Product design question
How would you design a product for Facebook to take on LinkedIn?
- 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.
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What this question tests
Competitive strategy and product design combined, checking whether you can identify a real gap in LinkedIn's model that Facebook could exploit, rather than just cloning features.
How to approach it
- Clarify the target: which part of LinkedIn, professional networking, job search, or content and thought leadership, since they call for different products.
- Identify Facebook's existing asset: real identity, large existing graphs of friends and colleagues, and Groups already used informally for professional networking.
- Find the gap: LinkedIn's professional content feels stale and overly self-promotional to many users, while Facebook has stronger everyday engagement habits.
- Prioritize career-relevant communities over resume-style profiles, since Facebook is unlikely to out-resume LinkedIn directly.
- Propose a design: a professional layer within Facebook Groups, surfacing job referrals and industry discussion through existing friend and colleague connections.
- Define success as growth in professional Group engagement and job referral clicks, not a full LinkedIn feature parity metric.
What a strong answer includes
- Picks a specific wedge, referrals through existing real-world connections, instead of trying to clone LinkedIn's entire feature set.
- Names Facebook's actual advantage, dense real-life graphs, as the basis for differentiation rather than competing head to head.
- Avoids the trap of proposing a new standalone app and instead builds on Groups, a realistic scope for Meta.
Common mistakes
- Proposing a direct LinkedIn clone instead of identifying a defensible angle unique to Facebook's graph.
- Ignoring that professional content on Facebook could clash with its primarily personal use case.
Likely follow-up questions
- How would you keep professional content from cluttering the main News Feed?
- What would make a user choose this over LinkedIn for job searching?
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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