Helping Facebook users discover books: product design and success metrics
Company: Meta
Role: Product Manager
Category: Product Design & Strategy
Difficulty: medium
Interview Round: Other
You are a product manager at Facebook. Design a way for people to get book recommendations inside Facebook: decide what the experience should achieve and whom it serves, propose and prioritize what to build, and explain how you would measure whether it succeeds.
```hint Find the moment of need
Think about the last time someone wanted a book suggestion: whom did they ask, what came back, and what was lost between hearing about a book and actually reading it?
```
### Clarifying Questions
- Is the experience meant to deepen engagement and community around reading, to give Facebook a better picture of people's interests, or to open a revenue path with booksellers or publishers?
- Should recommendations come from people (friends, groups, authors), from an algorithm, or from a mix of both?
- Do all formats count (print, e-books, audiobooks), and does Facebook only recommend books or also help people buy or borrow them?
- Is the scope the Facebook mobile app, the website, or both?
### What a Strong Answer Covers
- A stated goal for the experience and how it connects to what Facebook wants from it
- Segments on both sides of a recommendation (the people who look for books and the people who suggest them) compared, with a focus chosen and justified
- Pain points in how the chosen readers find books today, and what Facebook can offer that a bookstore or retailer cannot
- Solutions compared and prioritized into a first release, including where the experience appears in Facebook
- A primary success metric tied to the goal, supporting funnel metrics and guardrails, and a way to test the launch
### Follow-up Questions
- How would the experience work for someone who has never posted, liked or joined anything related to books?
- Recommendations travel between friends, so treated and untreated users influence each other. How would you design the experiment?
- If people who do not care about books started hiding book posts in their feed, what would you change?
Overview: A product sense prompt about Facebook: design an experience that helps people get book recommendations on the platform and define how to measure its success. It tests goal setting, weighing people who seek suggestions against those who give them, prioritizing a first release, and choosing a primary metric with guardrails.