Product design question

As a PM at WhatsApp, you found that there is a gradual decrease in the engagement of WhatsApp groups. How will you make enhancements in such a way that this engagement is improved?

Practice this question out loud. An AI interviewer asks it, follows up like a real interviewer would, and scores your answer. Type or speak.

What this question tests

Product sense for diagnosing and reversing engagement decline in an existing feature, requiring root-cause thinking before proposing a fix.

Confirm what 'engagement' means here, message frequency, active participants per group, or both, and over what time window the decrease occurred.
Hypothesize root causes: group size creep diluting relevance, notification fatigue causing muting, or newer features like Channels pulling activity away from Groups.
Segment the decline by group size and group type, family versus large community groups, since the cause and fix likely differ by segment.
Propose a fix targeted at the most likely driver, e.g. smarter, topic-based notification grouping to reduce noise in large groups while preserving signal in small ones.
Define success as message-and-reply rate per active group member over a 30-day window, with notification opt-out rate as a guardrail.

Diagnoses before prescribing: names 2-3 concrete hypotheses and how segmentation would confirm or rule each out.
Distinguishes large, noisy groups from small, high-trust groups, since a single fix rarely suits both.
Picks a fix tied directly to the diagnosed cause, notification fatigue, rather than a generic 'add more features.'

Proposing a fix before segmenting the decline, risking a solution that doesn't match the actual cause.
Treating all WhatsApp groups the same, when family groups and large community groups behave very differently.

How would you distinguish notification fatigue from a genuine decline in group relevance?
How would you measure success without just re-inflating message volume with noise?