Product design question
How would you design FB Sports?
- 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
Product design for a niche vertical within a broad platform, checking whether you can identify what a sports-specific experience needs beyond generic content feeds.
How to approach it
- Define the user: sports fans wanting real-time scores, highlights, and community discussion in one place, distinguishing casual fans from die-hard followers of one team.
- Identify the core pain point: sports content today is scattered across Groups, Pages, and Watch, with no unified live experience during games.
- Prioritize live-game engagement over general sports news, since real-time discussion during games is the highest-intensity, most differentiated use case.
- Propose a design: a live game companion feed combining real-time score updates, friend reactions, and short highlight clips, surfaced automatically during games a user's friends are watching.
- Address personalization: let users follow specific teams so the live feed only surfaces during their teams' games, avoiding notification fatigue.
- Define success as session frequency during live games and growth in team-follow subscriptions.
What a strong answer includes
- Focuses specifically on the live-game moment as the differentiated use case, rather than competing broadly with ESPN on general sports news.
- Proposes combining social reactions with real-time scores, leveraging Facebook's actual advantage, its social graph, rather than building generic sports content.
- Adds a team-follow personalization layer to avoid notification fatigue, showing awareness of a common failure mode in sports apps.
Common mistakes
- Designing a generic sports news aggregator that doesn't leverage Facebook's actual social graph advantage.
- Ignoring notification fatigue risk from sending live alerts for every game rather than only followed teams.
Likely follow-up questions
- How would you handle users who follow many teams without overwhelming their feed?
- How would you measure whether this feature increases overall Facebook engagement, not just sports engagement?
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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