Meta operates one of the largest consumer social platforms globally, and Instagram Reels is a core short-form video surface competing for user attention against TikTok, YouTube Shorts, and other entertainment products. Reels already has massive scale, but continued growth depends on showing users videos that feel immediately relevant while also helping creators reach the right audiences.
Instagram leadership believes Reels can increase session depth and creator satisfaction, but users currently report mixed feed quality: some feel Reels becomes repetitive, some say it over-indexes on viral content instead of personal interests, and new creators struggle to get distribution. Internal analysis shows that users who find 5+ highly relevant Reels in their first week are significantly more likely to return, while excessive repetition and low-quality recommendations correlate with lower satisfaction and more negative feedback actions (e.g., “Not Interested,” skips, hides).
You are the product manager responsible for defining the product strategy for the Instagram Reels recommendation system. This is a product-sense question: focus on user needs, product goals, prioritization, trade-offs, and how you would decide what the system should optimize for. You do not need to design the full ML architecture.