Make Twitter (X) a Better Place to Follow the News: Product Improvement
Company: X (Twitter)
Role: Product Manager
Category: Product Design & Strategy
Difficulty: medium
Interview Round: Other
You are a product manager at Twitter (now X). How would you improve the news experience on Twitter?
Walk through how you would decide which part of the experience and which users to focus on, what problems they have, what you would build first and how you would measure success.
```hint Picture a news moment
Imagine several different people opening Twitter while a big story is breaking: a journalist, someone curious about a trending topic, a sports fan. Where does each of them struggle, and which struggle is Twitter best placed to fix?
```
### Clarifying Questions
- Does "Twitter news" mean a specific surface, such as the trending and news sections of the Explore tab, or the whole way people follow news on Twitter, home timeline included?
- What is the goal: more frequent visits for news, more people treating Twitter as their main news source, or more accurate and trusted news on the platform?
- Can the improvement target the supply side too, meaning the publishers, journalists and eyewitnesses who post news, or only readers?
- Are there business constraints, such as keeping ads in news surfaces or not reducing clicks through to publishers' sites?
### What a Strong Answer Covers
- A clear definition of the news experience being improved, and a goal tied to what Twitter is uniquely good at for news
- Segmentation of the people who use Twitter for news, and a justified focus segment
- Pain points of following news on a real-time social feed, grounded in how the product works
- Prioritized improvements with trade-offs, including misinformation risk and effects on publishers
- Success metrics with guardrails for accuracy, trust and notification fatigue
### Follow-up Questions
- Early reports during breaking news are often wrong. How does your design balance speed with accuracy?
- How would your changes affect news publishers' traffic, and do you need their cooperation?
- If engagement rises but so do reports of misleading posts in the news surfaces, what do you do?
Overview: A product improvement question asking how a product manager would improve the news experience on Twitter (X). It tests defining the news surface and goal, choosing a user segment, finding the pain points of following news on a real-time feed, prioritizing ideas and setting metrics with accuracy and trust guardrails.