Product design question
How would you improve monetization of Facebook stories?
- Meta
- Product design
- Hard
Practice this question out loud. An AI interviewer asks it, follows up like a real interviewer would, and scores your answer. Type or speak.
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What this question tests
Monetization strategy for an ephemeral content format, checking whether you can balance ad load against the short attention span and high drop-off risk of Stories.
How to approach it
- Clarify the current state: Stories already carry ads between user stories, so frame this as optimizing existing monetization, not inventing it from scratch.
- Identify the core tension: more ad frequency increases revenue per session but raises story-skip and drop-off rates, hurting long-term engagement and ad inventory.
- Segment by advertiser fit: some categories, like local businesses or shopping, may work better as native story-format ads than generic display-style ads.
- Propose a fix: improve ad relevance through better targeting and native story-style creative formats, which typically perform better than static banner-style story ads.
- Test a frequency cap tied to session length, so light users see fewer ads per session than heavy users, protecting the experience for casual viewers.
- Define success as revenue per session growing without an increase in story-skip rate or session abandonment.
What a strong answer includes
- Frames the problem as optimization of an existing system, not invention, showing accurate knowledge of how Stories monetization already works.
- Names the specific trade-off, ad frequency versus skip rate, as the central tension to manage rather than just 'add more ads'.
- Proposes a frequency cap tied to session length, a concrete mechanism that protects the experience for lighter users.
Common mistakes
- Suggesting simply adding more ads without addressing the skip-rate and drop-off risk that comes with it.
- Ignoring ad format quality, assuming any ad works the same in the fast, swipe-driven Stories format as in the main feed.
Likely follow-up questions
- How would you decide the right ad frequency cap per user segment?
- How would you measure long-term impact on Stories usage, not just immediate revenue?
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Learn the skill behind it
Chapters of the AI PM course that teach what this question tests.
- Chapter 4: Discovery and strategy for AI products
- Chapter 7: AI UX and human oversight: design for a system that is wrong sometimes
- Chapter 14: Get the job: the AI PM interview loop