Design a new Facebook product that protects people from harm
Company: Meta
Role: Product Manager
Category: Product Design & Strategy
Difficulty: medium
Interview Round: Other
As a product manager at Facebook, you are asked what new product you would build to make people safer. Explain which kind of safety you would focus on and for whom, what the product would do, and how you would measure whether it actually reduced harm.
```hint Define safety first
"Safer" could mean protection from harm that reaches people through Facebook or help with danger in the physical world. Choose one on purpose, and look for a problem where Facebook's network and signals give it an advantage that others lack.
```
### Clarifying Questions
- Does "safer" mean protection from harm that happens through Facebook (scams, harassment, hijacked accounts) or safety in the physical world (emergencies, meeting strangers, natural disasters)?
- Is there a priority group, such as teens, older adults, or people buying and selling on Marketplace?
- Does the product need to work inside Messenger chats that are end-to-end encrypted, where Facebook's servers cannot read message content?
- Should this be a new standalone app or a feature in the existing Facebook and Messenger apps?
### What a Strong Answer Covers
- A precise definition of the harm being addressed, why Facebook is well placed to reduce it, and how the idea differs from safety tools Facebook already offers.
- A chosen user segment with concrete pain points along the path to harm.
- A product design with core flows, including how it handles false alarms, privacy and misuse of the safety tool itself.
- Prioritization among alternatives and a clearly scoped first version.
- Success metrics that capture harm actually reduced, with guardrails for false positives and for normal use of the product.
### Follow-up Questions
- Your product wrongly flags a risk in one out of every twenty cases it acts on. How would you decide whether that error rate is acceptable?
- How would bad actors adapt once your product launches, and how would you keep up with them?
- How would you measure harm you prevented when most victims never report what happened?
Overview: A Facebook product design question asking which new product a PM would build to make people safer. It tests defining the specific harm to address, choosing a user group where Facebook has a real advantage, designing flows that handle false alarms, privacy and misuse, and measuring prevented harm with guardrails.