Behavioral question

Instagram executives had a strategy meeting. They decided to pursue something in the area of education. You've been chosen as the PM to lead the effort. What do you do?

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

Behavioral and strategic judgment under ambiguity, whether you can turn a vague executive mandate into a scoped plan.

Situation: describe getting a broad directive, education, with no defined problem, user, or success metric yet.
Task: your job is to convert that mandate into a specific opportunity before committing to a solution.
Action: describe how you would research, for example talking to educators and students already using Instagram informally for learning content, and reviewing what content categories already perform well.
Action: narrow to one wedge, such as short tutorial content discovery for a specific subject or age group, rather than building a full LMS.
Action: describe how you would pressure test the idea with a small pilot, for instance a creator cohort or a discovery surface for education hashtags.
Result: state the outcome you would aim for, engagement or time spent among the target segment, and what you would report back to executives.

Shows you would push back on ambiguity constructively, asking executives what success looks like before building.
Picks a concrete wedge grounded in Instagram's actual strengths, visual short-form content and creators, rather than inventing a generic ed-tech product.
Proposes a specific low-cost validation step, like a creator pilot with 10 to 20 educators, before a full build.
Ties the effort back to Instagram's existing engagement and ad metrics so leadership sees a path to impact.

Designing a full course platform from scratch instead of leveraging Instagram's existing content and creator strengths.
Skipping validation and jumping straight into a large build.
Not clarifying what success means with the executives who set the mandate.

How would you decide whether to build this inside Instagram or as a separate app?
What metric would tell you this initiative is working within the first quarter?