Product Sense for a Government Agency: Better Trips to US National Parks
Company: Meta
Role: Product Manager
Category: Product Design & Strategy
Difficulty: medium
Interview Round: Other
As a product manager, how would you make the US National Park Service better?
```hint Pick one visitor and one moment
The agency serves very different people and must also protect the parks it runs. Choose one group and the point in their trip where things break down most, and design for that.
```
### Clarifying Questions
- Is the goal a better experience for visitors, or should the improvement also serve the agency's duty to protect the parks for future generations?
- Should the answer be a digital product (website, app, reservations), or are on-the-ground changes such as shuttles and signage in scope?
- Which visitors matter most: people planning a first trip to a famous park, regular local visitors, or people who rarely visit parks today?
- Are there budget or staffing limits to respect, given that this is a public agency?
### What a Strong Answer Covers
- A goal that balances the visitor experience with protecting the parks, and why it matters to the agency.
- A chosen visitor segment and the stage of the trip where it struggles most, with specific pain points such as reservations, crowding or no phone signal.
- Several solutions, prioritized by impact, effort and fit with a public agency's budget and the parks' poor connectivity.
- Success metrics with guardrails for crowding, damage to park resources, visitor safety and fair access.
- Risks such as shifting crowds onto fragile sites or excluding visitors without smartphones.
### Follow-up Questions
- Your feature sends visitors to quieter trailheads, and rangers report damage there. What do you change?
- How would you make sure a reservation system does not favor people who are online the moment slots open?
- With a fixed public budget, which single idea would you ship first, and why?
- Suppose the prompt instead asks you to design a product that makes visiting a national park a better experience, without improving the agency itself and without limiting it to the US. How would your goal, chosen segment and first solutions change?
Overview: A product sense interview prompt asking how a product manager would improve the US National Park Service. It tests picking a visitor segment and the trip stage where it struggles, designing fixes that respect crowding, poor connectivity and public budgets, and defining metrics that balance a good visit with protecting the parks.