Instagram Reels: North-Star Metrics and a Reels-vs-Feed Engagement Shift

You are a product manager at Meta working on Instagram. This question has two connected parts about Reels, Instagram's short-form video format. ### Clarifying Questions - When Feed engagement is said to be falling, is that time spent, likes and comments, or posts created, and how large and how long-lasting is the decline? - Do Reels shown inside the main Feed count toward Feed engagement or toward Reels engagement? - Over the same period, is total time spent on Instagram up, flat or down? - Is the Feed decline visible in every region, platform and age group, or concentrated in some of them? ### Part 1 — Define success for Reels How would you judge whether Reels is succeeding, and which metrics would you use to track it? ```hint Start from why Reels exists Name the job Reels does for Instagram before choosing numbers, and remember that Reels has two sides: the people who make the videos and the people who watch them. ``` #### What This Part Should Cover - A goal for Reels tied to Instagram's broader strategy - Metrics for viewers, creators and the ad business - One north-star metric with supporting and guardrail metrics ### Part 2 — Reels engagement up, Feed engagement down Engagement with Reels keeps growing while engagement with the main Instagram Feed is falling. What would you do about it? ```hint Look at the whole app Check what happened to overall activity on Instagram before deciding whether the Feed decline is something to fix. ``` #### What This Part Should Cover - Validating the definitions and the data behind both trends - Separating attention moving between surfaces from a real loss of engagement - Actions matched to each diagnosis, validated with experiments ### What a Strong Answer Covers - A Reels metric set that covers creators, viewers and revenue rather than time spent alone - Guardrails that watch the effect of Reels on the rest of the app, especially content from friends - A diagnosis ordered from measurement checks to segmentation to hypotheses, with a check for each - An explicit trade-off between short-form video growth and Instagram's social core - Decisions tied to experiment results rather than intuition ### Follow-up Questions - If a minute of Reels earns less ad revenue than a minute of Feed, how does that change your recommendation? - How would you design an experiment to find the right mix of Reels and friends' posts in the main Feed? - What evidence would convince you the Feed decline is a real threat rather than users simply moving to Reels?