also have stories as an option um

because they now view Instagram as like more of an entertaining thing engaging with content they don't follow right um and I think that that would be something we'd want to check on the health of for our ecosystem constantly and would we be sad about that that was we saw world as the product manager for now a leading product at Instagram that's kind of changed the system if it's successful I would want to be aware of the consequences of it and make sure that we're all aligned that those are the proper consequences I think Shifting the

behavior is something that you know um I want to make sure that Instagram I would if nobody ever posted to Instagram again they just did it I would be sad about that because I like Instagram for for its social aspects what we want to make sure is that people see this as additive and not subtractive if people were to stop posting to Instagram I would you know there's a whole set of tools's a whole library of content there's people who have created huge brilliant profiles sharing different things Niche interests anything you care about uh that

would kind of be forgotten so I would be sad about that yeah I feel like we're kind of already seeing that a lot of the profiles I don't have photos or like zero photos and stories so interesting all right let's cover counter metrics and then I have a trade-off question for you totally so I think the biggest thing that I would use as a counter metric is you want to see that it's a healthy ecosystem and I'm coming from more of a compliant standpoint so I was thinking I'm thinking about post reported as you create

this totally Green Field pasture for people to develop their own content and and but to make sure that those posts are not being reported by Bots and things like that that it doesn't just become a way for people to abuse our compliance system by you know just being mean and Reporting things you want to look at the number of successful appeals so you want to see this applet ratio for building a healthy essentially a new media product right like this is competing with television long form media you want to see that it's something that people

are being judicious with how they care about it um so there's you know that two layer and that for me is the most important counter metric just to make sure that the content is engaging and also um I don't want to you I don't want to overuse the word safe but it's things that we believe should be on the platform taking like a non-editorial bias [Music] what might give us the inkling something is not safe um I would look at if we see you know not knowing the apis if we saw that a number of

bots were just posting to Instagram tons of reals just engagement farming and that it wasn't necessarily quality content or that it was you know deeply racist or something like that you know we are seeing that our ecosystem is going to become unhealthy and that it's going to push away users who might have really been really enjoying that Community uh product that we built and that will ultimately affect uh people willing to be content creators our ability to create new media for people to engage with or to surface New Media for people to engage with the

content creators create the media all right so let's go off to the trade-off question it's a question for you would we rather see a 100 reals with a million views each or a million reals with 100 views each and why and feel free to take a minute yeah I'm gonna take a minute I you won't be shocked by my answer from what I've have said in this but I have this is an interesting one so I've got some notes [Music] and I think that uh one we got to measure this I'm not going to come

with you conclusion um until the end but I would want to measure both areas whether we have a 100 reels with a ton of content or one million reels with very limited engagement I'd want to measure the number of Impressions uh that both sides have the engagement that both sides have uh the time spent and then also looking at like our advertisers and our platform side um how many experiments can we really run with just 100 pieces of cont of short form video content there's only there is in fact a limited number of Arrangements you

can have I know it's exponentially huge but you can do it way more arrangements with a million right and you can do way more engaging arrangements with a million like I would want to see which user is engaged with like really deeply that you know one version of a hundred pieces of content that we had uh and then how do we make this an ecosystem for advertisers like that is still very important to this product so with all of that information that's what I would used to monitor I've kind of EX you know I don't

want to reason to my conclusion but I would want a million reels with a 100 videos each because you've got way more experimentation that you can do to show people exactly what they're looking for you uh as a media platform doing short from video you can never have a limit on the media you have right people it is about the infinite scroll to get people's engagement and if you only have 100 reals short form video of a max length of 10 minutes people will go through that in a day very quickly and then your product

is over for them there's no more user Journey there's no more success for that user even if they loved it I would rather have a million real and we can keep kind of honing the product making it easier for people to build really high quality engagement and sharing it to users based on like a unique profile where they've engaged with you know rare what is essentially like a rare piece of content with only 100 views and see what helps you know we would be building uh whole media platform from the ground up but if you're

