How to design music experience for Facebook?

A Product Design Question for Product Management Interviews

I recommend using the framework below to tackle this question.

1. Clarify the questions with interviewer to scope down
2. Reframe product statement
3. Segment the target users
4. Identify the use cases
5. Propose the solutions
6. Measure the success
7. Summary

1. Clarify the Questions to Scope Down

** Instead of asking the questions directly to get the clarification from interviewer, you should have your Point of View and confirm with interviewers.

• The music experience can be built in different ways, it could be a place for users to discuss music, singing the song or listening to music together. Is there any particular use case you want me to focus on?
• Facebook mission is to connect people together, can i assume the business goal of music experience is to increase the user engagement?
• I will target US and Europe countries as they represent a large percentage of Facebook users. Or is there any particular region that we should target to?
• I will target Mobile platform as there are more active users and easy to access.

2. Reframe Product Statement

In order to align with Facebook mission, I will leverage this new music experience to bring users to discuss, listen and sing on Facebook together. That is, the objective of this feature is to increase the user engagement.

I will start off by talking about the different types of Facebook users and why they use Facebook. This will help me identify who the most valuable users are and prioritize their needs. Then, I will brainstorm how music experience can be used to enhance the user’s experience, provide some solutions, and wrap up with recommendations.

3. Segment the Target Users

There are 2 types of users on Facebook for the new music experience:

• Creator — music producer, singer who will create posts
• Follower — entertainment followers who follow/read posts

In terms of increase user engagement, I will focus on Follower because

1. High barrier for facebook to start the business for creator as they get used to existing professional tools to produce music. As for creator, facebook is more like a place for them to promote new arrival music.
2. There are more followers than creators. One creator has lots of followers and followers will setup smaller group to discuss as they shared the same interest.

Focusing on Follower have bigger business impact than creators

4. Identify the Use Cases

Now, I would like to analyze how followers will use Facebook, then think how new music experience can be used to enhance their experience.

• Followers probably created FB pages for their favourite singers and discussed
• Followers listened to the music and reacted their feeling on FB
• Followers shared their liked music with friends

5. Propose the Solutions

I am going to brainstorm some possible new features that use new music service to increase engagement and frequency of use of these users.

Ideas could be:

1. [Chatroom] Given same interest users will get together to discuss the music they are interested in. Allowing users to create chatroom to listen/sing/discuss the music together.
2. [Music Challenge] Extend the sharing use case to allow followers to setup the music challenges with friends to play together.
3. [Music Tab] Add a new tab for music and allow followers to discover the trending music and able to listen to the music while reading the feeds.

Let’s talk about implementation now. I will based on the following 3 criteria to prioritize my proposed solutions:

• Impact
• Confidence
• Cost

1. [Chatroom] High Impact, Medium Confidence, High Cost
2. [Music Challenge] High Impact, High Confidence, Low Cost
3. [Music Tab]Low Impact, Low Confidence, High Cost

I will plan the music challenge as MVP scope. Users are able to select their liked songs to create the music challenge and share the post with their friends. Everyone will listen to the music and guess what’s the corrected song for this and there will be a leaderboard to present everyone’s score and see who would be the champion of this challenge.

6. Measure the Success

There are 3 kinds of metrics to measure the feature success:

1. Platform Metric: User retention, WAU should increase
2. Feature Metric: % user adopt this new feature, % user share the challenge
3. Health Check: Should not impact the FB monetization metric

7. Summary

In summary, I started with the user segment and decided to focus on the Facebook followers as there are more users than creators. Next, I analyzed the use cases that existing followers might have already done on FB and identified what’re the opportunities for new music service.

I brainstormed three possible solutions that use new music service to enhance the experience for Facebook followers: an extension to create chatroom to allow users to sing/discuss music together, a Music Challenge, and a new Music tab.

I recommend the implementation of the Music Challenge because its function would be more aligned with increasing user engagement and have less implementation cost.