Meta product sense case: collaborative travel planning tool

You are interviewing for a product manager role at Meta. The interviewer asks you to design a product that helps a group of people plan a trip together. Decide which groups and trips you would design for, identify the problems they run into, propose and prioritize solutions, and explain how you would measure whether the product succeeds. ```hint Look for the group-only problems Researching a destination is hard even for one traveler. Focus on the problems that appear only because several people, each with their own dates, budget and opinions, have to arrive at one plan. ``` ### Clarifying Questions - Should the product live inside one of Meta's existing apps (Facebook, Messenger, WhatsApp or Instagram), or be a new standalone app? - Which groups are in scope: friends and family who already know each other, or people who meet through a shared interest and travel together? Leisure trips only, or work trips too? - Is the main goal adoption and engagement, or should the product also earn revenue, for example through travel ads or bookings? ### What a Strong Answer Covers - A goal tied to Meta's mission and to the assets it can use, such as the social graph, group chats and Groups. - Segmentation of group types and trip types, with a reasoned choice of whom to serve first. - Pain points specific to group coordination (agreeing on dates, destination and budget, sharing the work, splitting costs), not only generic travel research. - A prioritized first version with clear trade-offs, plus what would come later. - A success metric that reflects trips actually getting planned, with guardrails on privacy, notification load and chat health. ### Follow-up Questions - Most groups already start planning in a chat thread. How would you get them to move the plan into your product, and would they need to? - Would you let users book flights and lodging inside the product? What changes for the business and for the team if you do? - How would you tell whether a trip planned in the product actually happened? - Suppose the brief were only "design a product for people who travel as a group", with no mention of planning. Which part of group travel would you build for (deciding where to go, coordinating the group, booking, the trip itself, or what happens afterward), and how would you defend that choice over the others? - Now suppose you are the PM who owns group travel in the Facebook mobile app, and the interviewer simply asks what you would build. How does tying the product to the Facebook app on a phone change your design, for example for people using it on the move during the trip? Would you also read "group travel" as serving the travel communities that already gather in Facebook Groups, and which reading would you pick?