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Evaluate Instagram's Short-Video Recommender System Success

Last updated: Mar 29, 2026

Quick Overview

This question evaluates a data scientist's ability to choose and justify a primary product metric, reason about distributional properties and guardrail metrics, and design end-to-end A/B tests for a short-video recommender feed.

  • medium
  • Meta
  • Analytics & Experimentation
  • Data Scientist

Evaluate Instagram's Short-Video Recommender System Success

Company: Meta

Role: Data Scientist

Category: Analytics & Experimentation

Difficulty: medium

Interview Round: Onsite

##### Scenario Instagram is launching a short-video recommender feed. ##### Question a) Which single metric would you use to evaluate the recommendation system’s success and why? b) Sketch or describe the expected distribution of that metric, labelling median, mode, and 95th percentile. c) Metric A rises while Metric B falls—what do you do? d) List the end-to-end A/B-testing steps for this launch. ##### Hints Discuss engagement vs retention, heavy-tailed distributions, guardrail metrics, power calculation and success criteria.

Quick Answer: This question evaluates a data scientist's ability to choose and justify a primary product metric, reason about distributional properties and guardrail metrics, and design end-to-end A/B tests for a short-video recommender feed.

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Meta
Jul 12, 2025, 6:59 PM
Data Scientist
Onsite
Analytics & Experimentation
108
0

Evaluating a New Short‑Video Recommender Feed

Context

You are a data scientist preparing metrics and an A/B test plan to launch a new short‑video recommender feed within Instagram. The goal is to measure whether the ranking algorithm improves user value and is safe to ship.

Questions

(a) Which single metric would you use to evaluate the recommendation system’s success, and why?

(b) Sketch or describe the expected distribution of that metric, labeling the median, mode, and 95th percentile.

(c) Metric A rises while Metric B falls—what do you do?

(d) List the end‑to‑end A/B‑testing steps for this launch.

Hints

  • Discuss engagement vs retention
  • Heavy‑tailed distributions
  • Guardrail metrics
  • Power calculation and success criteria

Solution

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