Subscription Software on Today's AR Tech: Pick a Paying Customer, Use Case and MVP
Company: Meta
Role: Product Manager
Category: Product Design & Strategy
Difficulty: medium
Interview Round: Other
Design a software-as-a-service product built on augmented reality capabilities that are available today, rather than on hardware or breakthroughs that do not exist yet.
Decide who would pay for it, the problem it solves for them, what the first version would include, how it would be sold and how you would know it is succeeding.
```hint Let today's limits pick the market
Current AR is strongest where seeing information in place beats reading it on a screen, and weakest where it needs long sessions, perfect tracking or hardware few people own. Look for a workflow where that strength saves a business real time or money.
```
### Clarifying Questions
- Is the paying customer a business buying seats for its staff, or individual professionals subscribing on their own?
- Which devices must it run on: the phones and tablets people already carry, or headsets and smart glasses such as Meta's mixed reality devices?
- Is the goal a standalone subscription business, or also to grow adoption of Meta's own AR platforms and devices?
- Which capabilities count as available: phone-based tracking and anchoring, headset passthrough, hand and face tracking, or anything a vendor has shipped?
### What a Strong Answer Covers
- A grounded view of which AR capabilities are mature today and where they fall short (tracking accuracy, device reach, comfort, battery, camera privacy)
- A comparison of candidate business workflows and a reasoned choice of one, naming the buyer, the daily user and the cost of the problem
- A prioritized first version, a platform choice, and the parts that make it a SaaS product: pricing unit, onboarding, admin controls and integrations
- Metrics for adoption, customer return on investment and subscription health, with guardrails
- Risks and a path from pilot to scale, including competition from established vendors
### Follow-up Questions
- A customer's pilot succeeds, but frontline workers stop opening the app after a few weeks. What would you investigate?
- How would you price it: per seat, per site, per session or by usage, and why?
- If Meta wanted the product to drive headset sales, how would the design change, and what would you risk by tying it to one device?
Overview: A product design question asking for a subscription software product built on augmented reality capabilities that exist today. It tests judgment about what current AR can and cannot do, the choice of a paying customer and workflow, a prioritized first version, the SaaS business model, and success metrics.