Choose a Sports Audience and Design a Facebook Product for It
Company: Meta
Role: Product Manager
Category: Product Design & Strategy
Difficulty: medium
Interview Round: Other
Design a new product for Facebook in the sports space. The space is broad, so you decide which part of it and which people to focus on. Explain that choice, propose the product, and describe how you would measure whether it succeeds.
```hint Narrow the field first
Sports covers fans of professional teams, people who play for fun, coaches, local leagues and fitness. Pick the slice where friends, Groups and local communities on Facebook give an advantage a dedicated sports app lacks.
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### Clarifying Questions
- Should the product live inside the Facebook app, for example in Groups, Events or Watch, or may it be a separate app?
- What does Facebook want from it: more engagement, new or returning users, a stronger relationship with leagues and athletes, or revenue?
- Does "sports" mean following professional sports as a fan, playing sports and staying active, or is either acceptable?
- Are there limits on budget, timeline, or whether the product can include hardware?
### What a Strong Answer Covers
- A goal for Facebook and a reasoned choice of segment, with the main alternatives weighed.
- Specific pain points of the chosen segment, grounded in how those people behave today.
- Solutions that use Facebook's social graph and communities, prioritized into a first version.
- Success metrics with guardrails.
- Risks such as safety, media rights, moderation, a cold start and competition from dedicated apps.
### Follow-up Questions
- How would you make the product useful to its very first users in a new market, before many others have joined?
- How would your product change if Facebook asked you to target fans of professional sports specifically?
- After launch, what results would make you stop investing, and how long would you wait before deciding?
Overview: An open-ended product sense interview question asking for a new sports-related product at Facebook. It tests narrowing a broad space to one audience, finding concrete pain points, designing social features that use Facebook's strengths, prioritizing a first version, and choosing success metrics and guardrails.