Clarify

• Is this product meant to be a standalone application OR something build on the FB app? : FB App
• What would be the goal of the product ?: You can decide
• Any specific geographical region targeted? : We can start with the US.
• Time frame: 3-6 months

The way I would want to approach this question is in 3 parts:

• Why — Why would FB want to build an education product
• Who — Who is the user for the product?
• What —  What are the specific features we would want to build?

Answering Why

Education is a fast growing market. There are various flavors of growth one being the MOOCs like Coursera, the other being the more personalized learning apps like Byju’s in India. However, this flavor of education is transactional in nature where there is a defined give-and-take between the parties and the connection between them last only during the transaction which is not what aligns with FB’s mission. FB mission is allow people to create communities and get closer. From that perspective, I think here we are talking about  product which helps users get education from the community and in turn gets the users closer and connected. So, I would restate the problem statement as

Build an education product which helps users learn from the community and in turns gets them closer and connected.

Answering Who

The 3 primary segments who are seeking education in a communal way are s follows:

• School students (Aged: 13-18)
• College Students (Aged: 19-25)
• Professionals (Aged: 25-60, looking to uplevel their skills)

Prioritization Score:

• Market Size
• Pain with existing solutions
• FB Mission for getting connected

School Scoring : Market (M): Pain(S): FB Mission(H)

Though by volume students would be high, many student’s decision is controlled and impacted by parents who might not be very conducive to the idea of studying in FB. Hence rated M

There are many alternate solutions available like special tutions and classes. Hence rated S

FB Mission: They are at the age where they would be looking for making connections and friends and hence good for FB Mission. hence rated H

Similarly scored the other as follows:

College: Market (H) Pain (M) FB Mission (H)

Professionals : Market (M): Pain (S): FB Mission (S)

So chosen segment: College Students

Answering What

Pain points:

• Guidance
  • What subjects to take?
  • How to plan career?
• Study Help
  • Not able to understand something
  • Not able to solve specific problems
  • Need practice partners
• Needs Motivation / Proof of progress

I will prioritize Guidance and Study Help as they are applicable to almost all students and will have the most impact.

Features:

• Mentorship

Some achiever students willing to give back to the student community will mark them as mentors. Junior students will ask them questions about which subjects to take or regarding planning their career. Mentors will answer their questions and if suited will get into a more long term association with the students. The Mentors will be able to set goals for the students and help them make progress.

• Study Room

Students would be able to create joint study room for specific subjects. Other students will search for relevant rooms and join. Once the students find their partners might keep it open for new joinee requests or close the room for other partners. Rooms could be scheduled recurrently for a sustained joint learning experience. This feature

• Solution Live Session

Students will post problems in the  groups and other students will upvote them. A student who has already worked out the problem will schedule and Live Event to show how he has solved the problem. The students who upvoted the problem will be notified of the live session.

I would prioritize the solutions based on

1. Breadth of problem (% of users who have the problem),

2. Depth of impact (How much impact the solution makes),

3. Implementation Ease

By that I would prioritize Solution Live Session as it will be applicable for almost all users, will benefit the students immensely and as it can built on top of the existing Live product would not be very costly to build and we should be able to launch in the target 3-6 months

Success Metrics:

The User goal is to get value from the Live Sessions. So, the key metrics would be

• number of users joining in live session (Joining could be defined as attending > x% of the session) ==> To show users are getting value
• Number of live sessions hosted ==> To show overall live session engagement is increasing
• Number of users hosting live sessions ==> To show a broad base of users are hosting live sessions

FB is looking for engagement and connection. So the key metrics over here would be

• No. of users accessing the  product
• Avg. time spent on the education product
• No. of new connections generated after accessing the product

Risks:

• One risk of the Live Session product is the host might not be able to do a good job of explaining, helping the users. Then the time spent by the joiners are mostly wasted. The host might not join after scheduling the live event. These could cause dis-engagement with the product. One way to counter that is to allow joiners to provide ratings to the host. A erring host would have bad rating and hence would have less joiners in the future. Some users with very poor rating might also be barred from hosting events.

