Meta Trade Off Prompts
One of three types of execution prompts, Trade off prompts can be standalone or tacked on to the end of another type of question, like success metrics. The answer boils down to the higher level goal.
The Core Steps
Establish the higher-level goal
Determine decision metirc
Develop Hypothesis for experiment
Establish Secondary Metrics
Setup Experiment
Determine Biases and Tradeoffs with experiment setup
You will notice two common patterns:
Should we do X new thing? (trade off is status quo vs new)
Shoule we do X or Y?
The Prompts
Should we do X?
One smart Engineer came to you with the idea that we should show recommended Marketplace items on Newsfeed. What will you do?
How would you decide to display ads on newsfeed? After every 100 posts or 25 posts? Evaluate tradeoffs
Product Manager comes to me, Data Scientist and tells me that the "share" feature is not improving engagement. Lets take it out. How would you, as a Data Scientist evaluate that feature.
If you are the PM for new user registration at FB, and user research comes to you with a suggestion to remove picture requirement, how would you decide?
If we were to make a change to FB Newsfeed (showed screenshot of change) what are the tradeoffs from making this change? What would you do if X goes up but Y goes down?
Profile Pictures - Comes up more than most
Profile Pictures are mandatory today. What if it was made optional going forward? Evaluate.
How will you evaluate the option of making a profile picture optional during user signup?
Should we launch/invest in new product X?
Mark wants to know if FB should invest in building products related to sports and activity tracking. Why and what should FB build?
It's 2016, how would you decide whether to launch Facebook Stories?
How would you decide whether or not to ship reactions?
X vs Y
You are the PM of notifications. How would you determine the trade offs between showing your friend’s fundraiser or the event they are going to / created?
You’re the PM for newsfeed and you have to decide whether to show more videos or more events, what do you do?
You are PM of FB IG stories, we just launched and thinking as part of the launch to show a unit of our IG stories as a unit on FB feed instead of PYMK. How would you decide?
How would you decide whether to have click-to-play or autoplay on videos on newsfeed?
Could sound like a Root Cause Analysis
If you are the PM for FB Shops and you see the items sold per week is up but the # of messages on marketplace is down, how would you evaluate this tradeoff?
Could sound like a Metrics for Success
Your team is proposing removing profile photo upload step in onboarding flow. What metric would you look at?
Part of a series on Facebook Product Manager Interview Questions.
