You are the PM for a large social feed product with more than 200M daily active users, where ranking changes can quickly move both engagement and creator distribution. Over the last two quarters, session depth and reshares have grown 9%, but user surveys, hide/report actions, and integrity escalations suggest the feed is becoming more polarizing and lower quality for some cohorts. Leadership wants faster growth in sharing and retention, while policy and integrity teams are concerned that aggressive optimization could damage trust, creator incentives, and long-term ecosystem health. A recent ranking experiment lifted short-term engagement by 4.5% but also increased negative feedback by 11%.
How would you think about the trade-off between growth and ecosystem health in a feed product like this, and what product strategy would you recommend? How would you decide what to prioritize, what to measure, and where you would draw the line between acceptable growth tactics and unhealthy ecosystem outcomes?