Diagnose why a social feature is losing users and plan its turnaround
Company: Meta
Role: Product Manager
Category: Product Design & Strategy
Difficulty: medium
Interview Round: Other
Usage of one feature inside a social app has been declining. You are the product manager who owns that feature. How would you improve its engagement?
```hint Locate the drop before fixing it
Ask whether fewer people are reaching the feature, fewer of those who reach it are using it, or existing users are coming back less often. Each answer points to a different kind of fix.
```
### Clarifying Questions
- Which app and which feature is this (for example Events or Groups on Facebook, or Stories on Instagram), and what job is the feature meant to do for people?
- How is usage measured, and is the decline in the number of people using the feature, in how often each of them returns, or in how much they do per visit?
- Did the decline start suddenly or build up gradually, and does it coincide with a product release, a change in where the feature sits in the app, or a season?
- Is the aim to restore the feature itself, or would it count as success if the same activity moved to another part of the app?
### What a Strong Answer Covers
- Confirming that the decline is real and pinning down where it sits: which metric, which user segments, sudden or gradual, internal or external cause.
- A chosen group of users to win back, justified by the feature's purpose and by where the loss is concentrated.
- Reasons people stopped using the feature, each tied to a concrete product change, with the changes prioritized by impact and effort.
- A success metric for the turnaround, with guardrails against cannibalizing other parts of the app or adding notification noise.
- A view on whether the feature deserves reinvestment at all, compared with merging it into another surface or letting it shrink.
### Follow-up Questions
- Your fix brings the feature's weekly users back up, but total time spent in the app does not move. Was it worth shipping?
- Suppose the data shows the loss is concentrated among younger users who now do the same thing in group chats. How does your plan change?
- How would you test your top idea when users of the feature influence one another, so treated and untreated users are not independent?
Overview: A product manager case asking how to revive engagement for a feature in a social app whose usage is declining. It tests whether the candidate diagnoses the drop before proposing fixes, picks a group of users to win back, prioritizes concrete product changes, and defines success metrics with guardrails.