Plan an Amazon-Facebook Partnership End to End, Using the Social Graph to Lift Sales

You are a product manager at Amazon. Amazon is working on a partnership with Facebook whose aim is to use Facebook's network of friend connections to increase what people buy on Amazon. Walk through the lifecycle of this integration and partnership: how you would decide whether to do it, what you would build, how you would bring it to market, and how you would run it once it is live. ```hint Start with the value exchange Before designing any feature, pin down what each company gets out of the deal and which user data may cross between them, and with whose consent. Those two answers fence in every later phase. ``` ### Clarifying Questions - Is the target incremental sales across all of Amazon, or within a particular category or market? - What will Facebook share: individual friend lists, interests and likes, or only signals it computes on its own side? Must both the shopper and the friend opt in? - What does Facebook want in return (a revenue share, advertising spend from Amazon, shopping data), given that the two companies also compete for advertising budgets? - Should the integration live on Amazon's site and app, inside Facebook's products, or both? ### What a Strong Answer Covers - A goal for the partnership on Amazon's side, what Facebook gets from it, and a go/no-go case that weighs the upside against cost, data, brand and competitive risks - Integration points mapped along the shopping journey, with a first use case chosen and justified - Consent, privacy and data-handling design for both the shopper and the friends whose data is used - The lifecycle phases from deal terms through technical integration, piloting and scale-up, with owners and decision gates - Success metrics with guardrails, and a plan for what happens if either side ends the partnership ### Follow-up Questions - If Facebook will share only aggregated signals and no friend-level data, which parts of your plan still work? - How would you show that friend signals created new purchases rather than shifting ones that would have happened anyway? - Facebook asks to keep checkout inside its own app instead of sending shoppers to Amazon. How do you respond?