Metrics question
How would you set goals and measure success of Instagram stories? What will happen if too many stories are getting created instead of posts?
- Meta
- Metrics
- Hard
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What this question tests
Metric design for an ephemeral content format and understanding cannibalization risk.
How to approach it
- State Stories' goal: increase daily engagement and lower the barrier to sharing compared to curated posts.
- Propose metrics: stories created per DAU, story completion or view-through rate, and replies generated from stories.
- Address the cannibalization question directly: check whether total engagement and ad revenue stay net positive as posts decline.
- Propose a guardrail metric, e.g. feed ad impressions, to catch revenue risk from the shift.
- Distinguish engagement metrics, where stories help frequency, from discovery metrics, where posts help reach.
- Conclude that a moderate posts-to-stories shift is fine only if total time spent and monetization hold.
What a strong answer includes
- Names story-specific metrics, completion rate and replies, not just view count.
- Directly answers the 'too many stories' question with a guardrail instead of ignoring it.
- Distinguishes engagement metrics from discovery metrics rather than treating all content the same.
- Gives a reasoned verdict: cannibalization is acceptable only if it doesn't hurt total ad inventory.
Common mistakes
- Treating stories and posts as unrelated instead of addressing the substitution risk asked in the question.
- Only proposing engagement metrics with no monetization guardrail.
Likely follow-up questions
- How would you know if stories are cannibalizing post creation versus growing total content?
- What guardrail would stop you from over-optimizing for story volume?
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Learn the skill behind it
Chapters of the AI PM course that teach what this question tests.
- Chapter 9: Prove it paid off: outcomes, economics, and pricing
- Chapter 2: Data fluency: SQL, logs, and reading the truth yourself
- Chapter 14: Get the job: the AI PM interview loop