Explain why IG Story usage exceeds Facebook
Company: Meta
Role: Data Scientist
Category: Analytics & Experimentation
Difficulty: easy
Interview Round: Onsite
# Explain why IG Story usage exceeds Facebook
## Product analytics case: Instagram vs Facebook Stories
You work on **Stories** across two apps: **Instagram (IG)** and **Facebook (FB)**. A dashboard shows that **Stories are used by a much larger fraction of users on IG than on FB**, and this pattern has been stable over time.
### Your task
Explain how you would **diagnose and quantify** why IG has higher Stories usage than FB, and what you would do next.
### Clarifications / assumptions (state and validate in interview)
- Assume the metric shown is: **Story Usage Rate** = \( \frac{\text{# distinct active users who had ≥1 story view OR story creation event in a day}}{\text{# distinct daily active users (DAU)}} \).
- Events are reliably logged, but instrumentation differences across apps are possible.
- You can segment by user/app/version/country, and you can run experiments.
### What to cover
1. **Metric and data validation**: what could make the metric incomparable across apps?
2. **Decomposition**: break the gap into components (numerator vs denominator; view vs create; eligibility/supply/demand).
3. **Root-cause hypotheses** (product, audience, surface area, network effects, content supply).
4. **Analyses to run** to confirm/refute hypotheses (including segmentation and cohort analyses).
5. **Action plan**: what experiments or product changes you would test on FB Stories, and what success metrics + guardrails you’d use.
### Constraints & Assumptions
- Preserve the scope, facts, inputs, and requested outputs from the prompt above.
- If the prompt leaves a detail unspecified, state a reasonable assumption before relying on it.
- Keep the answer interview-ready: concise enough to present, but concrete enough to implement or evaluate.
### Clarifying Questions to Ask
- Clarify the business objective, unit of analysis, time window, exposure definition, and primary metric.
- State assumptions about instrumentation, randomization, sample size, and data quality.
- Separate descriptive analysis from causal claims.
### What a Strong Answer Covers
- A metric framework with primary, guardrail, and diagnostic metrics.
- A credible analysis or experiment design with clear assumptions and bias checks.
- SQL/statistical logic for segmentation, variance, confidence, and data validation where relevant.
- An actionable recommendation that explains trade-offs and next steps.
### Follow-up Questions
- What sanity checks would you run before trusting the result?
- How would you handle novelty effects, seasonality, or selection bias?
- What decision would you make if metrics disagree?
Quick Answer: This interview question evaluates metric design, causal reasoning, experiment setup, diagnostics, SQL/statistical checks, and recommendations in a realistic interview setting. A strong answer for Explain why IG Story usage exceeds Facebook states assumptions, handles edge cases, explains trade-offs, and shows how to validate the result clearly.