Cracking Facebook (Meta) Product Case Interviews: Tips for Data Science Interview Success!

0:00 hi guys welcome back to my channel in today's video let's talk about one of the most challenging product questions in data science interviews and that is how do you improve a product well you may have better ways to answer this kind of question and i'd love to hear them there are three reasons that i consider this kind of question most challenging the first reason is that there are many different ways to ask questions this kind of question can be very open-ended such as how do you input twitter it can also be very specific such as how do you increase what's on your mind posting on facebook and all these kind of questions can be categorized as how to improve a product another reason that i consider this kind of question

0:46 challenging is that their answer should be different for different interviewers what i mean by that is if you interview with a product manager the answer should be different when you interview with a data scientist also the answer will be different based on the type of the interview if you're asked this kind of question during a technical phone screen your answer should be short and to the point but if you ask this kind of question during an on-site interview you want to spend more time clarifying the question interact with the interviewer and provide more in-depth answer the third reason that i consider this kind of question challenging is that even though there are many ways to answer this kind of question there are many ways to improve product

1:33 the interviewers are still looking for structured answers basically even if you have some golden ideas to improve product but if your answer is unstructured or random it's very hard for you to get thumbs up from the interviewer without further ado let's see some simple questions how to improve user retention on twitter how to improve user engagement on facebook how to improve what's on your mind posting on facebook how to improve whatsapp what feature would you add to it so for the rest of the video i'm gonna provide you with my frameworks or a few steps that i typically follow to answer this kind of question i also use

2:18 one interview question from facebook as an example to provide some simple answers to give you a sense of what the answer would look like let's dive in the first step is to clarify the question this is very similar to other kinds of product questions we talked about before it's important to narrow down the scope at the minimum we should be clear about the high level goal of the improvement meaning is it to improve engagement retention or revenue also if the company has multiple products we want to narrow down the scope to a specific product or feature we want to focus on for example if the question is to ask you to improve twitter you can say something like twitter

3:04 has a diverse set of product features such as feeds tweets and others which one shall we focus on lastly if the question is on a specific feature for instance how to improve the words on your mind posting on facebook we need to clarify how the feature actually works is the feature only enabled for certain users or for all users do users have to log in in order to use that feature one thing was noting is that during interviews you may not fully count on the interviewer to give you a direction some interviewers may not give you any suggestion or feedback so be prepared that the interviewer refuses to be helpful we as candidates need to have a clear

3:50 idea on what is the goal of the improvement and which product to focus on as that being said i still encourage you to clarify the question one reason is that sometimes the interviewers do help you they may provide you with more clarity for the question another reason is that it's critical to avoid miscommunication during interviews what the interviewers mean to say is not always what they actually said if you assume you understand the question and you start answering in the wrong direction it's a huge red flag the next step after clarifying the question is to explain the approach it would take to identify product improvement opportunities there are many ways that you could use to come up with ideas to improve

4:36 product if you are a frequent user of a product you may already have some ideas to improve it here i just want to share with you two ways that i typically use to brainstorm ideas remember that we are in the brainstorm stage you can be as outrageous as you want one way to come up with ideas to improve product is to analyze current user journey map basically when you land on a website what would you do as a user and then think about how we can reduce or remove friction in current user experience let's use increasing the number of what's on your mind posting on facebook as an example after we log into facebook in order for

5:22 us to use a feature we need to be aware of it we could think about how often do people see it is the surface area large enough do people hover over the component some ideas we may use to increase people's awareness one is to just increase the size of the component and the button the larger the component the higher chances people will see it also after users log in we could use a pop-up window to show this feature this could also increase awareness another idea is to send emails or push notifications to people to remind them the feature exists ok now we are aware of the feature what do we do next we click on it and a window pops up then

6:08 there are different scenarios it's possible that we open the window but we don't know what to say so we end up not posting anything it can reflect in the data that some users spend some time on the page and did not enter any text then they abandoned it for this kind of users think about how we can reduce friction to incentivize them to post well you may have bad ideas but here i want to share with you some of mine we could probably provide a few templates that can be used easily by users for example we can have a template that asks the user to fill in their feelings like i feel something today because of something else or if it's a special

6:54 day such as an anniversary or birthday of the user or for someone they are closely connected to we could pre-generate the content to simplify the process of posting now we have some ideas to reduce friction for users who have the intention to start but don't know what to say there are also users who know exactly what to say and then type in some words but they end up abandoning the post those users are just one step further to posting let's see how we can reduce friction here to encourage them to post we could remind them in a few hours or in a few days by sending email or notification saying that hey you have a dropped would you like to post it directly

7:40 then they can just click a button to post it we can also provide the option for more edits say something like would you like to continue editing and then provide the link back to the draft to continue the analysis of the user journey another scenario is that users type in some content and post it this outcome we want there's no friction to be removed at that step i know you may think that some of the ideas may sound oversimplified or unnaive but remember that we are in the brainstorming phase the goal here is to come up with some ideas no matter how practical it is and how much business value it can generate another way to come up with product improvement ideas

