Product design question
How would you decide to build a "Products You May Wanna Buy" on the Facebook newsfeed?
- Meta
- Product design
- Hard
Practice this question out loud. An AI interviewer asks it, follows up like a real interviewer would, and scores your answer. Type or speak.
Start a mock interview on this question · Mock interview from a job description
What this question tests
Tests whether the candidate can decide, not just design, a native-commerce feature by weighing user trust, ad revenue, and engagement.
How to approach it
- Clarify the goal: drive commerce revenue, or surface things users already want, and confirm with the interviewer.
- Identify the target user: people already showing purchase intent via Marketplace or likes, not everyone.
- Name the trade-off: this feed slot competes with existing ads and organic content.
- Decide via an A/B test: does the card raise purchase-intent actions without hurting time spent or ad CTR.
- If positive only for one segment, recommend a narrow rollout rather than a blanket one.
- Define a guardrail metric, like ad revenue per user, to watch during rollout.
What a strong answer includes
- Frames this as a build or no-build decision with a clear recommendation, not just UI brainstorming.
- Uses a specific signal, like recent Marketplace searches, to target the placement instead of everyone.
- Names the ad-cannibalization risk explicitly, since that's the real tension here.
Common mistakes
- Designing the card's UI without ever deciding whether to build it.
- Ignoring that this competes with paid ads for the same feed slot.
- No guardrail metric for negative engagement effects.
Likely follow-up questions
- How would you decide if this hurts ad revenue more than it adds?
- Which users would you exclude from seeing this?
- How would sellers get access to this placement?
More product design questions
- You’ve just joined Meta and have been tasked with launching a new product to help people at home during emergencies. What would you build?Meta · Product design · Medium
- How would you improve the Facebook Timeline?Meta · Product design · Easy
- Build a volunteer product for Facebook.Meta · Product design · Medium
- Design an application launching in the US marketplace that enables patients to find doctors.Meta · Product design · Hard
- Design a washing machine for Google.Google · Product design · Hard
- How would you make WhatsApp more user-friendly for the elderly to use?Meta · Product design · Medium
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