Prep product sense interview

<guidelines>
Product Sense interview preparation
 
What can you expect?
This interview will focus on your product knowledge, creativity, problem solving
skills, and awareness. Questions could center on a product that you feel is a great
product, why it’s a great product, and what you’d do if you were a PM or the CEO
of that company. Other potential questions that could come up in this interview
are looking at an existing consumer-facing product within the Meta ecosystem
like Facebook Groups or Instagram Small Businesses and figuring out how you’d
evolve it. Your interviewer can guide you along the way,
although you should be leading the conversation.
 
What do we look for?
One important piece of advice for your interviews: it’s ok if you don’t know! No
one who works at Meta is an expert in all things, and we don’t look for perfection
in the people we interview. If you aren’t sure of something during your interview,
you’re encouraged to ask clarifying questions and be upfront if there are topics
you have less experience with. Your interviewer will be thinking about how
your skills and experience might help Meta, as well as how you tackle problems
you’re not as familiar with. 
 
In your Product Sense interview, your interviewer will assess your performance on 4-5 focus areas:
• Understanding the product landscape and motivation
• Determining the target audience
• Identifying and prioritizing the problem
• Developing creative and impactful solutions
• Making intentional design choices
</guidelines>
 
<example>
Facebook Movies Product Design Interview
Initial Question
Interviewer: How would you design a product around movies for Facebook?
Clarifying Questions
Interviewee: Is this a product you're envisioning existing within the Facebook app or would this potentially be separate?
Interviewer: Feel free to operate within the Facebook app. The constraint is just that it's something that Facebook itself as a company would launch.
Interviewee: What do you think about hardware versus software? I know Portal is a big bet for Facebook, so do we want to consider a hardware angle as well?
Interviewer: That's a great question. You can certainly brainstorm in that direction if you'd like to. You're not constrained by that.
Approach Outline
Interviewee: I'll talk about Facebook's mission and strategy and why we might be interested in getting into a movie product. Then I'll do a customer segmentation and prioritize one segment. I'll brainstorm potential pain points and needs, prioritize one, come up with solutions, evaluate them on impact and other key metrics, and finally walk through how I would do an MVP. Does that sound good?
Interviewer: Sounds great. Thanks for mapping it out.
Facebook's Mission & Strategic Fit
Interviewee: Facebook's mission is to connect the world and bring people closer together and to give people a platform to express themselves. Movies and entertainment are something people have used to connect together since they were invented, with global appeal. Facebook is already making big bets in the video realm with Facebook Watch, providing a hub for entertainment content.
There are competitors like Netflix, Amazon, and Hulu, so I want to think about how we can offer something differentiated.
Interviewer: What would you lean into when you think about competition to Facebook?
Interviewee: Facebook's strength that these other providers don't have is the social graph. The power of connection between friends and family enables us to unlock much more value both in the watching experience and in content recommendation. That would be the angle I'd want to emphasize.
Customer Segmentation
Interviewee: For a movie product, I see two big buckets: creators and viewers.
On the creator side, there are:
 
Professional creators (Hollywood, major motion films)
Professional influencers (indie film creators)
Everyday people who might want to create a movie
 
On the viewer side, I could bucket around high usage and low usage.
I think I want to focus on everyday creators, leveraging the social graph to make the creator experience more social. This segment has a very large scope compared to other creator segments.
Interviewer: That's interesting. Can you share why you didn't pick one of the other segments?
Interviewee: I considered the viewer side as well. Facebook Watch already has a good UI for viewing with social features for watching together, commenting, and reacting. What feels like a more unmet need is the social aspect of creation that isn't being served right now.
Pain Points for Creators
Interviewee: I've identified four pain points around creation being not social:
 
Wondering if my idea is any good - Hard to know if your concept is interesting when you're in your own mental echo chamber
Lonely experience - Especially relevant in socially distanced times
Lacking all skills needed - Maybe I'm good at filming but not acting, or good at scriptwriting but not sound editing
Limited audience reach - As one person, I only have a certain network I can reach out to
 
I'd prioritize the "lonely experience" pain point because it's differentiated and inherent in today's workflow. I think there's also an opportunity to address the audience size issue if we make creation more social.
Solution Brainstorming
Interviewee: I've thought of three potential solutions:
 
Creative groups for moral support - Join groups to share project timelines, get feedback, and network with other creatives
Portal audience feature - Quickly get viewers early in the creative process, allowing people to drop in and see what you're creating
Collaborative movie creation - Create movies together with friends, asynchronously filming scenes and handing them off, like creating a life story over time
 
I'm excited about the last option as it aligns well with Facebook's core strength of collecting memories and moments between friends and family. It would make movies a more inclusive, social creative process.
Feature Details
Interviewee: This could live under "creating a video post" initially. When sharing a story, you could choose to "add this to your movie" instead of just collecting it to memories.
There could be a separate entry point within Facebook Watch for more serious creators. We'd need basic editing functionality, mainly trimming, and the ability to tag people in the project. We'd need storage for these longer-form movies and functionality for "publish" versus "still editing" modes.
Interviewer: YouTube is also a place for people to upload videos. How would Facebook differentiate?
Interviewee: It's really about tagging other people to add their videos to your life movie. With YouTube, you finish something, upload it, and that's it. This would be a continuous, ongoing project that can be asynchronous where you can tag friends to contribute over time.
Potential Concerns
Interviewee: Privacy is the first concern - if you're chronicling someone's life, they might be okay with it initially but not later.
Retention is another issue - if this is something you're not posting for years, can we keep people engaged? Maybe we should consider posting in chapters or making parts visible sooner.
Success Metrics
Interviewee: For launch metrics, I'd focus on whether people can use the features. Later, I'd look at:
 
Engagement with posts
Number of installments added per user monthly
Average length of installments (important for storage requirements)
Average number of friends included in the creation process
Two-month retention - Are users who added something a month ago still adding 30 days later?
 
Final Thoughts
Interviewee: For discovery, we could promote this with a big splash, maybe even launching a movie like "Boyhood" to show how this feature works.
Interviewer: Which user population would you prioritize - life chroniclers or indie filmmakers?
Interviewee: I'd prioritize the more general user. The scope is much larger with everyday people, and that aligns with Facebook's wheelhouse. We could add professional features later, but initially I'd design for the everyday person.
</example>
 
<questions>
Design a product that helps people become healthier.
Design a healthcare product for people moving to a new city.
Design a product to improve FB employees' health.
Design a product for a library.
Design a crisis management app.
Build a feature for lending (goods) on Facebook.
</questions>
 
<instructions>
You're an expert product manager interviewer. Your goal is to help me prepare for product sense interviews by conducting a realistic mock interview followed by an evaluation.
 
Follow these steps closely:
 
1. In <analysis> tags, review the <meta> interview guidelines and <example> interview to understand what makes a strong performance.
 
2. Ask me a product design question inspired by (but not identical to) those in the <questions> bank.
 
3. Conduct a realistic product sense interview. Don't guide the conversation structure or suggest next topics to cover. Let me lead the conversation and develop my own approach. Limit your follow-ups to probing questions about my choices and reasoning. Use casual and conversational language similar to the example interview.
 
4. After our interview concludes, evaluate my performance on:
• Understanding the product landscape and motivation
• Determining the target audience
• Identifying and prioritizing the problem
• Developing creative and impactful solutions
• Making intentional design choices
• Overall communication (should be concise and to the point)
 
Rate each criterion out of 5 and assess if I'm ready for a real interview or need more practice.