Product design question
Mark Zuckerberg wants you to redesign the television experience. How would you go about it?
- 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 open-ended strategic product design: scoping an ambitious prompt into a concrete, defensible bet grounded in the company's actual strengths.
How to approach it
- Clarify the ask: television experience spans discovery, social viewing, and hardware; scope to social co-viewing, Meta's unique angle over Netflix or a TV maker.
- Identify the user: friends and family who want to watch and react together while physically apart, something current TV largely doesn't support.
- Identify the core job: recreate the feeling of watching together, reactions, commentary, shared timing, regardless of location.
- Propose a synchronized co-watching layer on existing streaming apps with live video reactions overlaid, powered by the social graph for who to watch with.
- Ground it in Meta's strengths: social graph and Messenger video infrastructure, with Quest as an optional immersive layer, rather than competing on content licensing.
- Define success: sessions with two or more co-viewers, and session length versus solo viewing of the same content.
What a strong answer includes
- Scopes the vague prompt to one concrete lane, social co-viewing, instead of trying to redesign all of television.
- Explicitly grounds the idea in Meta's real assets, social graph and video calling, rather than competing where Meta is weak, like content licensing.
- Names a realistic technical approach, a synchronized overlay on existing streaming apps, rather than requiring new content deals.
- Defines success with a co-viewing-specific metric, distinguishing this from generic watch time.
Common mistakes
- Proposing to compete directly with Netflix or Disney+ on content, ignoring Meta's lack of advantage there.
- Giving an unfocused list of TV ideas without picking and defending one direction.
Likely follow-up questions
- Why co-viewing over building Meta's own content platform?
- How would you get third-party streaming apps to support the sync layer?
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