YouTube Shorts Improvement Plan: Choose a Segment, Rank Fixes and Set Metrics

You are the product manager for YouTube Shorts, the short vertical video experience inside YouTube. What would you improve? Set the goal your improvements should serve, decide whose experience you are improving, and explain which changes you would build first and how you would measure them. ```hint Choose a side of the marketplace Shorts serves viewers, creators and advertisers, and a fix for one group can cost another. Decide which group's problem moves your goal most, and be ready to say why the others can wait. ``` ### Clarifying Questions - Is there a goal leadership cares about most for Shorts, such as watch time, the number of active creators, or ad revenue, or is choosing it part of my job? - Should I focus on viewers, creators or advertisers, or pick one myself? - Is the scope the mobile app only, or also Shorts on the web and on TV screens? ### What a Strong Answer Covers - A goal tied to Shorts' role within YouTube and its competition with other short-video apps - A segmentation of viewers or creators and a justified choice of one segment - Pain points specific to that segment's journey on Shorts, ranked by impact - Solutions prioritized by impact and effort, with a clear first release - A primary success metric plus guardrails that protect the viewing experience ### Follow-up Questions - Your change raises uploads from new creators, but viewers start swiping away faster. What do you do? - How would you tell whether Shorts growth is taking watch time from long-form YouTube rather than from rival apps? - How would your plan change if the goal were Shorts ad revenue?