Venmo friends feed product plan: drive more interaction and repeat visits

You are a product manager for Venmo, PayPal's peer-to-peer payments app. Venmo's social feed shows payments a user's friends have made, with each payment's note and emoji but not its amount. How would you get people to engage more with that feed? ```hint Engagement for what Venmo is a payments utility, not a media app. Before generating ideas, decide which feed behavior actually helps the business, and think about why the feed may hold fewer stories than it could. ``` ### Clarifying Questions - Should engagement mean interaction with feed stories (views, reactions, comments), or behavior the feed drives elsewhere, such as payments, requests and new friend connections? - Should I focus on people who already browse the feed, or on people who open Venmo only to send money and never look at it? - Are changes to privacy defaults in scope, or must every idea leave each user's payments at least as private as they are today? - Is this prompted by a decline in feed activity, or is it open-ended improvement? ### What a Strong Answer Covers - A definition of feed engagement tied to why the feed matters to Venmo's payments business - A chosen user segment and concrete pain points with today's feed - Ideas that address both the supply of stories and the reasons to interact, prioritized by impact, effort and privacy risk - A primary success metric with guardrails on privacy and payment activity - Risks specific to a feed of financial activity: privacy backlash, social pressure and abuse ### Follow-up Questions - How would you test a feed change when one user's settings change what their friends see? - If feed interaction rises but payment volume stays flat, would you call the change a success? - How would you stop a feature that makes payments more visible from pushing users to switch to private?