How would you measure the success of LinkedIn Likes? — Interview Question

Image Source: LinkedIn Blogs

One day while using LinkedIn, I saw how LinkedIn had introduced 5 new reactions to react over a post, I wanted to understand the reasoning behind it and how does it increase engagement, as a designer I want to understand the why behind it and as a product guy I want to understand how do we measure it’s a success, so for the same, I thought of studying a few of things, but this time in another way.

Instead of simply searching over google, and finding my answer, I take it as a challenge and asked this question myself, as someone is asking from me in an interview (sort of PM interviews), yes I had a lot of interest in product & growth part (Obviously including design :P). So, I took one step further and consider myself like I'm sitting in an APM interview, and now the interviewer had asked me this question, this way it would even help me to expand my existing knowledge 😇.

Interviewer- Hi Shubham, let’s start the interview, let’s say you’re currently working at LinkedIn and recently the team had launched the “Likes” feature in which a user can react to a post via 5 different reactions. You need to measure the success of the whole feature. How would you go with that?

Me- Hey, first of all, I would like to clarify the question- Here I’m working at LinkedIn and I want to measure the success of the newly launched “Likes” feature. For now, I’m focusing only on the “Thumbs Up” Like feature and not on other reactions as of now, should I move forward with this assumption?

Interviewer- Sure, let’s go with that.

Me- Cool, for better answering the question, here I would be first describing the product feature, its goals, user journey, and finally the success metrics.

Describing the feature —

1. LinkedIn “likes” allow users to react to content on LinkedIn seamlessly and offer less friction to show interest.
2. Users can react with multiple reactions to show how they feel about the particular post.
3. Provides a kind of validation, back to the content creator.
4. Allows LinkedIn to show related content (Push content of that particular user/page more).
5. Friends of the user could see the “ liked” content and end up engaging with the post itself.

Goals —

Are there any specific goals we’re targeting for?

Interviewer- Decide and set the goals from your end.

Me- Sure, so here I’m assuming that we want to increase the overall engagement of the user and maybe increase our revenue to some extent by introducing this feature. Is that good to go with these two things in mind?

Interviewer- Yes, fair enough. Please go ahead.

Me- So, again here are the goals that I finalized —

1. Drive the overall engagement — user engagement, as well as the user’s friends engagement.
2. Help LinkedIn personalize the content.
3. High revenue by showing ads according to user relevance.

User Journey —

1. Go to the LinkedIn app/website.
2. Scroll to see the content available on the home feed.
3. Found something good and relatable.
4. Had no time to put a comment, so reacted with a like feature.
5. The user’s friend would get the motivation and encouragement to post more.
6. Interact with other posts and scroll through the way.

Metrics —

For metrics, I’m dividing all metrics into combinations of Engagement(1,2), Adoption(3,4), Retention(5), and Monetisation(7,8) part.

1. Active usage of like feature — % of unique users who liked at least one post as compared to all unique users who visited LinkedIn (Weekly, Monthly).
2. User engagement — % of total posts seen by the user as compared to the post s/he’ s liking on LinkedIn.
3. The average number of posts like by a user for a particular session/day.
4. Measurement of likes by content type(articles, image & video)and user segment (age, demographics, etc.).
5. How often a user comes back to the application/website in relation to the number of likes s/he received.
6. Determining the post frequency and share frequency separately by like volume per user.
7. % of Ad clicks by like volume.
8. Total time spent by a user over watching or engaging with a particular Ad.

Few Indirect engagement metrics —

1. The number of new connections developed as a result of a like.
2. The number of new communications/messages generated.

Now, I have listed down all the metrics that come to my mind, also in the end I would like to measure any decrement in any other feature, if that’s the case then I’ll analyze that and see what I can do and how implementing this affecting other features. So, for now, Is there anything that I missed, or do you want to add something?

Interviewer- No you can go ahead.

Me- Cool, after this we can prioritize these metrics, as we can’t measure everything, here I would follow the I.C.E (Impact, Confidence, and Ease of implementation) approach. Although here I’m not aware of the business and tech requirements, still if I want to prioritize a few metrics then I would go with 2,3,4 & 7.

Now comes the why part of introducing various reactions, so only one major reason that I can figure out is users want to express themselves in more ways, rather than only a thumbs up (like) action. Users want more ways to feel heard and understand why someone liked what you said. This is just another way to quickly and constructively communicate with each other.

Interviewer- Overall good work Shubham, thanks for coming in.

Note — This interview could take up a whole different direction, depending upon how the interviewer would ask the questions. Also initially, I could ask more clarifying questions, like we’re measuring it for which platform, audience, and much more, but for now just not to increase the length of the article, I started simply with few questions only.

Finally Done 🤭🥳

Hurray, so finally I listed down all things that I learn while researching or that comes to my mind, now I’m open for all kind of feedback, as I myself is learning new things and critiques are so important in this phase. So, if you had any kind of feedback, please share that with me here on LinkedIn or just comment down in the article 🙌🏻.

Thanks for being here till the end, btw you can hold up that clap icon for 10 seconds, to see some magic (Yes, now go and see the magic 😛). Oh and by profession, I’m a product designer currently crafting experiences at InterviewBit(Scaler), you can always connect with me over Twitter and LinkedIn.

Sources I used —

Introducing LinkedIn Reactions: More Ways to Express Yourself

Designing LinkedIn Reactions

Use LinkedIn Reactions | LinkedIn Help