Company Context

Meta operates products at global scale, and Facebook Groups remains a core community surface with hundreds of millions of users participating in interest-based, identity-based, and local communities. Groups supports engagement, retention, and creator/admin ecosystems, but product teams must balance growth with trust, relevance, and community health.

Problem

You are a User Experience Researcher embedded on the Facebook Groups team. The PM team plans to invest the next two quarters in a new discovery-focused feature set to help users join more Groups and increase weekly active Groups participation. Early product thinking assumes the main problem is that users do not find enough relevant Groups.

However, your initial research suggests a different issue: many users can find Groups, but struggle to stay active after joining because onboarding is confusing, norms are unclear, and notifications feel noisy or irrelevant. Internal data shows that while Group joins grew 12% quarter-over-quarter, 4-week retention among new joiners is flat at 28%, and 35% of users who mute Group notifications do so within the first 10 days.

Your job is to explain how you would use research to potentially change the product direction from acquisition toward post-join experience and community fit.

Deliverables

1. Define the core user problem you would investigate and the user segments you would prioritize.
2. Describe the research plan you would run to determine whether Meta should prioritize Group discovery or post-join experience.
3. Explain how you would synthesize findings into a product recommendation that could change roadmap direction.
4. Propose the product changes you would recommend for Facebook Groups if the research confirms your hypothesis.
5. Define success metrics and how you would know the research had meaningful product impact.

Constraints

• The team has already staffed engineers against discovery concepts, so changing direction has organizational cost.
• You have 6 weeks to produce actionable insights before roadmap lock.
• You can access existing behavioral data, admin feedback, and Meta research recruiting channels, but cannot run a long-term longitudinal study before the decision.
• Any recommendation must work across diverse Group types, including parenting, gaming, local buy/sell, and health support communities.