North-star metric and guardrails for Facebook's college-only Campus space

Facebook Campus is a section of Facebook reserved for college students. As the product manager who owns it, explain how you would measure whether it is succeeding: state the goal, choose the metric you would treat as the main measure of success, and define the supporting metrics and guardrails around it. ```hint Measure where the value is created Ask what makes the product useful to one student, and at which level (the individual, a single school, or all schools together) that value should be measured. ``` ### Clarifying Questions - Is Campus newly launched and still building a user base at each school, or established, so the focus is engagement and retention? - What does Facebook mainly want from it: helping students connect with others at their school, re-engaging college-age users, or both? - Is success judged only inside Campus, or across each student's whole Facebook usage, so that activity that merely moved from elsewhere in Facebook does not count as a gain? ### What a Strong Answer Covers - The product's purpose for students and for Facebook, turned into one clear goal. - A north-star metric with a precise definition, and a reason it beats raw usage counts. - Supporting metrics across the student journey, from joining and setting up a profile to finding classmates, interacting and returning, broken down by school. - Guardrails for safety, privacy and cannibalization of the rest of Facebook. - How the measurement handles the academic calendar and network effects when evaluating changes. ### Follow-up Questions - Weekly active students rose at the start of term, but messages between classmates fell. How do you interpret that? - How would you test a new Campus feature when students at the same school influence each other's behavior? - At what point would you conclude Campus is not working at a given school, and what would you do then?