Design a Neighborhood-Scale Local Product Inside Facebook
Company: Meta
Role: Product Manager
Category: Product Design & Strategy
Difficulty: medium
Interview Round: Other
Design a new hyperlocal feature for Facebook: one built around the neighborhood a person lives in, rather than around their friend list or their whole city.
```hint Start from what neighbors already do
People already handle parts of local life on Facebook through neighborhood Groups, Marketplace and Events. Look for the neighbor-to-neighbor need those surfaces serve badly, and pick the users who feel it most.
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### Clarifying Questions
- Is the goal more engagement from existing users, a reason to open Facebook every week, or new revenue such as ads from local businesses?
- How small is "hyperlocal" here: one building, a few blocks, a named neighborhood, or a radius the user sets?
- Should the feature build on existing local surfaces such as Groups, Marketplace and Events, or stand on its own?
- Which areas are in scope: dense cities only, or also suburbs and rural regions where neighbors are far apart?
### What a Strong Answer Covers
- A stated goal for Meta and a chosen user segment, with a reason hyperlocal matters more for that segment than for others.
- Neighbor-level pain points that Groups, Marketplace and Events leave unsolved today.
- A prioritized feature set with a first version, including how residency is confirmed and how a sparse neighborhood avoids feeling empty.
- Success metrics with guardrails for location privacy, safety and content quality.
- Risks such as exposing where people live, profiling or harassment of neighbors, local rumors, and competition from neighborhood apps.
### Follow-up Questions
- A neighborhood has only a handful of active members. How does the feature avoid feeling empty, and when would you widen its boundary?
- Safety posts start describing "suspicious" people in ways that target certain groups. What would you change in the product and in moderation?
- How and when would you decide to let local businesses pay to reach a neighborhood?
Overview: A product design prompt asking for a new hyperlocal feature inside Facebook, built around the neighborhood a person lives in. It tests goal setting, choosing a user segment, finding neighbor-level needs that Groups and Marketplace miss, scoping a first version, and defining metrics with privacy and safety guardrails.