Diagnose Falling Instagram Feed Post Engagement While Stories Engagement Holds Up
Company: Meta
Role: Product Manager
Category: Analytics & Experimentation
Difficulty: medium
Interview Round: Other
You are a product manager on Instagram. Engagement with Stories is doing well, but engagement with feed posts has been going down. How would you work out what is happening, and what would you do about it?
```hint Read the two trends together
Do not study the post decline on its own. Ask what overall time spent, sessions and post creation would look like if attention were moving from one surface to another, and what they would look like if people were losing interest in the app.
```
### Clarifying Questions
- Which post engagement metric is falling (likes, comments, shares, saves, time in feed, or posts created), and is it a total or a per-user rate?
- When did the decline start, and is it a sudden step or a gradual slide? Does the timing line up with a launch, a ranking change or an app release?
- Is the decline broad, or concentrated in a segment such as a country, platform, app version, or new versus established users?
- Is the goal to restore post engagement specifically, or to maximize overall Instagram engagement and time spent?
### What a Strong Answer Covers
- A precise definition of the falling metric, decomposed into its drivers, with data and logging problems ruled out first
- Segmentation by time, geography, platform, app version and user cohort to localize the decline
- Internal causes (bugs, performance, ranking or feed changes, Stories or another surface taking attention) weighed against external ones (seasonality, competitors, shifts in sharing behavior), each with a way to test it
- An explicit test of whether attention moved from posts to Stories, using total engagement, time spent and creation on both surfaces
- A decision on whether the shift needs action, tied to Instagram's goals and guarded against harming Stories
### Follow-up Questions
- The data shows people simply moved from posts to Stories and total time spent is flat. Is that a problem, and who inside the company might disagree with you?
- Suppose ads in Stories earn less per minute of attention than ads in the feed. How does that change your recommendation?
- What experiment would you run to confirm that Stories is pulling engagement away from posts?
Overview: A product analytics question set at Instagram, where feed post engagement is falling even though Stories engagement is healthy. It tests checking data quality, decomposing and segmenting the metric, separating bugs from behavior shifts, testing whether Stories is pulling attention away, and choosing a response.