Choose a food need Facebook users have and design a product to serve it
Company: Meta
Role: Product Manager
Category: Product Design & Strategy
Difficulty: medium
Interview Round: Other
You are a product manager at Meta and have been asked to design a new product around food for Facebook. Decide which food need it should serve and for which users, identify the problems those users have today, propose and prioritize solutions for a first version, and explain how you would know it is working.
```hint Look for the social meal
Food already has specialized apps for recipes, reviews, reservations and delivery. Find a food moment where Facebook's friends, Groups, Pages and Messenger give it an advantage those apps do not have.
```
### Clarifying Questions
- Which part of food is in scope: deciding where to eat out, cooking at home, buying groceries, ordering delivery, or buying from local food sellers?
- What is the main objective: bringing people together around food, more engagement on Facebook, or more value for the local restaurants and food businesses that advertise on it?
- Should this live inside the Facebook app and Messenger, or ship as a separate app?
- Which market should the first version target, given how much eating habits and food apps differ by country?
### What a Strong Answer Covers
- A goal that fits Facebook's mission and business, and a clear reason Facebook, rather than an existing food app, should build this.
- A segmentation of food needs and users with a reasoned choice of one segment to design for.
- Pain points of that segment mapped to solutions that use Facebook's social graph and surfaces, prioritized into a focused first version.
- A north-star metric tied to the goal, with guardrails for spam, privacy and harm to other Facebook surfaces.
- Risks such as cold start, trust in sponsored suggestions, stale business information and competition, with mitigations.
### Follow-up Questions
- Your design relies on friends' food recommendations, but most users have never shared one. How do you get past the cold start?
- How would restaurants pay for this without turning friend-driven suggestions into ads that users stop trusting?
- Engagement with the feature is high, but very few plans end with people actually eating together. What would you investigate and change?
Overview: A Meta product manager design question that asks for a new food-related product inside Facebook. It tests choosing a food need and user segment, using Facebook's friends, Groups, Pages and Messenger as an advantage, prioritizing a focused first version, and defining success metrics with guardrails.