Product design question
Design a product for kids.
- Meta
- Product design
- Easy
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What this question tests
Product design with strong safety and age-appropriateness judgment, especially sensitive for a company like Meta given past scrutiny on youth products.
How to approach it
- Clarify scope, confirming a target age range, since needs and regulatory requirements differ sharply between young children and pre-teens.
- Identify the target user and their actual context, for example a specific age band with parental involvement expected, and clarify whether this is entertainment, education, or social.
- List pain points: existing kids' apps often overload with ads or manipulative engagement hooks, and parents lack visibility or control.
- Propose the design: an ad-light or ad-free experience with strong parental controls, time limits, and content curated for the specific age band, avoiding open-ended social features.
- Prioritize parental trust and safety features first, given regulatory requirements like COPPA and Meta's specific reputational sensitivity in this space.
- Define success as parent-reported trust and safe usage patterns, not just engagement time, since maximizing time-on-app is the wrong goal for a kids' product.
What a strong answer includes
- Explicitly rejects engagement-maximizing design patterns as inappropriate for kids, proposing healthy usage limits instead as a feature, not a constraint.
- Names COPPA and parental consent requirements directly as a design constraint, not an afterthought, given the regulatory reality of building for children.
- Proposes parental controls and visibility as a core feature, not bolted on, recognizing that parent trust drives adoption more than the child's engagement alone.
- Chooses success metrics tied to trust and safety, not time spent, explicitly avoiding rewarding manipulative engagement design.
Common mistakes
- Designing for maximum engagement time, which is the wrong goal and a reputational risk for a kids' product.
- Ignoring COPPA or parental consent requirements entirely.
- Not giving parents visibility or control over their child's usage.
Likely follow-up questions
- How would you handle COPPA compliance for data collection from users under 13?
- How would you measure success without falling into optimizing purely for time spent?
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More questions from Meta
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