Main takeaways: - Understand your goal and product - Brainstorm ideas - Opportunity size and prioritize

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6. Identify
Product
Opportunities
An approach to finding meaningful
opportunities to improve your product.

7. Outline Intro
Framework
Case Studies
Takeaways

8. Intro

9. About the presenter
Won 2 awards at Facebook for this work
2x Founder
Discovered product opportunities at
Facebook that moved topline metrics
You can apply this thinking to any product or
area

10. Let it guide your path
Be flexible and open
the framework
“UI-ME”

11. Understand
Identify
Market-Size
Execute

12. Understand Goals and Metrics
Problems
Data
Motivations
User Feedback
Past experiments or investments
Upstream vs downstream impact

13. 1
Tips
How to execute this phase
1. Narrow your focus on a goal or metric
2. Don’t try to be exhaustive -- there will
always be more opportunity
3. Create a shared doc
4. Rely on cross functional partners
a. Product marketing
b. Data science
c. Business Operations
d. Research
e. Design

14. Identify Levers
Heuristics
Large vs. Small percentages
Brainstorm
Intuition
Hypothesis
Bugs - Optimizations - New Products

15. Identify Levers
Heuristics
Large vs. Small percentages
Brainstorm
Intuition
Hypothesis
Bugs - Optimizations - New Products

16. Move a large
number a little
A small number a
lot
10M
Moved 1% is 100,000

17. Tips Traps
Create a list
Not everything has to be novel and new
Ensure ideas could impact goals & metrics
Don’t only rely on data
Data won’t always jump out answers
Past doesn’t always indicate future performance

18. Have one place with your list of
opportunities.

19. Market Sizing
(aka opportunity sizing)
(aka impact sizing)

20. ➔ Your goal is to project expected metrics or goal impact for each opportunity
➔ Work with cross functional partners, or do it yourself (data science, business operations, analysts)
Project expected impact
Prioritize
➔ Does it align with your goals and mission
➔ What is the investment cost and rough size (time, money, effort)
➔ Expected impact vs. effort

21. Execution
Get to work!

22. Tips Traps
Validate your assumptions
Be quick to move on
Reduce scope when you can
Focus on the problem, not the solution
Don’t get tunnel vision -- improve real experiences
and problems
Don’t under-communicate
Trust, but verify your results

23. Case Study 1
Unlocking
inventory
from my work at Facebook

24. Goal: increase birthday sharing
● First, I looked at distributions of data. Countries? Platform? What’s the funnel look like
(notifications vs. feed vs. messenger vs. profile etc.)
● Then, I reviewed everything I knew about birthdays. How do people have them on Facebook? What
are the steps on both sides (recipient vs. sender)
● After reviewing data and thinking through the flows, I realized you have to list your birthday on
your profile.. I had found a lead!
● I pulled data and found millions of people hid their birthday privately.
● I asked myself why so many people would hide their birthday. It because of age concerns? Was it
unintentional? Would they want to change their birthday privacy?

25. After market sizing, we saw it could be big
and only a few weeks of work.
50% conversion rate
Hundreds of millions of new birthday wishes
annually
Many accidentally hid, others intentionally

26. Case Study 2
Clarity
Optimization

27. Goal: increase wall posts (original sharing)
● Again, I looked at distributions of data. What’s the sharing funnel like? Where do people post status
updates, how do they do it? What’s the breakdown of data?
● Then, I reviewed the experiences and thought about our goal and metrics.
● After reviewing data and thinking through the flows, I had an a thought: how important is the
“ghost text” aka hint text that we see?
● I had an idea: what would happen if we improve some of this text people see before they share?
Could making the ghost text more clear increase the number of people sharing an update?
● I had an idea and a hypothesis. If we improve the hint text on a surface viewed by hundreds of
millions of people every day, we’ll help them share more updates.

28. Small change, several variants. Big impact!
“to [firstname]”
+650,000 sharing updates / day
Clarified who’s wall you’re posting

29. Takeaways

30. Brady Simpson /in/wbsimpson
● Understand your goal and product
● Use the framework (UI-ME), be flexible
● Consolidate your workflow and keep it clean
● Solve a real problem
● Not all opportunities need to move metrics -- focus on the ones that do
● Don’t worry about being exhaustive
● Rely on your cross functional partners
● Trust but verify your results

31. Questions?
Brady Simpson /in/wbsimpson

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