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How would you improve Meta (Facebook) Rooms?

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  • For Technical PM
  Meta
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Answers (2)
  1. Describe the product:
    1. It is the video conferencing product of Facebook where by users can connect and hangout (spend quality time) with their friends, loved ones or people with shared interest and enjoy a face to face experience. It allows upto 50 users to connect together and can be invoked from :-
      1. messenger
      2. Instagram
      3. News feed
      4. groups
    2. Also u can invite users who don’t even have a FB account to join the call.
    3. Is there any imp point about the product that i am missing?
    4. Mission of rooms product would be : Make connecting with friends, loved ones or people with shared interest in virtual world as real/human and at the same time private. Also this connects well with the overall mission of Facebook which is to enable users to build communities and bring world closer as when people will connect with other people then only communication will happen and they will discuss, know each other better and thus will be able to help each other as well and thus will bring the world closer and help in building communities. Is this fine?
    5. Also this product is pretty new (launched in 2020) , so I ll consider it in the growth phase in terms of product life cycle.
  2. Clarifications –
    1. By improvement do u have any specific goal in mind on which i shd focus or I can decide? u decide
    2. Also I am considering that for the product MVP is already proven, product concept is proven, market launch across various geographies already done.
    3. I ll consider ‘engagement’ as the goal since if the product is more engaging that means users like it and if they like it they will spread its word and thus drive adoption as well. So the goal is to improve engagement of the product.
  3. User segments who are using this product:
    1. Friends connecting with each other to have fun
    2. Users connecting with family members (parent connecting with kids, children connecting with parents, long distance couples connecting with each other) to spend quality time
    3. Users connecting to discuss similar interests with other users
  4. Prio of user segment
    1. I would want to prioritize, segment 1 since
      1. This segment will be the biggest, facebook started as a platform for friends to connect and thus mostly users have all their friends on facebook. With family, it is not very obvious if your parents use facebook and would use facebook to initiate a video call. I think for family usecase, u already have platform like whatsapp which is more frequently used. Also in comparison to users connecting to discuss similar interests –> considering these users might not mutually known users, users might not be comfortable with video calls, users might prefer voice calls and thus segment again won’t be huge. Thus the biggest segment will be friends.
      2. Our goal is to drive engagement on the video call and there also I think friends looking out to enjoy themselves might want to engage with the tool and try out new features in comparison to segment 2 and 3 users.
      3. Also with competition from products like Snapchat and tik tok where young age group is engaging more with friends vi visual means, Facebook might want to retain these users on their platform by developing engaging face to face interactions.
  5. Now lets understand some of the existing pain points of this segment
    1. Specially in times of pandemic where users cannot meet in person, they miss out on enjoying activities with their friends like going for movies together, strolling in parks, going to malls, shopping together, eating in restaurants together.
      1. Impact – high
      2. Reach – high
    2. Video calls break often, have poor quality, have lags thus do not give a in person experience and thus are not enjoyable
      1. Impact – high
      2. Reach – med as the fibre network coverage is increasing this issue is reducing but still is prevalant
    3. People become conscious in video calls as they fear they might not look good, they don’t know where to look and at times the background is also not something they want to show to other people
      1. Impact – med
      2. Reach – med
  6. Prio of pain pts , thus want to prioritize pain pt 1.
  7. Couple of solutions to solve for this problem
    1. Option to view movies together in a room. Basically users would decide on a movie and then that movie would be played in synchronization across the participants. If one user pauses the video then it will pause for all. Users can leave in between without pausing the movie and join back from the pt at which others are. Along with that users can group chat about the movie.
      1. Customer exp – high
      2. effort – low, as per my understanding similar kind of experience exists for US users for watch known as watch parties, so we just need to enhance that feature and introduce it for messenger.
      3. bandwidth usage – high
    2. Themed experiences – >
      1. Users can choose a theme like Mc donalds restaurant or universal studios – based on which user’s background would be changed, background music would play as per the theme choosen and user would see other users inside that particular theme for example -> users sitting at a table in Mc donalds or in a park.
      2. and in long run we could have full immersive experience, where in the users could together explore a mall or a tourist spot. This can be enabled via the 360 degree videos of places and allowing users to interact with their friends in virtual while they explore the place.
      3. Customer exp – med
      4. Bandwidth usage – high
      5. effort – med to high.
    3. Use augmented reality technology which overlays computer generated imagery in real word objects – we can build a very real hangout experience, where a user can see that all the hangout participants are sitting on his couch. particpants can use which avatar they want to pick and the person’s imagery will be generated with that avatar only.
      1. Customer exp – high
      2. Effort – med to high. This depends on the amount of tech that can be reused from Oculus quest which offers kind of an AR feature.
      3. Bandwidth usage – high
    4. Allow users to play light house party kind of games like pictionary, tambola, karoke,taboo  while talking and interacting with friends.
      1. Cust exp – high
      2. Effort – med
      3. bandwidth usage – med
  8. Prio – based on the prio, i would prio 4th as it is does not require high internet bandwidth thus more users would be able to use these features efficiently and thus has high changes to drive engagement.
  9. Trade offs:
    1. Designing the experience in a simple way would be extremely imp over here so that users can understand and it is easy to play the game.
    • Metrics :-
    1. No. of successful rooms where feature was used/ total no. of successful rooms in a particular duration – where successful room defined as a room with minimum 2 participants in the call and call being of atleast 10 minutes.
    2. % increase in the avg. time spent on messenger rooms before and after release of the feature (primary metric)
    3. %increase in the no. of successful rooms week over week, month over month
    4. %increase in the avg. duration of successful rooms week over week. (split across user groups)

