Facebook feature for discovering and contacting trusted nearby service providers
Company: Meta
Role: Product Manager
Category: Product Design & Strategy
Difficulty: medium
Interview Round: Other
You are a product manager at Meta. Design a feature for Facebook that helps people find local service providers near them.
```hint Start from how people ask today
Think about what someone on Facebook does today when they need a provider nearby they can trust, and where that path breaks down between asking around and actually hiring someone.
```
### Clarifying Questions
- Which services are in scope: home services such as repairs and cleaning, personal services such as hair and fitness, or professional help such as tutoring and tax preparation?
- Is the main goal value for people looking for help, more small businesses active on Facebook, or new revenue from those businesses?
- Should the feature end once a person contacts a provider, or also cover booking, payment and reviews inside Facebook?
- Should it launch in every market at once, or in a few markets first?
### What a Strong Answer Covers
- Why this belongs on Facebook, using assets such as the friend graph, local groups, business Pages and Messenger, compared with search engines, maps and review sites
- Both sides of the market: a chosen segment of people looking for help and the providers needed to serve them, with trust treated as the central problem
- Pain points across finding, vetting, contacting and hiring, mapped to a prioritized feature set with a clear first version
- Success metrics that reflect real connections between people and providers, with guardrails for scams, spam in groups and ad load
- Cold start in places with few providers or recommendations, and the main risks such as fraud and privacy
### Follow-up Questions
- How would you make the first version work in a small town where few providers have a Page and few friends have hired anyone?
- How would you keep fake or fraudulent providers out of results without blocking legitimate one-person businesses that have no website?
- If Meta later wanted revenue from this feature, would you choose ads, a fee per lead or a booking fee, and how would each affect how much people trust the results?
Overview: A Meta product design question asking a PM candidate to design a Facebook feature that helps people find and contact local service providers. It tests two-sided marketplace thinking, use of social trust from friends and local groups, scoping a first version, connection-based success metrics and protection against scams.