Metrics question
How would you measure success for a Facebook travel recommendation product?
- Meta
- Metrics
- Medium
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
Whether you can define success for a discovery-oriented feature where the real outcome happens off-platform.
How to approach it
- Clarify the product's goal: helping users discover and plan trips based on friend recommendations and posts, not booking travel directly.
- Prioritize an engagement metric close to the actual goal, like saves or clicks on a recommended place, over generic feed engagement.
- Address the off-platform outcome problem: the real success, actually visiting the place, happens outside Facebook, so proxy metrics are needed.
- Propose a proxy metric: percent of saved recommendations later marked visited or revisited by the user, if self-report or check-in data exists.
- Add a content quality guardrail, like report rate on recommended places, to ensure suggestions stay trustworthy.
- Segment metrics by recommendation source, friend-posted versus algorithmically surfaced, since trust and conversion likely differ.
What a strong answer includes
- Chooses a save or click metric that's closer to real intent than generic feed engagement like likes.
- Explicitly addresses the challenge that true success, visiting the place, happens off-platform, and proposes a proxy for it.
- Segments by recommendation source, since friend-driven suggestions likely convert differently than algorithmic ones.
- Adds a trust guardrail, like report rate, since bad recommendations would quickly erode the feature's value.
Common mistakes
- Measuring only in-app engagement like likes, ignoring that the actual value happens off-platform when a trip is taken.
- Treating all recommendation sources as equivalent instead of segmenting by friend versus algorithmic origin.
Likely follow-up questions
- How would you get a reliable signal that a user actually visited a recommended place?
- Which would you prioritize, more recommendations shown or higher-quality, higher-trust recommendations?
More metrics questions
- How would you measure the success of Facebook Likes?Meta · Metrics · Medium
- How would you measure improvements made to Facebook messenger?Meta · Metrics · Easy
- Imagine you are the PM in charge of Reactions on Facebook - the new way to interact with posts by using “love”, “haha”, “wow”, “sad”, and “angry” reactions. What would success look like in terms of number of non-like reactions per post at launch and how do you come up with this? Would this number differ by reaction? Why or why not?Meta · Metrics · Hard
- You launched a new signup flow to encourage new users to add more profile information. A/B test results indicate that the % of people that added more information increased by 8%. However, 7 day retention decreased by 2%. What do you do?Google · Metrics · Hard
- Define the metrics for YouTube search.Google · Metrics · Medium
- You are the PM of Instagram app. The MAU has been constant but DAU has declined. What will you do?Meta · Metrics · Medium
More questions from Meta
Learn the skill behind it
Chapters of the AI PM course that teach what this question tests.
- Chapter 9: Prove it paid off: outcomes, economics, and pricing
- Chapter 2: Data fluency: SQL, logs, and reading the truth yourself
- Chapter 14: Get the job: the AI PM interview loop