Product changes to bring YouTube viewers back more times each week
Company: Google
Role: Product Manager
Category: Product Design & Strategy
Difficulty: medium
Interview Round: Other
You are a product manager at YouTube. Your goal is to get people to come back to YouTube more often, where frequency is measured as the average number of visits per user per week. What would you build or change to raise that number?
```hint Why people do not come back
A visit starts with a need, a reminder or a routine. Look for viewer groups whose need recurs often but who currently forget YouTube between occasions or meet that need somewhere else.
```
### Clarifying Questions
- Does "user" mean viewers only, or creators as well, and are signed-out visitors included?
- Which surfaces count toward a visit: the mobile app, desktop web, TV apps, or players embedded on other sites?
- Is there a metric I must not hurt while raising frequency, such as watch time per visit, viewer satisfaction or ad revenue?
- Should I focus on particular markets or viewer segments, or on YouTube's audience as a whole?
### What a Strong Answer Covers
- A precise definition of a visit and of the target metric, and why frequency matters to YouTube's broader goals.
- A segmentation of viewers by why and how often they come, with a reasoned choice of one or two segments.
- Pain points that actually suppress return visits, kept distinct from things that only make sessions longer.
- Solutions prioritized by reach, impact and effort.
- Success metrics plus guardrails against notification fatigue, empty visits and lost watch time.
### Follow-up Questions
- Your reminder experiment raises visits per week by 8 percent but lowers 30-day retention for a subset of viewers. What do you do?
- How would you tell whether the extra visits are valuable, or just people opening the app because something pinged them?
- Short-form video raises visit frequency but may reduce long-form watch time. How would you judge that trade?
Overview: A YouTube product improvement prompt asking how to get viewers to visit more often, measured as visits per user per week. It tests defining the metric, segmenting viewers by why they return, separating frequency from watch time, prioritizing solutions, and setting guardrails against notification fatigue.