Success Metrics and a North Star for Instagram's Shopping Feature

You are a product manager at Instagram responsible for Instagram Shop, the shopping experience in which businesses showcase their products and people discover and buy them. How would you measure whether Shop is succeeding? Define what success means, choose the metrics you would track, and explain which one you would treat as the primary measure. ```hint Success for whom Shop lives inside an app people open to be entertained, not to shop, and it works only if both shoppers and businesses get value from it. Decide what Shop is meant to achieve for Instagram before you pick any metric. ``` ### Clarifying Questions - Is Shop a recent launch we are evaluating, or an established feature we want to grow? - Does the purchase happen inside Instagram, or does the shopper tap through to the business's own website to pay? - Is the main objective revenue for Instagram, sales for businesses, or engagement among Instagram users? - Should the metrics cover every market and seller size, or a specific region or segment such as small businesses? ### What a Strong Answer Covers - A goal for Shop tied to Instagram's business and to the feature's stage - Both sides of the marketplace, shoppers and businesses, with the journey from discovering a product to buying again - One primary metric with a clear reason, supported by a small set of funnel metrics - Guardrails that protect the core Instagram experience and buyers' trust - Measurement caveats: attribution when checkout happens off Instagram, incrementality, and rates versus absolute counts ### Follow-up Questions - Your primary metric goes up while time spent in the feed goes down. How do you decide whether Shop is succeeding? - How would you keep measuring purchases if checkout moved from Instagram to sellers' websites? - How would you show that Shop creates purchases that would not have happened anyway?