a content creator and you're one of the first million pieces of content that's awesome if you get a 100 views for the 100 reels well first you mentioned me measuring number of Impressions The Impressions would be the same right The Impressions would all be the same I would say though like if you there is a drop off rate right so they all have one million views um but I'd want to see kind of like how quickly they got those I guess sorry the pace of Impressions is a better way to measure that right so how

long has this content been up there as well if I if the hundred reals each got a million views within you know 90 minutes of being posted that's more compelling than if it's been up there for two weeks and what do you think the personas of creators or content is for one of these 100 reels with million views versus these 1,000 reels with 100 views I don't I don't actually like I um like I mentioned earlier in interview I actually don't know I mean if they have a million views it's probably likely that they are

cross-pollinating different applications you know what I mean so they already have an Instagram profile they've already developed you know a following on Instagram they may have ported this over from Tik Tock because Tik Tok was an earlier product had the short from video I'm not actually sure though because again um I'm not going to have information if this is at the outset of the product I'm not going to have information what has gone viral as a short firm video on Instagram I think that if it's higher quality like let's say it's commercial grade film I

would be worried that we've just created something to compete with television as opposed to creating something that's fun for people to engage with where they feel like they can become a Creator easily themselves all right that's a good point so we're kind of seeing the 100 reels are more commercial influencer based content one million reals are coming from kind of Everyday People yeah exactly and like I said I have no reason to believe that I would know what should be viral versus the user awesome all right let's conclude it there thank you Harris so we

are going to go through some feedback what's working because there are definitely a lot of strong points here and then I'm GNA have Harris give you some tips on how you prep for the interview so you guys can Ace this as well so let's go through some feedback what's working and what are some other opportunity areas so obviously I had Harris do this because he killed it in his analytical interviews and we know that because he passed but also some things I want to call out that you'll want to mimic one Harris showed a lot

of the Strategic thinking behind the analytical interview combined with the user empathy that stood out to be very strong so for example some examples talking about why Instagram reals was built versus some the other normal Instagram static content is the focus around departure from connecting with friends and family towards the entertainment angle so that's something you're seeing in Industry as gone a lot of people joke we've switched from social media to mass media sadly but that is what is capturing engagement and time spent at the end of the day so throughout just the interview he

sprinkled these sort of strategic thoughts that gave us confidence that he understood what's going on with the industry but also to bring in all parties so you constantly saw him bring it back to okay we also need to make this a viable business and henting point into these things so that was one great thing that stood out between you and most other candidates I've interviewed or have coached second most folks going through these interviews will just list these metrics mechanically what Harris did wonderfully here was he drew a picture of what it means means to

be successful on the platform so for example we went through time spent number of sessions engagements so we had the metrics but he kind of Drew out a world in Instagram is successful if people are spending 40 minutes of your day like you were if they're coming back regularly and if they're interacting with content like this so often these interviews they're called analytical but there is a huge user empathy component and the ability for a product manager to Define what success even looks like I would say is even more important than just listing a bunch

of metrics so that was another key thing that I think you stood out doing versus most of the other folks that I've interviewed or interacted so those are two of the strongest points there let's go to the next slide this stood out whenever I've given this question most folks don't mention the ads opportunity here so again going back to the first point bringing in the Strategic element what I might have liked to see more of on the tradeoff S questions was more clarity around what I call this concept of tiebreaker metrics so for example in

both of these cases the views total impressions are the same but what could be the tiebreaker thing to tell us that one example is contributing more to the ecosystem on traditional Instagram versus reals and I guess something I wanted to see there which you did do here um but in that question again what is the unifying thing that's going to matter for the platform versus just trying to save how Instagram started off with right and that's what leads the demise of a lot of companies they stick to what they started off with without realizing well

the trend is going in a certain direction and that's where engagement is going to fall into so what I wanted to hear was you know if traditional Instagram the visuals gets totally unused but we are seeing an increase in time spent or engagement on the platform as a whole it's directionally going in marching towards our goals so that's totally fine there are companies where companies will have to sacrifice things in order to grow the larger pie totally yeah cool all right folks thank you Harris so much for