Deciding Whether and How to Bring Advertising Into Facebook Dating
Company: Meta
Role: Product Manager
Category: Product Design & Strategy
Difficulty: medium
Interview Round: Other
Assume you are the product manager responsible for Facebook Dating at Meta. A product manager from the Ads team comes to you wanting to start showing ads inside Dating. How would you respond? Decide whether ads belong in Dating at all, what form they could take if they do, and how you would test the idea and judge the outcome.
```hint Find the goal behind the request
Before you sketch any ad format, work out what the Ads team actually needs and what Dating users would lose if the experience started to feel commercial. How sensitive dating data is should shape every choice that follows.
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### Clarifying Questions
- What is driving the request: a revenue target for Dating, advertiser demand for a dating-adjacent audience, or a push for every Meta surface to carry ads?
- Does Dating show any ads today, and what have users been told about keeping their Dating activity separate from the rest of Facebook?
- How mature is Dating: still building enough users per market for matching to work, or stable enough that earning money is the next priority?
- Are ads the only option on the table, or can I propose other ways for Dating to pay for itself, such as paid features?
### What a Strong Answer Covers
- Treating the request as a stakeholder conversation: learning the Ads team's goal and restating Dating's own goal before agreeing or refusing.
- An honest assessment of what makes Dating a different ad surface: emotionally sensitive moments, intimate data such as who someone wants to date, and users' expectation of privacy from their Facebook friends.
- If ads go ahead, concrete limits on placement, ad categories, targeting and frequency that protect browsing, matching and conversations.
- A test plan with a success metric and guardrails that would catch damage to trust, matching and retention, plus a rule for stopping.
- A recommendation that compares alternatives, such as paid features or a narrow pilot, and a plan for bringing the Ads PM along.
### Follow-up Questions
- The pilot earns revenue, but more users who saw ads say they feel watched. What do you do?
- Advertisers ask to target people using the gender preferences they set in Dating. How do you respond?
- How would your answer change in a market where Dating competes mainly with paid dating apps?
Overview: A product sense question about how the Facebook Dating product manager should respond when the Ads team asks to show ads inside Dating. It tests stakeholder judgment, care with intimate user data and trust, ad placement and targeting limits, and an experiment with guardrails that protects matching and retention.