Choosing what to build next for Meta's Horizon Worlds social VR app
Company: Meta
Role: Product Manager
Category: Product Design & Strategy
Difficulty: medium
Interview Round: Other
You are the product manager for Horizon Worlds, Meta's social virtual reality app on Oculus headsets (now sold as Meta Quest), where people meet as avatars in worlds that other users build. What would you design for it?
Pick the problem you think matters most, explain who you are designing for and why, describe your design, and say how you would know it worked.
```hint Find the weak link in the social loop
A social VR app only delivers value when there are people to meet and something worth doing when a user puts on the headset. Decide which part of that loop is weakest, and for whom, before you sketch features.
```
### Clarifying Questions
- Is the goal to attract new users, keep people who have already tried it, grow the creators who build worlds, or earn revenue?
- Is the design limited to the headset, or can it reach people who join from a phone or a browser?
- Which audience matters most: adults looking to socialize, teenagers, players looking for games, or creators?
- Are there headset constraints I should design around, such as comfortable session length or battery life?
### What a Strong Answer Covers
- One explicit goal for Horizon Worlds, with the reason it matters more than the alternatives
- A chosen segment with pain points specific to social VR, such as empty or chaotic spaces, anxiety about strangers, physical comfort, and friends who do not own a headset
- One prioritized design described as a concrete flow across headset and phone, not a feature list
- Success metrics tied to the goal, with guardrails for harassment, comfort and creators
- Risks particular to live voice and avatars, younger users, and building enough density of people
### Follow-up Questions
- Your design lifts first-month retention, but harassment reports per hour of use go up. What do you do?
- How would the design change if most new users arrived on phones rather than headsets?
- What would you build for creators so that the worlds new users find are worth returning to?
Overview: A Meta product manager design question that asks what you would build for Horizon Worlds, the social virtual reality app on Oculus headsets. It tests choosing a goal, finding the weakest point in a social VR experience, designing one concrete solution and defining success metrics with safety guardrails.