Assumptions

1. Education product means a learning product
2. Existing FB users – mostly above 20 years
3. There can be 2 goals for fb – Acquire new users let’s say younger users; engage existing users

1. School Students –> Help with their studies, get good grades, Ace competitive exams
2. College Students –> Help with studies, employability skills, Interviews
3. Young Professionals –> Learn new skills, Workplace behaviour / Collaboration
4. Mid level Professionals –> Upgrade skills, managerial skills
5. Older Professionals –> Advanced managerial skills
6. Self employed users –> business management skills, sales & marketing skills
7. Remote workers in the internet economy –> How tos? Instructive lessons, Skills

1. School Teachers
2. Professionals
3. College Professors
4. Entrepreneurs & Small Business owners
5. Individuals
6. Institutions

1. Separate Learn & grow section on fb app
   1. Videos
   2. Learning Games
   3. Assessment Sessions
2. Recommend Learning videos basis user profile and activity
3. FB Kids App with focus on games and learning

1. Launch an invite only Creators App where users can
   • View popular topics
   • Add or request a new topic
   • Create educational content on a digital storyboard software
   • Add voice to content
   • Submit
2. Game developers can develop learning games
3. Ways to screen content before pushing live
4. Live content is suggested to user in their feed in the first version
5. Monetization Models
   • Ads based – in roll and banner;; also greater engagement should increase user revenue
   • Pay per lesson
   • Subscription

Assumptions:

1. Part of the core FB product and not standalone app/
2. Education for children in 13-18 range

Goal: To improve the education of children while building stronger social networks with their family/friends and thus further the mission of the company of bringing the world together and offering tools to form communities.

Key user segments:

3. Students (middle and high school)
4. Teachers
5. Parents

For the purpose of this exercise, I would like to focus on the student user group, since I believe they are relatively larger in size and any change on them will have a bugger impact on the goal and FB’s mission.

The specific student persona I want to focus on initially are:

6. On the east and west coasts
7. Have access to high-speed internet, tech-savvy
8. Age range 13-18
9. Often are managing school life, extracurriculars, and work sometimes
10. Have a hard time staying on top of things and getting help from peers

Key problems faced:

11. Collaborating with friends on exams, homework etc to learn things
12. Avoiding social interaction in schools due to fear or bullying etc
13. Some students suffer with ADD, Dyslexia and are not able to get the right aids for learning due to lack of personal attention.
14. Personal mental health issues faced by students due to family issues etc that affects their learning

Overall the main problem boils down to not being able to get the personal help they need to learn things in a way that makes sense to them in a supportive environment.

Some solutions to solve this:

15. Personalized FB classroom groups
    1. A private FB group by the school for each grade with all students and teachers. Within each group, you can have office hours to ask questions to teachers, students, TAs via video chat. Collaborate with students anytime via messenger/WhatsApp.
16. VR based interactive learning rooms/groups
    1. Allow for a VR based interactive medium to interact and learn with other students and ask questions from teachers.
17. AR-based support in FB groups to help with homework and assignments.
    1. Allow students to annotate homework assignments drawings etc while collaborating and

In order to prioritize these solutions, I will measure them along the following dimensions: 1. Impact on UX (reach of users, impact on FB mission, impact on user delight), 2. Engineering Effort

Since we already have 1 and 2 by FB via groups and occulus, they will require minimal engineering efforts to redesign them to suit our specific needs. AR-based document annotation isn’t there on FB will require a lot of effort so it the highest in engineering effort.

In terms of the impact on UX, I believe #1 (personalized FB groups) will have the highest impact due to the reach on # of users, VR will have lesser impact since very few people will have access to occulus.

Thus, I would pick #1 as the feature to prioritize.

The expected user journey for it will be as following.

18. FB in conjunction with schools and teachers will setup private groups for students and teachers.
19. Teachers and TAs will be allowed to setup office hours with their areas of expertise
20. Students will be able to ask each other questions and collaborate via group-based chats, reply with photos etc of the work they are doing. Get feedback from the teachers without being constrained by regular school hours.
21. Students will be able to record videos of how they are thinking and hold live sessions with other students to do group study.

Success Metrics:

22. DAU and WAU metrics for students and teachers who are part of these groups
23. # of office hours held and questions asked/answered

Risks and Tradeoffs:

24. Users (students) get cannibalized into this feature and their engagement with other features drop
25. Students get distracted due to this feature and may end up spending more time on FB socializing and not actually studying