Facebook Pro Mode User Base

The Facebook Business Growth team was planning to open up new features to Facebook user profiles that was previously only available to business owners. The team was interested in better understanding who the core users might be, what their use cases were, and how to communicate these new features to them. Facebook leadership also wanted to get opportunity sizing for the feature, in order to better forecast engineering and other resource needs.

The research roadmap that was developed prior to me joining the team called for US qual research, but after speaking with my product manager, I realized we needed quant research in various regions, to get a rep sample that enabled stat testing. Also, while the team believed we should only recruit from our sample of users identified as having commercial intent, I knew we would risk missing out on users that would have an interest in the feature if we narrowed our sample too early.

I adjusted the research plan to reflect three regions instead of just one, quantitative research ahead of the qual, and an additional leg of quant research so that we could survey both the targeted sample, and a rep sample in each region.

The results confirmed that we did need to broaden our target, and identified an incremental $12MM opportunity by doing so. Importantly, had we only conducted the research in the US, as originally planned, the concept wouldn't have met thresholds and we would have spent more time trying to develop the idea. However, since it was so successful in the other two regions, we were able to move forward with global development, while further exploring some communication adjustments for the US market.