Product design question
Design a standalone maps app for Meta.
- Meta
- Product design
- Easy
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What this question tests
Tests product strategy and design for a spin-off product: can you justify why a standalone maps app makes sense for Meta and design around Meta's actual data strengths, not Google's.
How to approach it
- Clarify why this is a hard sell: Google and Apple Maps dominate navigation, so a Meta app cannot win on turn-by-turn quality alone and needs a different value proposition.
- Identify Meta's unique asset: social graph and check-in data, friends' favorite places and events, that Google and Apple lack at the same depth.
- Design the core differentiator: a maps app centered on social discovery, seeing where friends have been and events nearby, layered on a licensed navigation base rather than one built from scratch.
- Prioritize a narrow use case: discovering places through your social circle rather than competing broadly on logistics-grade navigation accuracy.
- Address the build-vs-license decision: full turn-by-turn navigation is extremely costly to build, so licensing base map data while focusing engineering on the social layer is more realistic.
- Define success as social-discovery engagement, places saved via friend activity, rather than raw navigation market share.
What a strong answer includes
- Explicitly avoids trying to out-navigate Google Maps, correctly identifying that this is not a winnable fight on navigation quality alone.
- Grounds the differentiator in Meta's actual unique asset, the social graph, rather than a generic 'better maps' pitch.
- Addresses the realistic build-vs-license trade-off, showing awareness of the cost of building navigation infrastructure from scratch.
- Scopes success to the social-discovery use case, a realistic goal rather than an unrealistic market-share claim.
Common mistakes
- Proposing to compete head-on with Google Maps on navigation quality, unrealistic given the infrastructure investment required.
- Ignoring Meta's actual unique data asset (the social graph) as the real differentiator.
- No mention of the build-vs-license trade-off for base mapping data, a major practical consideration.
Likely follow-up questions
- Would you build core navigation in-house or license it from a partner, and why?
- How would you convince users to switch from their default maps app for social discovery alone?
- How would you monetize this app differently from Google's ad-based model?
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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