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Root-Causing an Instagram Satisfaction Decline During Ad Monetization Growth

MetaProduct Manager · Other
MediumProduct ManagerOtherAnalytics & Experimentation

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A Meta product manager interview question about Instagram, where ad revenue has risen while user satisfaction has fallen. It tests validating both metrics, decomposing revenue and satisfaction to find a shared cause, testing hypotheses with holdouts, and weighing short-term revenue against long-term user health.

You are a product manager at Meta working on Instagram. Instagram's advertising revenue has gone up, but over the same stretch its user satisfaction has gone down. Explain how you would work out what is happening and what you would do about it.

Clarifying Questions

  • How is user satisfaction measured here (an in-app survey, a sentiment score, app-store ratings), and has the survey's wording, placement or sample changed recently?
  • Did the two metrics drift over months, or did they shift around a specific date, such as an ads or feed-ranking launch?
  • Is the satisfaction decline concentrated on one surface (Feed, Stories, Reels, Explore), one region or one user group, or is it broad?
  • Have behavioral metrics such as daily actives, sessions or time spent moved as well, or only the satisfaction score?

Hints

Hint 1

Ask what users actually noticed: Before linking the two trends, ask whether users would directly feel whatever drove the revenue gain, and what you would expect to see in the data if they did.

Follow-up questions

  • If a long-running holdout shows that the extra ads lower time spent slightly while raising revenue, how would you decide whether to keep them?
  • Suppose the decline turns out to be concentrated among teenagers and unrelated to ads. How does your plan change, and who else do you bring in?
  • How would you set ad load per user without simply showing more ads to the people least likely to complain?