Instagram activity tab: north-star metric and guardrails for the notifications screen

You are the product manager responsible for Instagram's activity feed. Take it to be the screen that lists recent interactions with a user's account, such as likes, comments, mentions and new followers. How would you measure whether the feed is successful? ```hint Purpose before numbers Ask what a user comes to this screen to do and what Instagram gains when they do it. A count that goes up whenever the screen gets noisier does not show that it is working. ``` ### Clarifying Questions - Does "activity feed" mean only the in-app list of interactions with my account, or also the push notifications that lead into it? - Are we judging the feed as it works today, or after a recent change where a before-and-after comparison is possible? - Should success be judged for all users together, or separately for groups with very different volume, such as creators and businesses who receive far more activity than a typical account? ### What a Strong Answer Covers - The feed's purpose for users and for Instagram, tied to Instagram's broader goals. - The journey from an interaction happening to the user seeing it and acting on it. - A north-star metric that reflects value delivered rather than visits alone, with supporting metrics along the journey. - Guardrails for notification fatigue, spam, harassment and pressure around likes. - How results differ by segment and how the metrics would be validated. ### Follow-up Questions - After a change, visits to the activity feed go up while time in the main feed goes down. Was the change a success? - How would you tell whether more engagement with the activity feed comes from users finding it more useful or simply from more alerts being sent? - How should the feed and its metrics differ for a large creator who receives far more activity than they could ever read?