LinkedIn Stories is a failed product. What would you have done differently?

This question is designed to test your ability to analyze a product's performance, identify potential improvement areas and suggest alternate strategies. When responding, start by acknowledging the statement in the question, then provide your analysis of why you believe LinkedIn Stories failed. After this, you can go ahead to suggest what you would have done differently. Importantly, remember to back up your statements with reasonable justifications. You may also want to mention how you would know if your new strategy is successful or not.

Indeed, LinkedIn Stories did not meet the expectation despite its promising start. In my observation, the key reason for its failure was a misalignment with user needs and expectations on the platform. LinkedIn is a professionally oriented platform where users are looking to make business connections, gain industry insights, and find career opportunities. The Stories feature, which is more casual and ephemeral, seemed out of place in such a setting.

In its place, I would have invested in enhancing features that align with the platform's professional nature. For instance, features that highlight industry trends, provide deeper analytics around post engagement, or facilitate more targeted networking could have been more beneficial.

I would gauge success on these features through user engagement levels, feedback and their impact on overall user activity on LinkedIn.

LinkedIn Stories' adoption was not as robust as anticipated. I believe the primary contributing factor was its format, which is more suited to lifestyle-based social platforms, like Instagram or Snapchat, rather than a professional networking platform like LinkedIn.

Instead of Stories, I would propose implementing a feature that helps user in real-time professional development and learning. This could take the form of live mentorship sessions, webinars, or 'Ask Me Anything' (AMA) sessions with industry leaders. This aligns better with LinkedIn's mission of facilitating professional growth.

To measure the effectiveness of these new features, I would track metrics like user adoption, session attendance, repeat usage and the participation level in these live sessions. Additionally, community feedback and engagement could also serve as indicators of the new features' success or areas requiring improvement.