Product design question

Design a new Facebook feed where you can find nearby businesses like bars and coffee shops.

Practice this question out loud. An AI interviewer asks it, follows up like a real interviewer would, and scores your answer. Type or speak.

What this question tests

Tests product design for local discovery, weighing overlap with existing surfaces against a genuinely new gap.

Pick a user: someone new to an area or looking for a spontaneous nearby spot, not a planned researcher.
Identify the pain: existing feed content is social, not location-aware, so nearby discovery is passive.
Check overlap with Facebook Local and Marketplace, and find the gap: no passive, friend-based nearby discovery.
Design the mechanic: an in-feed card surfacing places friends checked into or reviewed nearby.
Prioritize social proof, friend visits and reviews, as the differentiator over generic business listings.
Define success as click-through to a business profile and, ideally, a verified visit afterward.

Leverages the social graph, the real differentiator, rather than competing head-on with Yelp or Maps.
Explicitly checks for overlap with existing features before proposing something new.
Picks a success metric tied to real-world follow-through, visit or check-in, not just impressions.

Building a generic local-search feature that duplicates existing tools with no social differentiation.
Ignoring existing surfaces that might already solve this.

Chapters of the AI PM course that teach what this question tests.