Project Career Path
Project Career Path
Project Career Path
My role in this project:
My role in this project:
I am the Product Manager on this project working closely with engineers, designers, data scientists, operations and marketing specialists.
I am the Product Manager on this project working closely with engineers, designers, data scientists, operations and marketing specialists.
My role in this project:
I am the Product Manager on this project working closely with engineers, designers, data scientists, operations and marketing specialists.
This is a personal project that uses kinetic motion to illustrate the song "The History of Everything", which gives the song a different visual narrative in motion.
This is a personal project that uses kinetic motion to illustrate the song "The History of Everything", which gives the song a different visual narrative in motion.
Removing Uncertainty from Career
Mobile, B2C, Q&A, Community, LinkedIn, China Market
Introduction
LinkedIn Career Q&A is a career-oriented community product that aims to enable knowledge sharing and career opportunities through professional Q&A. It also serves as a content source of active discussions for the China strategic features like LinkedIn Salary Insights and LinkedIn Learning.
User Research
In order to understand user needs so that the product is developed to create real user value, a user research is conducted by the UER team at LinkedIn. I deeply participated in the user research which recruited ~20 professionals who are users and potential users, career starters, mid-career professionals and people managers across tier 1 and tier 2 cities. I prepared questions and assumptions beforehand, took notes during interviews and participated in the discussions.
Key Findings
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Compared to group Mid-Career Professional and People Manager, group Career Starter are more anxious about their career mainly because they are starters who haven’t built up their connections. So they have no idea where and how to acquire credible and valuable information when facing decision-making questions like how to choose the first job or compare job offer.
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Both Mid-Career Professionals and People Managers have the need to build their reputation in career, the latter group has a stronger need. They want to find a trusted platform/product to share their career experiences and insights for that sake. What’s more, they prefer public/group sharing over 1on1 conversation for efficiency reason.
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In terms of product type, all 3 groups of users prefer Q&A over long-form article or courses for Q&A’s interactive communication and the content type is suitable for fragmented learning in a lot of scenarios like commuting on subway etc.
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In terms of content, all groups mentioned that the source of content must be reliable, either from credible organizations/companies or trustworthy professionals with good reputation in the industry. Additional need is to be able to connect with these industry professionals through meaningful conversations.
Why this Project?
There is a market demand for professional Q&A
Members want to learn credible insights about career opportunities (the company/the team/the salary/the skills etc.) from industry professionals
Questions get higher response rates and engagement than other types of shares on LinkedIn
Question shares have a much higher response rate than other shares and have 2X the number of responses.
Members’ immediate networks are not always the best suited to answer their professional questions
They may not always have members with the right expertise to answer their questions.
Members want to showcase their expertise and enhance their professional image:
Members are able to showcase their expertise and build their professional brand by giving answers on LinkedIn.
Competitors and Our Key Strengths
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MaiMai is LinkedIn's head-to-head competitor in China market.
They are famous for their anonymous forum which is a traffic driven (rumors and gossips) feature, people go there to meet their gossiping needs rather than find and give answers for real career problems.
Zhihu is Quora of China. First, it's not a professional career focused Q&A community. Second, they don't have real identity mechanism so they have a lot of credibility issue with their content. Especially for career topics, user can hardly tell the source of the Q&As.
LinkedIn's strengths are IDENTITY and NETWORK. Real identity can add credibility to Q&As, while social network can help the content go viral, and build more connections via meaningful conversations under the same topic (company/occupation/industry).
Vision to Value
Define Milestones and Features
Stage 1
Content Generation Foster Contributors
Stage 2
Content Distribution
Question Targeting & Discovery
Stage 3
Engage Participation
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Enable answering a question
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Match the question to the right audience leveraging profile data (role, company, industry, education)
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Include Q&A activity as a part of member profile
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​Provide social validations through likes, comments, and shares
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Enable asking a question leveraging the #hashtag feature
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​Make the questions easily discoverable by surfacing them in the feed and integrate with other strategic features like Salary, Learning and Career Guide​
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Spam Filters and user flagging to ensure only high quality questions are shown
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Build support for search
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Recognize useful answers by sorting answers based on user likes, awarding topic expert badges
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Surface Q&A network activity in the feed and notifications to keep the conversation going.
