Diagnosing rising Facebook Stories engagement alongside a News Feed engagement decline

You are a product manager at Meta. Engagement with Facebook Stories has gone up, while engagement with News Feed has gone down. Explain how you would investigate what is happening, how you would judge whether it is good or bad for Facebook, and what you would do about it. ```hint Shift, problem or both? Before hunting for causes, work out whether people are moving the same attention from one surface to the other, or whether something is wrong with News Feed. What happened to total engagement and to revenue tells you which situation you are in. ``` ### Clarifying Questions - How is engagement measured for each surface: time spent, items viewed, reactions and comments, or posts created? - Over what period did this happen? Was it a sudden change or a gradual trend, and did it follow a launch or a ranking change? - Did total time spent on Facebook and daily active users rise, hold steady or fall over the same period? - Is the shift concentrated on particular platforms (mobile app or web), countries or age groups? ### What a Strong Answer Covers - Checking that the change is real (definitions, logging, data pipelines) before analyzing it. - Sizing and segmenting the change, and testing whether it is substitution between surfaces or a separate problem in News Feed. - Ranked hypotheses on both the viewing side and the content-creation side, internal and external, with the data that tests each. - The effect on the business, especially how differently the two surfaces earn ad revenue, and on the wider ecosystem of creators, Pages and businesses. - A recommendation tied to what the diagnosis finds, with an experiment and guardrails. ### Follow-up Questions - Total time on Facebook is flat, but ad revenue has fallen. What would you prioritize? - People are posting more to Stories and less to News Feed. How does that change your diagnosis? - Should Facebook try to steer engagement back to News Feed? What evidence would make you say yes? - Suppose the shift is in what people create instead: more people post Stories while fewer write regular Feed posts. Rather than diagnosing why, weigh the trade-offs of this shift for the people who share, the people who watch, advertisers and Facebook as a business, and say what you would recommend.