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#Product design question
How would you improve Facebook Groups?
Thank you for bringing it out an interesting question!
Before jumping into building strategy, I would like to clarify a few things in order to correctly draw strategy. Is that okay for you?
Thank you. First I would like to start a brief check about Facebook Groups. As far as I know, Facebook groups have been on Facebook for more than five years which is already passing the maturity life cycle stage.
What is the current life cycle stage of Facebook Groups? Can I regard this product as experiencing the DECLINE stage? or still in the MATURITY stage and maintain its engagement volume?
(Product life cycle as Introduction - Growth - Maturity - Decline)
If we confirm this Facebook Group product is experiencing the DECLINE stage, I would like to ask whether this is a gradual decline or a steep decline recently. If this is a gradual decline been witnessed throughout several years, I would like to make a hypothesis with a fundamental reason rather than a temporary issue such as technology bug or temporary external shock that would affect the ecosystem metric such as Olympic or pandemic.
The hypothesis that I would like to investigate more about this gradual decline is "The fewer group pages are generated, the less user engagement will happen". This hypothesis is based on an economic concept that "supply derives demands". One of the possible causes of losing user retention for this service would be losing interesting group pages activities. From the early stage of Facebook pages, many people would like to join Facebook Groups page as their organization or social meetup is gathered via this channel. However, as the social media market is diversified and a lot of meetup services appear, the number of groups using Facebook Groups as their communication channel could be reduced. This is the rationale for generating this hypothesis.
Can I walk you through what metric could help test this hypothesis? If we can follow up the longitudinal trend of active group pages and active users who used the group feature, we can observe whether this decline is happening from either the supply-side or user side or both. We could also stratify the group into the public group and private group and measure these two metrics as well. If the public group is maintaining a good level of metrics while the private group is showing decreasing metric trend, we could make an inference that gradual decline mainly happens from private group pages.
If we can detect our decline is from private pages, we can explore what kinds of private groups are decreasing a lot and what kinds of private groups are still maintaining the engagement. If offline related groups are decreasing a lot while online-based groups are increasing or remaining the same, we can seek a solution to improve user engagement for those who used offline related groups. We can also seek solutions for boosting user engagement for those who used online related groups on Facebook as a strategy of focusing on what we can do the best.
Is there any following question you would like to discuss more my approach?