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Follow action feature to help members follow a specific question and keep tabs on its activity via notifications
Core Flow
Native App
Notification
Entry point banner
Recommendation card in feed
Q&A home page
My answers history
Answer list page
Collect questions page
Be the first to answer page
Write an answer
Invite the network to answer
Answer detail page
WeChat Sharing Experience
Wechat Card
Answer detail page
Answer detail page
Share on Wechat
Profile page
Download app
Signup/Login
Answer list
Answer detail
After
Answer list
Answer detail
Case Studies
Case study #1 - Revert Q&A consumption flow for a better experience
Before
After
Question list
Answer list
Answer detail
Question list
Answer list
Answer detail
The original flow of consuming a question is:
View Question list -> Tap on a question -> View the best answer's detail page -> View all answers
2 problems with this flow after ramp:
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From a content recommendation perspective, this flow adds the risk of recommending the best answer. In theory, the answer that got the most likes and comments should be recommended right after a user chooses a question. In practice, it takes time to get these likes and comments for the answers in the cold-start stage, so in a lot of the cases, the newly added answer take the best place rather than the "best" answer. And the user just stopped there rather than continue to view the other answers.
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From a content consumption perspective, the viewer can only consume one answer per time, but given the answers are all relatively short. It's a waste of space and less efficiency to just view one of the answers to the question.
So I suggested optimize the flow to:
View Question list -> Tap on a question -> View all the answers in a list -> Tap on an answer -> View the answer details
The new flow seems less intuitive than the original one, but it actually gives the viewer more content(answers in this case) to consume and solves the bad cold start answer recommendation problem, which provides a better content consumption experience in general.
Case study #2 - Increase efficiency for users to interact with content
Before
Answer list
Answer detail
After the flow enhancement above, I found another problem - there are very few likes and comments for answers. But social actions are so important in terms of giving motivation to contributors to come back and continue contributing. Leave the answer quality concern for a moment, from the user interaction perspective, I found an area to improve, which is the static likes and comments on the Answer List page.
As I've mentioned before, a lot of the answers are relatively short(within 3-4 lines) yet still in good quality so that the viewers are able to consume a lot of short answers from the answer list view without even tapping into the answer detail page. But the viewer can not Like or Comment an answer from the outside(directly on the answer list page), which brings inconvenience for viewers to contribute likes and comments resulting in bad numbers of social actions.
Therefore, my suggestion was to make the Like and Comment clickable buttons on the answer list page instead of static numbers. The results are very positive, unique contributors and contributors retained were greatly increased.
Integrate with Learning and Salary Features
Q&A on Course Page
Q&A on Salary Insights Page
AB Testing Results and Learnings
Content Generated was lifted by 161%, Social Actions was increased by 54%​
I've learned a ton from this project.
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I’ve developed a deeper understanding of the positive correlation between user generated content(UGC) and user retention. Here are 3 levels of interactive patterns in terms of engagement that I summarized: 1) The lightest interactive pattern is viewing behavior like viewing content that’s composed/published by someone else; 2) The moderate interactive pattern is clicking behavior, e.g. liking/sharing. 3) The deepest interactive is writing content from commenting, to giving an answer, to writing a long-form article. The deeper the interaction is, the cost of time and effort from user become higher, the deeper relationship could be built between the writer and other people in the community if the content is distributed well, thus adding probabilities for user to be retained. In short, the engagement level will be increased accordingly from the lightest interaction to the deepest interaction. This is the reason why I initiative this project and explained the results.
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Leveraging operational resources is vitally important for content product like Q&A. I deeply participated in Q&A operation in defining daily/weekly/monthly rules to publish content, increase efficiency in content review before publishing, and developing campaigns to reward active contributors. There is a metaphor I highly agree to describe the relationship between operation and product - Product plants a seed of a tree, operation water the seed and work with product to ensure the tree is growing robustly.
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Partner with related product functions to form an ecosystem that benefits all stakeholders. My last and most important piece of learning from this project is always collaborate with related teams to maximize the impact of your project. In this case, I found Salary and Learning are two features that are low frequent products that could be two good candidates for Q&A to integrate into. Thus I reached out to Salary team and Learning team to discuss adding Q&A modules to their features to help them increase engagement. I did some extra work to add customize Q&A tags ensuring content relevance in their scenarios. This integration turned out to be a win-win strategy as it not only brought more traffic and added content variety from Q&A product perspective but also increased engagement for Salary and Learning feature.