Product sense: diagnose what holds LinkedIn Groups back and decide what to change
Company: LinkedIn
Role: Product Manager
Category: Product Design & Strategy
Difficulty: medium
Interview Round: Other
You are a product manager at LinkedIn responsible for Groups, the feature that lets members create and join communities around a profession, industry, school or shared interest. How would you make Groups better? State what the improvement should achieve, choose whose experience you are improving, propose and prioritize changes, and explain how you would measure success.
```hint Trace two lifecycles
Sketch how a group goes from being created to holding a steady discussion, and how a member goes from joining to coming back, then find the step where each one most often stalls.
```
### Clarifying Questions
- Is the aim more member activity inside groups, better quality of discussion, more groups being started, or a bigger contribution from Groups to overall LinkedIn sessions?
- Whose experience is in scope: members who read and post, the admins who run groups, or professionals who have not found a group yet?
- Should group content keep flowing into the main feed, or can Groups become more of a destination of its own?
- Are paid features for admins or members on the table, or should the improvements stay free?
### What a Strong Answer Covers
- A stated objective for Groups and why it matters to LinkedIn
- The kinds of people a group depends on, compared, with one chosen and the reason for the choice
- Pain points for that segment, ranked by severity and by how they affect the health of a group
- Solutions weighed on explicit criteria, leading to a prioritized plan
- A primary metric with guardrails, an experiment design that suits shared communities, and the main risks
### Follow-up Questions
- How would you stop a growing group from turning into a stream of self-promotion without silencing legitimate posts?
- Members belong to many groups at once. How would you design the experiment for your top idea so the results are not contaminated?
- If your change raised activity in Groups but lowered engagement with the main feed, how would you decide whether to keep it?
Overview: A product sense question about improving LinkedIn Groups, the feature for professional communities. It tests choosing an objective and a participant segment, finding where groups and members stall, prioritizing fixes, and defining a success metric, guardrails and an experiment design suited to shared communities.