Product design question

You’re a PM at Meta. Design a product that enables users to request emergency help.

Practice this question out loud. An AI interviewer asks it, follows up like a real interviewer would, and scores your answer. Type or speak.

What this question tests

Product design for a safety critical feature, requiring speed, reliability and low friction design under a real crisis scenario.

Define the user context: someone in immediate danger who needs to alert contacts or authorities quickly, often one handed or discreetly.
Identify the core requirement: the action must work in seconds without requiring the user to type or navigate multiple screens.
Propose a hold button or hardware shortcut triggered alert that shares live location with pre selected emergency contacts and, where integrated, local services.
Design for discretion so the trigger is usable without obviously alerting anyone nearby, given many emergencies involve an immediate threat.
Define success: alert delivery latency, and false positive or accidental trigger rate.

Prioritizes speed and one handed, low friction activation, correctly reading the emergency use case constraint.
Adds a discretion requirement, a detail specific to real emergency situations that generic SOS button answers miss.
Balances the metric between speed and false positive rate, avoiding alarm fatigue for contacts.

Designing a feature that requires multiple taps or navigating into settings, unrealistic under real emergency stress.
Ignoring the false positive or accidental trigger risk, which would undermine long term trust in the feature.

How would you prevent false alarms from eroding trust with emergency contacts?
Would you integrate directly with local emergency services, and what would that require?