Microsoft Product Manager Mock Interview: Improve Instagram Stories | Product Design

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Last year before PM I was only a viewer of this channel. I would have never imagined being on the flip side. Thank you to the Exponent crew for letting me contribute. Feedback from the viewers is always appreciated 🙏🏻

Feedback point 1, take your time to focus in on your user groups. IMHO, you gave good logic in selecting Gen Z as your target population, however, there are SO many users that fit into Gen Z, you have New content creators, Content watchers who post regularly, Content watchers who don't post regularly and of course, the advertising companies that target the Gen Z population.

By spending more time to develop your Gen Z category, 1, it shows the interviewee that you are able to develop sound & rationale users that fit into Gen Z & 2, the more defined your users, the better you can define their problems & 3 the more defined you have your user groups, the better the products features you can come up with to solve the problem.

for example, let's take Gen Z Content Creators - we can say something like " We know that short form content us currently the rave, as a result we see more Gen Z content creators on multiple services such as TikTok, Snap and Facebook/instagram stories. One of the problems could be that our content creators do not get as much engagement (likes/follows/comments) as they do on the other products, so they give up on our platform and move to another. As a result, our content dries up which has a knock on effect downstream.

By having this detail, you can then build better products such as a feature that gives new content creators a temporary increase in engagement, and then, when the engagement drops off, we give them another bit of engagement which keeps them on the platform and keeps them using this product and creating more content.

Feedback point 2 - NEVER focus on the business problems - ALWAYS focus on the Customer problems. Companies like Facebook & Google want to see you be empathetic to the customer and create solutions for the customer .

Feedback point 3:
Clarification questions were somewhat iffy. Should look to ask questions such as "What problem has the business observed which has driven us to want to improve instagram stories" , "Are we working to any time constraints ?" "Are we targetting a specific platform (asked)" etc

There were more business problems than user problems. I would suggest viewers to take note of that as a downfall.

I love you guys’ content, but can you please start adding feedback at the end of these sessions too like what went wrong in the interview and how could it have been improved.

As the interviewer kept reiterating, first two pain points sound more like business pain points, and not user pain points. GenZ as a segment does not care about decrease in usage or revenue, Instagram does.
Interviewer did keep hinting towards that, and how to connect competition with user pain point would have been how user has more options in terms of interactive elements with TikTok, and not so much with Instagram.

I would probably also like to understand why do we want to improve? and how do we define improvement?/business objective before moving on to the users and pain points

Also PM at Microsoft, it feels like a missed opportunity to specify business objectives first of Instagram stories first and foremost, and ask clarifying questions that are relevant to what was asked such as "What exactly are we trying to improve here: user retention, new users, increased revenue per active user, etc". I'd also say the users are not specific enough and do not illustrate an understanding of those that are engaging with this feature.

The start was great. But it went downhill pretty quickly.

The 2 things i liked most were:
- How she clarified the scope of ig stories and gave a short user journey before starting to think about the question.
- The fact that she wrote down the mission of the company as well as the mission of the team.

The 2 things that could have been better were:
- real user pain points rather than ig pain points
- Better solutions (maybe one moonshot?) because this was a video shoot and am assuming they practiced or thought about it before

My humble opinion: I would start with north metrics, engagement or revenue etc. Then have some trade offs about why we diving into engagement.
Then go with the user segmentation:
1. Top content creators who post stories frequently.
2. Waist users who sometimes posted stories.
3. Users who barely or never posted stories

I would guess the 3rd type of users takes around 50% of the user base. Features could be how to lure them start posting stories etc.

These pain points seem more like business (IG) pain points for selected user group. I would list consumer pain points something on the lines of - 1) cannot re share stories 2) i see duplication of content in stories and in my feed 3) i cannot see stories anywhere other than top of the feed page etc.

Really helpful content! However, there is one major flaw in this interview - the goal to improve was not discussed. I feel the clarifying questions and the entire case for that matter would have a much better direction and end result. This is just a note for the viewers of this video. Keep up the good work, Exponent team :)

Very helpful content, please continue focussing on PM-related discussion. Thank you!

Great content guys! Extremely helpful and insightful

Does it make the most sense to segment users by age group? I was thinking more along the lines of user types 1. celebrities 2. content accounts 3. influencers 4. regular users (within this high/low/0 frequency posters). Will perhaps prioritize the low/0 frequency regular users group to increase postings/engagement

Can you link the google doc in the caption?

Sounds good

Irrelevant clarifying questions, no goals discussed, random user segmentation, pain points which are nowhere close to being pain points.

I need an explanation what improving IG stories got to do with hardware?

She is really good. Very good thinking.