Handling a Rival Team Building an Overlapping Product
Company: Meta
Role: Product Manager
Category: Product / Decision Making
Difficulty: medium
Interview Round: Other
You find out that another team is building a product that competes head-on with yours. How do you respond?
```hint Diagnose before you react
Before choosing to fight, merge or step aside, work out why the overlap exists: who sponsored the other effort, which users and goal it serves, and what leadership already knows about both projects.
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### Clarifying Questions
- Is the other team inside your company, or is it an outside competitor?
- How far along is each effort: is your product already live with users, and is theirs still being built?
- Did leadership approve the other project knowing it overlaps with yours, or did the overlap go unnoticed in planning?
- Are both teams going after the same users and the same goal, or only building a similar feature?
### What a Strong Answer Covers
- Gathering facts about the overlap (scope, users, goals, sponsors) directly with the other team before escalating.
- An objective way to compare both efforts against the company's goals, rather than defending your own product.
- The options, such as merging, splitting scope, running a deliberate parallel bet or stopping one effort, and the criteria for choosing among them.
- How the decision reaches leadership and is carried out, including care for existing users and for both teams if your product loses.
### Follow-up Questions
- Leadership decides the other team's approach wins. How do you handle your team and the users already on your product?
- The other team will not share its plans with you. What do you do next?
- When is it healthy for a company to let two teams build competing solutions on purpose?
Overview: A product leadership question about what a PM should do when another team builds something that competes directly with their product. It tests how the candidate investigates the overlap, compares both efforts against company goals, weighs options such as merging, splitting scope or stopping one, and handles users and both teams.