Company Context

Meta operates products at global scale across Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger, with billions of users and highly diverse behaviors, motivations, and constraints. User Experience Researchers at Meta often need to help product teams distinguish between what people explicitly ask for and what they actually need to accomplish in a product.

Problem

You are supporting the Instagram team on a new creator-sharing concept intended to help casual creators post more confidently. Early interviews show a mixed signal: many users say they want "more editing tools," "more control," and "more visibility into who will see my post." However, behavioral data shows that the biggest drop-off happens before posting, especially among newer creators who start creating but abandon drafts. Leadership wants to know how research should separate user wants from user needs before the team commits roadmap resources.

The risk is building highly requested features that increase complexity without solving the deeper problem. At the same time, ignoring stated preferences could make the team miss important trust and control concerns.

Deliverables

1. Explain how you would distinguish user wants from user needs in this Instagram research problem.
2. Identify the most important user segments and the underlying jobs-to-be-done.
3. Recommend what evidence would change your mind about whether a requested feature reflects a true need.
4. Propose how you would translate research findings into product priorities for an MVP.
5. Define how you would communicate trade-offs to product, design, and engineering partners.

Constraints

• The team has 6 weeks to make an MVP scope decision.
• Only one UXR and one data scientist are assigned part-time.
• Engineering can support at most two net-new user-facing changes in the first release.
• The solution must work across multiple global markets, including users with lower-end devices and limited connectivity.