Metrics question
Your team is proposing removing the profile photo upload step in the onboarding flow. What metric would you look at?
- Meta
- Metrics
- Easy
Practice this question out loud. An AI interviewer asks it, follows up like a real interviewer would, and scores your answer. Type or speak.
Start a mock interview on this question · Mock interview from a job description
What this question tests
Whether the candidate can anticipate both intended and unintended metric impacts of a small onboarding change before it ships.
How to approach it
- Clarify the hypothesis behind removing the step: likely reducing onboarding drop-off and time to first session by cutting friction.
- Define the primary metric: onboarding completion rate and time to complete signup, expecting these to improve.
- Define a downstream risk metric: profile completeness later correlates with engagement and trust (a photo-less profile can look less credible or safe), so track early retention for users who skip it.
- Consider a guardrail on social or trust features, such as friend request acceptance rate, which could suffer if profile photos are added late or not at all.
- Recommend testing with an A/B experiment rather than a full rollout, watching both onboarding completion and week-1 retention before deciding.
What a strong answer includes
- Names a plausible downstream risk, lower trust or engagement without a photo, not just the intended onboarding completion lift.
- Proposes an A/B test rather than accepting the change blindly, since the tradeoff isn't obviously positive.
- Distinguishes a short-term funnel metric (completion rate) from a longer-term health metric (week-1 retention) that could move in opposite directions.
Common mistakes
- Looking only at onboarding completion rate without considering downstream retention or trust effects.
- Assuming the change is automatically good because it reduces friction.
Likely follow-up questions
- How would you prompt users to add a photo later without hurting onboarding speed?
- What would make you reject this change even if onboarding completion improves?
More metrics questions
- How would you measure the success of Facebook Likes?Meta · Metrics · Medium
- How would you measure improvements made to Facebook messenger?Meta · Metrics · Easy
- Imagine you are the PM in charge of Reactions on Facebook - the new way to interact with posts by using “love”, “haha”, “wow”, “sad”, and “angry” reactions. What would success look like in terms of number of non-like reactions per post at launch and how do you come up with this? Would this number differ by reaction? Why or why not?Meta · Metrics · Hard
- You launched a new signup flow to encourage new users to add more profile information. A/B test results indicate that the % of people that added more information increased by 8%. However, 7 day retention decreased by 2%. What do you do?Google · Metrics · Hard
- Define the metrics for YouTube search.Google · Metrics · Medium
- You are the PM of Instagram app. The MAU has been constant but DAU has declined. What will you do?Meta · Metrics · Medium
More questions from Meta
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