Instagram Shops Growth: Raising Completed In-App Purchases
Company: Meta
Role: Product Manager
Category: Product Design & Strategy
Difficulty: medium
Interview Round: Other
You are the product manager for Instagram Shops. How would you increase the number of transactions completed through it?
```hint Find the weakest step
Split the transaction count into the steps between someone noticing a product and paying for it, plus the shops and catalogs that feed those steps. Decide which step loses the most people before you propose features.
```
### Clarifying Questions
- Does a transaction mean an order paid for inside Instagram, or does a tap that sends the shopper to the merchant's own website and ends in a purchase there also count?
- Should I grow the total number of transactions or transactions per buyer, and is a lower average order value acceptable along the way?
- Is a particular kind of seller in focus: small businesses, large brands, or creators selling their own products?
- Which countries are in scope, given that in-app checkout and local payment methods may not be available everywhere?
### What a Strong Answer Covers
- A precise definition of a transaction, broken into buyer-side levers (reach, conversion, repeat buying) and seller-side levers (shops, catalog quality, tagged content)
- A diagnosis of where shoppers drop out, and a deliberate choice of which buyers or sellers to focus on first
- Prioritized ideas aimed at those drop-off points, with an explicit first release
- A primary metric with guardrails for refunds and disputes, feed engagement and ad revenue
- Trade-offs and risks: shopping content competing with ads, scam or counterfeit sellers, and the privacy cost of social shopping signals
### Follow-up Questions
- Transactions rise after your launch, but refund requests and seller complaints rise faster. How do you decide whether the launch worked?
- Shoppable posts take feed space that ads could fill. How would you decide how much shopping content to show?
- How would you test whether keeping shoppers inside Instagram for checkout produces more completed purchases than sending them to the merchant's own site?
Overview: A product strategy question for the Instagram Shops product manager: raise the number of completed transactions. It tests defining a transaction, breaking the count into buyer and seller levers, finding where shoppers drop off, prioritizing fixes, and setting guardrails for trust, feed quality and ads.