Product design case: a recipe discovery experience inside Instagram
Company: Meta
Role: Product Manager
Category: Product Design & Strategy
Difficulty: medium
Interview Round: Other
You are a product manager at Instagram and have been asked to design a product that helps people find recipes. Explain whom you would build it for, what problem it would solve for them, what you would build first, and how you would know it is working.
```hint Follow the meal
Trace a cook's path from "what should I make?" to a finished dish. Ask at which step Instagram, with its creators, short videos and social graph, can do something a recipe website or a search engine cannot.
```
### Clarifying Questions
- Should this live inside the Instagram app (for example in Search, Explore or Saved) or be a separate app, and is extending it to Facebook in scope?
- Is the goal more engagement with food content, more value for food creators, or a path to revenue such as grocery or kitchenware shopping?
- Do "recipes" include baking and drinks as well as meals, and both well-known dishes and creators' original ones?
- How much control do creators keep over how a new feature displays or reuses their recipe posts?
### What a Strong Answer Covers
- Why recipe discovery is worth Instagram's investment, and where today's experience of finding and using recipes on Instagram falls short.
- A deliberate choice among consumer segments (from novice to expert cooks) and the creators who supply recipes, with a reason tied to the goal.
- A cooking journey with its pain points, and a clear argument for which pain point to attack first.
- Several solutions compared on reach, impact and effort, with one specified as a first release that also works for creators.
- A north-star metric, supporting metrics and guardrails, plus risks such as creator pushback, recipe accuracy and cannibalizing existing surfaces.
### Follow-up Questions
- Creators worry that a recipe view lets people cook without watching their videos. How would you address that?
- Recipe saves go up after launch, but time spent in the main feed drops slightly. Is the launch a success?
- How would you add revenue a year after launch without eroding trust in the recommendations?
Overview: A Meta product design question asking a product manager to design an Instagram product that helps people find recipes. It tests choosing a target segment among cooks and food creators, mapping the cooking journey, prioritizing solutions that use Instagram's strengths, and defining a north-star metric with guardrails.