Product design question
Design a Facebook feature to find roommates.
- Meta
- Product design
- Medium
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What this question tests
Tests product design for a trust-sensitive matching product within an existing social graph.
How to approach it
- Target young adults and students seeking roommates, likely leveraging Facebook's existing Marketplace or Groups infrastructure rather than a new standalone product.
- Identify the pain point: current roommate search happens informally in Groups with no structured filtering and no trust signal beyond a profile photo.
- Design a structured roommate-matching module within Marketplace, with filters for budget, move-in date and lifestyle preferences, plus trust signals like mutual friends and verification.
- Prioritize trust signals since living with a stranger is a higher-trust decision than a typical Marketplace transaction.
- Define success as successful match rate confirmed by both parties, listing-to-message conversion, and a low safety-report rate.
What a strong answer includes
- Leverages Facebook's unique advantage, real-identity social graph and mutual friends, as the core trust mechanism.
- Explicitly treats trust and safety as higher priority than for typical buy-and-sell listings given the stakes of shared living.
- Names concrete filters, budget and lifestyle preferences, rather than a generic listing format.
Common mistakes
- Designing a generic listing and filter product without leveraging Facebook's real-identity or mutual-friend trust advantage.
- Underweighting safety given the high-stakes nature of choosing a roommate.
Likely follow-up questions
- How would you handle safety verification without creating excessive friction?
- How would you prevent this from being misused for housing discrimination based on visible profile info?
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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