Make conversations under Facebook posts better for readers, commenters and authors
Company: Meta
Role: Product Manager
Category: Product Design & Strategy
Difficulty: medium
Interview Round: Other
You are a product manager at Meta who owns comments on Facebook, the conversations people have underneath posts. How would you improve them?
Explain what goal the improvement serves, whose experience you would focus on, which problems you would solve first and how you would measure success.
```hint Three roles in every thread
A comment section involves the person who wrote the post, the people who comment and the people who only read. Their problems differ, so decide whose experience you will improve and what "better" means for them before you list features.
```
### Clarifying Questions
- What should the improvement serve: more comments, higher-quality conversations, less spam and harassment, or more people reading comment threads?
- Which posts are in scope: friends' personal posts, public posts from Pages and creators, posts in Groups, or ads?
- Is the focus the mobile app, the website, or both?
- Do replies and reactions to comments count as part of the comment experience for this question?
### What a Strong Answer Covers
- A goal for comments that goes beyond raw volume, tied to why conversations under posts matter to Facebook.
- The roles in a thread (post authors, commenters, readers) and the contexts (a friend's post versus a busy public post), with a justified focus.
- Specific pain points for that focus, prioritized, and solutions ranked by impact and effort, with trade-offs such as engagement versus conversation quality and safety.
- A primary metric that captures good conversation, supporting metrics, and guardrails for harassment, spam and wrongly hidden comments.
- A testing plan that accounts for one person's comment changing what everyone else in the thread sees.
### Follow-up Questions
- Your change lifts the number of comments, but reports of harassment rise as well. How do you decide what to do?
- Would you offer AI-suggested comments? What could they do to the authenticity of conversations, and how would you find out?
- How would your design differ for a post with thousands of comments compared with a friend's post with five?
Overview: A Meta product manager interview prompt that asks how you would improve comments on Facebook posts. It tests whether you can set a goal beyond raw comment volume, choose between post authors, commenters and readers, prioritize fixes for real pain points and define success metrics with safety guardrails.