Design an Internal Business Travel Product for Meta Employees
Company: Meta
Role: Product Manager
Category: Product Design & Strategy
Difficulty: medium
Interview Round: Other
Facebook (now Meta) is a multinational company with offices in many countries, and its employees travel all the time. As a product manager, build a product that serves these employees' business travel.
Explain whom you would build for, which travel problems you would solve first, what the first version would include and how you would tell whether it is working.
```hint Follow one trip end to end
Picture one trip, from the moment someone decides to visit another office until their expenses are repaid. Who besides the traveler touches that trip, and where does it stall?
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### Clarifying Questions
- Is this an internal tool built in-house, or should the answer consider integrating with a corporate travel agency or booking service the company may already use?
- Which trips are in scope: visits between the company's own offices, trips to partners and customers, conferences, or relocation and new-hire travel?
- Whose problem matters most: the traveler's time, the finance team's control of spending, or the company's duty to keep traveling employees safe?
- Does a travel policy with cost limits and approval rules already exist, and must the product enforce it?
### What a Strong Answer Covers
- A clear goal and a reasoned choice among stakeholders: travelers, assistants who book for others, approving managers, finance and travel teams, security, and the teams that run each office.
- An end-to-end trip journey with concrete pain points at each stage, including what is specific to visiting another company office.
- A prioritized first version with trade-offs, including what to build in-house and what to integrate.
- Metrics for traveler time and satisfaction, adoption, policy compliance and cost, with safety and privacy guardrails.
- Risks such as weak adoption, location privacy and country-by-country differences in rules.
### Follow-up Questions
- Employees keep booking directly with airlines and hotels to earn loyalty points. How would you get them to use your product?
- Finance asks you to cut travel spend next year. How does that change the design, and where does it conflict with the traveler's experience?
- During a regional emergency, how would the product help the company find and support employees traveling there without tracking them the rest of the time?
Overview: Design an internal product for the business travel of employees at Facebook (now Meta), a multinational with offices worldwide. It tests stakeholder choice across travelers, approvers, finance and security, an end-to-end trip journey, a prioritized first version, build-versus-integrate trade-offs, and adoption, cost and safety metrics.