Product Sense: Define the Purpose, First Users and Core Features of Facebook

You are a product manager at Meta. Walk through how you would design Facebook as a product. ```hint Who is there on day one A social product is only useful to a new member if people they know are already on it. Decide which group you would build for first, and how that choice makes the product worth joining for its earliest members. ``` ### Clarifying Questions - Should I design Facebook from a blank page, as if it did not exist yet, or redesign the Facebook people use today? - Is the scope the core experience of connecting with friends, family and communities, or does it also include the business side such as pages, ads and Marketplace? - Should the design target a launch market, such as one country or one kind of community, or a global audience from the first day? ### What a Strong Answer Covers - A stated purpose for Facebook, and an explicit choice between designing it new and redesigning it, made before any feature is proposed. - A deliberately chosen first user segment, and how that choice handles the cold start every social network faces. - The core experiences (identity, connections, sharing, feed, communities) with a prioritized first release and a clear list of what is deferred. - A success metric built around interactions between people who know each other, with guardrails for privacy, safety and well-being. - Risks such as fake accounts, harassment, over-sharing and passive consumption, and the design choices that limit them. ### Follow-up Questions - Your feed fills up with posts from pages and publishers, and posts from friends get fewer responses. What do you change? - How and when would you introduce advertising without hurting the success metric you chose? - A growing share of sharing moves into private messages and small groups. Does your design follow it, and how?