I’d first start by asking Clarifying questions:

Clarifying questions:

  1. Why are we trying to improve FB rooms? — Increase Adoption and Engagement
  2. Does the product work only for FB users or outside as well? — Both
  3. Is this for specific region? — USA
  4. Improvements to be rolled out a specific platform – Website or App (iOS and/or Android)? — You Decide
  5. Are there are specific user types I need to consider? — You decide
  6. Is there a timeline for improvement release? — Not really
  7. Any resource constraints I need to know about? — Not really

At this point, I’d to discuss how FB Rooms fits with FB Mission

FB’s mission is to help connect people in various ways and build communities with the help of the products they build for them. With Rooms, FB allows people to meet now or at any given time with their friends and peers virtually. Especially at these times during pandemic – it is needed even more as people are not able to meet each other in person.

Approach:

At this time – I’d like to discuss the users for rooms, then proceed to disucss their pain points with prioritization, list out potential solutions and then discuss some success defining metrics.

User Types:

  1. Non- Business users
  2. Businesses

Here, I’d like to focus on Non-Business users and mobile apps because of the sheer volume of people that are on FB that are not there to do business and are usually on the app than on the web, but to connect with people they know and/or would like to know and connect with.

Pain Points:

  1. Not everyone the user wants to talk to might be on FB
  2. Security concerns
  3. Calendar integration for reminders

Prioritization Matrix (Pain Amount / Priority):

1. M / L — Because, not everyone wants to be on FB given privacy/security reasons.

2. H / H — Because, given FB’s privacy settings, not everyone understand how it is used.

3. H / H — because meeting on a calendar is important

 

Solution(s):

Since the high amount of ‘Pain’ and impact is associated with the phonebook, my proposed solution would revolve around calendar integration with prioritization Matrix (Priority / Impact / Effort):

 

1. Allow calendar access (M / M / M) — it may require permissions that may make people uncomfortable

2. Make a calender link clickable to enable auto add (H / H / L) — may result in unwanted attendees too if the link is forwarded.

Priority should be given to solution with ‘clickable calendar links for auto add’ feature. This should alert people in time for the event/meeting/hangout likely to create enagagement and adopt the product.

 

Success Metrics

  1. # of Invite shares via FB/Messenger/SMS/Whatspp
  2. # of People accepting the invites
  3. # of people attending the rooms after accepting the invite
  4. # of Rooms created
  5. # of Rooms with audience of >1
  6. # of unique users joining rooms
  7. Session Time
  8. Room Cancellations
  9. # of rooms created by the same user
  10. Frequency of the rooms created by the user
  11. # of unique people invited by the user

Summary:

My role was to improve Facebook Rooms. The goal was to improve engagement and adoption of the product. I narrowed down the platform as an app, and then the user type to the ‘Non-business user’ of the product instead of business due to the sheer volume of people that like to connect with peers on Facebook. I narrowed down the pain point of Rooms not having calendar access (I may have missed the feature while playing with the feature on FB) based on prioritization.

I proceeded to put 2 solution on the table, and based on impact – I prioritized making calendar integration with one click auto add feature as it’d help remind people of the meeting/event/hangout and support the ultimate goal of increased adoption and engagement.

p.s. Please feel free to provide feedback on how I can potentially improve on this answer? I do think I need to be more creative in solutions. But I could use some help in figuring out how to go about answer for a product that you haven’t used before.