How to set goals/success metrics for a product?

Most of the PMs are asked on setting goals and success metrics in PM interviews. I will try to provide a framework and a case study

FRAMEWORK

1. What is the product & what problem does it solve?
2. Mission for FB & Product
3. Stage of the product & whether to focus on acquisition/Engagement/Retention
4. Key User groups & GOALS
5. Customer journey
6. Define at least a6 metrics (3Supply 3demand)
7. Define a single north star metric
8. Risks
9. Counter metric to measure risk
10. Identify Cannibalism scenarios

Measure success of events

Clarifying Questions

• Pre-Covid or post Covid — Virtual events vs in person events
• I believe..You want me to look at events all up and not just mobile or desktop app.

What does events solve for? Facebook events enables users to organize and respond to to gatherings around the world.

Competitive advantage: Facebook has a huge user base of 3B, and it helps event organizers to connect with a huge base. Event attendees can also discover high volume of events in one place

Mission: Events mission is to help people discover, attend, and organize events nearby and allows people to connect over common interests in the event

Stage of the product: Mature product as it has been there for a while in the market and even naive users are able to use this. I won't say adoption rate or acquisition should be our key goal.

Engagement should be our key goal

User & User Journey

For organizers, it acts as a marketing channel(awareness) where they can tap into the huge base that fb has.

Organizer User journey:

• Clicks create event
• Selects online or Inperson event
• Enters event name, time, privacy mode(public/private)
• Enters location : Links
• Enter description of events
• Upload cover photo
• Send invites

For Attendees, it helps them to search, express interest(by clicking & attend events around them

• Discover event
• Clicks interested or going
• Pays for the events
• Shares events with friends

Engagement -

• #going and #interested which tells us about the attendee's interest
• #events created on monthly basis
• #Invites sent
• #Engaged user/event — for every 100 events how many people clicked going or interested share or invite
• #Shared events
• %of users who added friends
• %who actually showed up/interest

Prioritization

North start — Eng user/event

Risk

• Fake/Bogus/lazy events creation : To address this, we will remove them for measurement purposes
• No activity from organizer after event creation

Counter — #active events

• Invites sent
• Complete info of event

Cannibalization — FB events is also integrated with pages, groups

If engaged user/event goes up, I would want to make sure we don't reduce the engaged user of pages or groups. I will look at LTV per visitor in such cases to ensure we are helping the overall FB goal.