Building News Into Facebook: Reader Problems, First Version and Success Metrics
Company: Meta
Role: Product Manager
Category: Product Design & Strategy
Difficulty: medium
Interview Round: Other
You are a product manager at Meta, asked to create a news product for Facebook. Decide what it is for and whom it serves, which problems it solves, what the first version contains and how you would measure whether it succeeds.
```hint What the feed does not already do
People already see news on Facebook whenever friends and pages share it. Decide which reader problem a dedicated news product would solve that the existing feed does not, before you list features.
```
### Clarifying Questions
- Does "news" mean professional journalism from publishers, local community updates, or any post about current events that people share?
- Should the product live inside the Facebook app, as a tab or a section of the feed, or be a separate app?
- Which country launches first? Rules on paying publishers for news links and on political content differ by market.
- What should it optimize for: engagement on Facebook, how well informed people are, or value for news publishers?
### What a Strong Answer Covers
- A goal tied to Facebook's mission and a clear view of what a dedicated product adds over the news people already see in their feed.
- A choice among the sides of the product (readers, publishers, local sources) and a focus reader segment, with reasons.
- Pain points specific to news on a social network, such as unreliable or sensational stories, duplicate posts about the same event and important updates that get buried.
- A prioritized first version with trade-offs, including personalization versus filter bubbles and engagement versus quality.
- A success metric that goes beyond clicks and time spent, with guardrails for misinformation, negative experiences and publisher health.
### Follow-up Questions
- An experiment shows the product increases time spent but also increases reports of false news. What do you do?
- How would you keep publishers willing to supply content, and how would laws in some countries that require platforms to pay for news change your plan?
- How would you rank stories for a reader without trapping them in a filter bubble?
Overview: A product sense exercise asking how you would build a dedicated news product into Facebook. It tests choosing a goal and a reader segment, finding the problems with news on a social network such as misinformation and buried updates, prioritizing a first version, and defining success metrics with quality guardrails.