8:26 is to segment users into different groups based on their behavior and they analyze what makes users more active than others how can we incentivize inactive users to be more active on the platform let's use the same facebook interview question to illustrate this point there are a few distinctive groups of users we can analyze one group is the users who never post it we want to figure out why to identify key needs of those users for example we can figure out if there are new users so they are not aware of this feature or they don't know how to use it if so we could raise their awareness by increasing

9:11 the size of the ui component and providing more detailed instructions on how to use the feature if there are existing users and they never post it we want to find why that is happening do they find it difficult to create content or they don't have enough friends so they don't have motivation to share a simple way to gather feedback is to send surveys to the users we could then address the needs for specific kinds of user for example if they find it difficult to create content we could pre-generate some content for them another segment of users is those who haven't posted in a while they have posted before but they post it less frequently

9:56 or they stop posting at a certain time for this group of users we definitely want to know why they become less engaged on the platform is it because they didn't get lots of attention such as likes and comments on their previous posts therefore they don't have much motivation to post anymore it is also possible that they may get some unexpected criticism on their posts which make them feel it's a toxic platform once we can figure out the reason we could come up with ideas to address different needs for different people if we find that people stop sharing was due to lack of attention to their previous posts we could send some reminders and tell them that your friends miss you and they want to know how you are doing

10:44 that could encourage them to start posting if the reason is about criticism on previous posts the platform could take more actions to remove negative comments the third group of users have the intention to post but end up abandoning the post we already talked about a few ways to reduce friction for those users and here we can go one step further to figure out why we could ask them about their concerns maybe they worry that their posts will not be popular or they think their content is too controversial if we can get the reason we can have solutions to deal with them if they worry that their content is too controversial we could send some posts that's more controversial and encourage them to share their

11:30 opinions the last group of users is those who post frequently we want to study them right we want to know what makes them more active and engaged than others we can compare them versus those who are inactive for example we could use a machine learning model and pick a few variables that you think would matter to change the number of posts typically we can consider a combination of user characteristics and their browsing behaviors as features and use a tree-based model to obtain the importance of those features if we find out users with similar demographics are less active in a certain geographic area than others we could then focus on that

12:16 area and see if it's an awareness problem or if there are competitor products dominating the market we could consider to launch a marketing campaign to raise awareness of those users i have just shared with you two ways to come up with ideas to improve a product during interview there's no need to provide both approaches you can only focus on one of them my rule of thumb is that if my interviewer is a product manager i'm gonna go for the first option basically i'm gonna try to reduce or remove any friction in current user experience and i won't mention anything related to machine learning if my interviewer has data science background i'm gonna go for the second

13:03 option basically i'm going to analyze user behavior and see how we can turn inactive users into active users after the brainstorming session the next thing is to make recommendations on what ideas to prioritize if you have multiple ideas there might not be enough resources in reality to support all of them so we want to recommend how to select the idea to focus on we can recommend doing some quantitative analysis analyzing the proportion of users that are impacted by each idea and compare the business impact so back to the interview question from facebook we can get the percentage of users who never posted users who haven't posted in a while and

13:49 users who have the intention to post but ended up not posting anything once we have those numbers we can select ideas that may impact the most users another way to prioritize idea is to recommend those that are most cost effective meaning that we could put less effort to drive more impact for example we can focus on the users who have the intention to post but end up not posting anything because there is just one step away from posting assuming that there are a fair amount of users who are in this category we want to prioritize ideas that can encourage those users to post the next two steps can be optional depending on the type of the

14:35 interview if it's a technical phone screen it may not be necessary but if it's on-site interview most likely the interviewer will ask you some follow-up questions such as how to design an experiment to test if it's a good idea or not the third step is to define one or two success metrics to measure the success of the new feature you proposed this is very similar to the major success type of question we've covered in another video this step is particularly necessary when you're asked to dive into how you would design an experiment to test your idea be careful about how we split users and whether there will be interference between control and treatment groups because

15:22 that will make the results unreliable especially in social networks such as facebook linkedin and twitter and two-sided markets such as airbnb lyft and uber check out another video on cracking every testing problems to learn more about the pitfalls and the solutions for every test the last step is to summarize the overall approach of taking to improve the product we want to summarize what the goal is and how we come up with a few ideas to improve the product how do we prioritize the ideas based on the business impact and if we want to run every test what metrics do we use and how do we design the experiment so there you go i have just shared a few

16:09 steps that i typically follow to answer this type of question if you have different ideas or different ways to approach them i'd love to hear them feel free to comment below as always i appreciate you for taking time to watch this video and any feedback comment question is welcome if you like this video please give it a thumbs up subscribe share it with your friends who are interested in data science all of them will motivate me to make videos faster and better thank you so much for being here i will see you in the next video