Product design question
Build a restaurant product for Facebook.
- Meta
- Product design
- Hard
Practice this question out loud. An AI interviewer asks it, follows up like a real interviewer would, and scores your answer. Type or speak.
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What this question tests
Product design combined with strategic scoping: can you evaluate whether building a dedicated restaurant product makes sense for Facebook versus leveraging existing assets.
How to approach it
- Question the scope first: consider whether this should be a standalone booking/ordering product or an enhancement of existing Facebook Pages/Events for restaurants.
- Define the user: diners wanting to discover, book, and order from local restaurants, and restaurant owners wanting a lower-cost alternative to third-party delivery/booking fees.
- Propose the design: enhance existing restaurant Pages with integrated reservations and ordering, leveraging Facebook's existing local-business and social-proof (reviews, friend check-ins) assets.
- Add differentiation: social discovery, seeing where friends have eaten and enjoyed, as a distinct advantage over pure utility apps like OpenTable.
- Address monetization: lower commission/booking fees than incumbents as a pitch to restaurant owners, funded by Facebook's existing ad business rather than needing this product to be independently profitable immediately.
- Define success: restaurant Page adoption of the booking/ordering feature and reservation/order completion rate.
What a strong answer includes
- Builds on existing Facebook Pages/local business infrastructure instead of proposing a disconnected new standalone app.
- Identifies genuine differentiation (social proof from friends) versus pure utility competitors like OpenTable or Resy.
- Proposes a realistic monetization pitch to restaurants, lower fees than incumbents, addressing a known pain point for small restaurant owners.
- Chooses adoption and completion metrics tied to real business outcomes for both diners and restaurant owners.
Common mistakes
- Designing a disconnected standalone app that ignores Facebook's existing Pages/local business assets.
- Proposing no real differentiation from existing dedicated reservation/ordering apps like OpenTable.
Likely follow-up questions
- How would you convince a restaurant owner to switch from an established platform like OpenTable?
- How would you handle order/reservation reliability if a restaurant doesn't update availability promptly?
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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 7: AI UX and human oversight: design for a system that is wrong sometimes
- Chapter 14: Get the job: the AI PM interview loop