Product design question
Facebook decides to enter the travel market. As a PM how would you design a product?
- Meta
- Product design
- Hard
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What this question tests
Product design for a new market entry, using an existing platform's unique assets rather than copying incumbents.
How to approach it
- Clarify the entry angle: booking to compete with Expedia, or discovery and inspiration to leverage the social graph, since Facebook's edge is the latter.
- Segment users: people planning trips with friends and family versus solo travelers seeking inspiration from their network.
- Identify the pain point: travel planning today is fragmented across group chats, spreadsheets, and separate booking sites.
- Prioritize group trip planning, since it uniquely leverages the social graph and Groups product, a moat Expedia and Google don't have.
- Design the solution: a trip-planning hub inside Groups or Messenger where friends see recommendations from mutual connections and vote on itinerary items.
- Define success: trips co-planned per month and downstream bookings through partner affiliate links.
What a strong answer includes
- Anchors the product in Facebook's actual unique asset, the social graph, instead of building a generic booking site clone.
- Names a concrete integration point, Groups or Messenger, rather than a standalone new app.
- Proposes monetization via affiliate booking links, realistic given Facebook wouldn't become a travel agency.
- Defines success with an engagement metric tied to a revenue metric, showing the funnel.
Common mistakes
- Designing a generic booking site that just copies Expedia or Booking.com.
- Ignoring Facebook's actual competitive advantage, the social graph.
- Not addressing monetization.
Likely follow-up questions
- How would you monetize this without becoming a full travel agency?
- How would you convince travel partners to integrate?
- What would make this defensible against Google and Airbnb?
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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