Make the data-backed case at Facebook for a restaurant discovery and reviews product
Company: Meta
Role: Product Manager
Category: Product / Decision Making
Difficulty: medium
Interview Round: Other
You are a product manager at Facebook and believe the company should build a restaurant search product in the style of Yelp, where people find and compare places to eat. The decision is not yours alone: you need the engineering team and your fellow product managers to back it. How would you convince them, using metrics that already exist on the platform as your evidence?
```hint Let current behavior make the argument
Look for places where people already try to choose restaurants on Facebook today, and where they leave to finish that decision elsewhere. Then ask what engineers and peer product managers each need to hear before they say yes.
```
### Clarifying Questions
- Is the product a new experience inside the Facebook app, an upgrade to existing search, or a separate app?
- Which existing data may I use for the pitch: aggregated search queries, restaurant Page activity, check-ins, Groups posts?
- Whose agreement do I need: only my own engineers, or also teams such as Search and Pages that the product would depend on, and who makes the final call?
- Is there a company goal this half, such as engagement or small-business revenue, that the proposal should support?
### What a Strong Answer Covers
- A clear problem and opportunity statement for diners, restaurants and Meta, tied to company goals.
- Specific existing platform signals chosen as evidence, how each would be measured, and what result would weaken the case.
- Different arguments for engineers (feasibility, reuse of existing systems, scope, interesting problems) and for product peers (strategic fit, opportunity cost, dependencies).
- A low-risk path to commitment: a scoped experiment with success metrics, guardrails and a decision rule agreed in advance.
- Anticipated objections (strong existing review and map apps, review integrity, privacy of friends' activity, capacity) and credible responses.
### Follow-up Questions
- The data shows many restaurant searches but few that lead to any action. Do you still pitch the product, and how would you reframe it?
- The Search team says it cannot take on your dependency this half. What do you do next?
- After launch, how would you keep fake or paid reviews from undermining trust in the ratings?
Overview: A Facebook product manager question about persuading engineers and fellow product managers to build a Yelp-style restaurant search product. It tests choosing existing platform metrics as evidence, sizing the opportunity, tailoring the pitch to each audience, and proposing a scoped experiment with clear success criteria.