Restaurant Discovery on Instagram: Choosing a Segment, First Version and Success Metrics
Company: Meta
Role: Product Manager
Category: Product Design & Strategy
Difficulty: medium
Interview Round: Other
You are a product manager at Meta, asked to design a feature in Instagram that makes it easier for people to discover a restaurant and settle on where to eat. Explain who the feature is for, which of their problems it solves, what the first version would include, and how you would tell whether it is working.
```hint Why Instagram
People already have maps, review sites and delivery apps for choosing a restaurant. Ask what Instagram knows about places and about its users' tastes that those tools do not, and build on that.
```
### Clarifying Questions
- Does "find a restaurant" end at choosing a place, or should it also cover booking a table, ordering takeout or getting delivery?
- Is the main aim more engagement on Instagram, a new revenue stream from restaurants, or both?
- Should the feature serve diners only, or also give restaurant business accounts new tools to get discovered?
- May the feature use a person's location and the food posts they have saved or liked to personalize suggestions?
### What a Strong Answer Covers
- A goal that fits what Instagram is good at, rather than a review site rebuilt inside the app.
- A chosen diner segment, weighed against restaurants and creators, with the reasons and the tools that segment relies on today.
- Pain points specific to choosing where to eat (recall, trust, group agreement, logistics) and ideas that use Instagram's own assets: food photos and Reels, location tags, saves and the friend graph.
- Prioritization among a few ideas with explicit criteria, ending in a scoped first version.
- Success metrics centered on a decision or a visit, with guardrails for the core feed, information quality and privacy.
### Follow-up Questions
- Restaurants will want to pay for better placement in this feature. How would you allow that without losing users' trust?
- The visit itself happens offline. How would you estimate whether people actually went to the places they found?
- How would the feature work in a small town with few location-tagged food posts?
Overview: A product design question asking a product manager to create an Instagram feature that helps people choose a restaurant. It tests setting a goal tied to Instagram's strengths, picking a diner segment, ranking decision pain points, prioritizing ideas into a first version, and defining success metrics with guardrails.