Strategy question
A few years ago, Facebook used to restrict user signups with .edu emails only. Why did they remove that restriction and what were the pros & cons of doing so?
- Meta
- Strategy
- Hard
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What this question tests
Tests reasoning about a real strategic pivot, growth versus trust trade-offs, using known facts about Facebook's early history rather than invented ones.
How to approach it
- State the known context: Facebook started as a closed network requiring a .edu email, restricted to college students.
- Reason about why that restriction existed: it built initial trust and a sense of exclusivity within a verified community.
- Reason about why it was removed: the college-only model capped the addressable market, and Facebook's growth strategy shifted to maximizing total users and ad reach.
- Weigh the trade-off Facebook accepted: opening up diluted the closed, trusted-community feel but unlocked network effects at a much larger scale.
- Connect this to the broader growth-versus-trust tension that recurs throughout Facebook's history, including later privacy and misinformation issues.
- Avoid inventing specific dates or internal statistics not part of common knowledge.
What a strong answer includes
- Grounds the answer in the real, well-known fact pattern, .edu-only signup, rather than speculating on unverifiable internal details.
- Frames the decision as a classic growth-versus-community-quality trade-off, which is the actual strategic lesson being tested.
- Connects this early choice to the pattern seen later in Facebook's history, openness driving both growth and trust problems.
- Avoids stating fabricated statistics or specific internal reasoning as fact.
Common mistakes
- Inventing specific numbers or internal memos that aren't common knowledge.
- Treating this as a pure feature question instead of a strategic growth-versus-trust trade-off.
- Not connecting the historical example to a broader, reusable strategic principle.
Likely follow-up questions
- What would you have done differently to preserve trust while growing?
- Do you see a parallel in another product you've used?
- How would you design a modern equivalent of a trusted, verified onboarding gate?
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Learn the skill behind it
Chapters of the AI PM course that teach what this question tests.
- Chapter 4: Discovery and strategy for AI products
- Chapter 9: Prove it paid off: outcomes, economics, and pricing
- Chapter 14: Get the job: the AI PM interview loop