Meta/Facebook Product Manager Mock Interview: Meta/Facebook Movies

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Summary

Selena, an incoming product manager at Facebook, participates in a mock interview focused on designing a movie-related product for Facebook. The discussion emphasizes leveraging Facebook’s strengths, like its social graph, to create a unique and social movie creation experience. Selena proposes creating a platform that turns movie-making into a communal activity, using Facebook’s existing features to foster collaboration and sharing memories. The interview highlights Selena’s ability to think creatively, align with Facebook’s mission, and consider key metrics and potential challenges such as privacy and retention.

Highlights

Designing a Facebook product around movies focuses on creating a communal experience. 🎞️
Selena identifies loneliness as a key pain point for creators and suggests social solutions. 👥
Ideas include movie creation groups and a portal feature allowing live audience interaction. 📽️
A bold proposal to let users create 'life movies' asynchronously with friends is brought forth. 🎥
Discussions cover challenges like privacy concerns and the importance of user retention. 🔑
Metrics for success include engagement, retention, and collaborative participation rates. 📊

Key Takeaways

The interview showcases how to approach open-ended product design questions effectively. 🎬
Selena emphasizes the importance of aligning product ideas with Facebook’s mission to connect people. 🌍
By leveraging Facebook's strengths, such as its social graph, Selena proposes a unique communal movie-making experience. 🎥
The discussion delves into potential pain points like loneliness in content creation and how a social approach can address this. 🤝
Selena maintains a focus on innovative yet feasible solutions, demonstrating her strategic thinking. 💡
Thoughtful consideration is given to metrics for success, privacy issues, and user engagement for the proposed product. 🔍

Overview

In the mock interview with Selena, she creatively tackles the challenge of designing a Facebook product centered on movies. Emphasizing Facebook’s core mission of connectivity, she explores ways to integrate the social media giant’s inherent strengths, like its expansive social graph, to innovate the movie-watching and movie-making experience. Her approach showcases a thoughtful blend of creativity and strategic alignment with Facebook’s broader goals.

Selena’s initial exploration involves identifying the social and technical aspects of integrating a movie product into Facebook. By focusing on existing user behaviors and potential pain points, particularly the isolation creators might feel, she crafts a solution that turns individual content creation into a collaborative activity. This includes forming creative communities and utilizing Facebook’s portal to engage real-time audiences.

As the discussion progresses, Selena outlines potential solutions and their practical implementations, from creating supportive groups for movie-making to more ambitious ideas like asynchronous 'life movie' projects. Her considerations extend to technicalities like privacy and retention, underlining a comprehensive product design approach. The interview reflects Selena’s capability to innovate while remaining grounded in Facebook's operational strengths and user expectations.

Meta/Facebook Product Manager Mock Interview: Meta/Facebook Movies Transcription

00:00 - 00:30 how would you design a product around movies for Facebook hey everyone we're here today to do a p.m. mock interview a Selena who is an incoming product manager at Facebook before we jump into the interview question Selena could you introduce yourselves just a little bit to the audience yeah nice to meet you my name is Selena um I actually know Steven from Stanford GSB where were classmates and just found a ton of value and exponent and preparing for getting a
00:30 - 01:00 product offer from Facebook so really excited to be here today we're super excited to have you on the show Selena and and so a question the mock interview question that we will be doing today will be how would you design a product around movies for Facebook yeah this is a product design question that interview question and and it's sort of open-ended but yeah let's together figure out a product that you would design around
01:00 - 01:30 movies or Facebook yeah sounds good so I think my first question before we get started would be is this a product you're envisioning existing within the Facebook app or would this potentially be separate it you can be as open under Disney bike with this question so yeah feel free to operate within the Facebook app I would the constraint is just that it's something that Facebook itself as a company would launch one more question
01:30 - 02:00 what do you think about hardware versus software I know portal is a big bet for Facebook so do we one of me you think no hardware lens as well yeah not as literal lens like hardware direction that's a great question so yeah the question being is there a hardware angle here you can certainly brainstorm in that direction if you'd like to you're not constrained by that okay
02:00 - 02:30 awesome so I think the way that I'd like to go about this first I'll talk a little bit about Facebook's mission and strategy and why we might be interested in getting into a movie product from there I'll do a customer segmentation and prioritize one and then we'll do a quick brainstorm about potential pain points and needs prioritize one of those and then from there we'll come up with a few solutions and we'll evaluate on
02:30 - 03:00 impact it may be a couple other key metrics to pick one and then I'll walk you through how I think I would do an MVP does that sound good sounds great thanks for mapping it out awesome so I'm just going to take a quick second to jot down my thoughts here awesome take your time all right so Facebook's mission is to connect the world and bring people closer together and to give people a platform to express themselves about the things that they care about so it totally makes sense to me as to why we
03:00 - 03:30 would be interested in moving further into the movie space I think movies and cinema and entertainment in general is something that people have used to connect together since movies were invented and I think it has really global appeal it doesn't matter where you're from pretty much everyone enjoys getting together with friends and families and broader social communities around movies and also I think Facebook is making a lot of big bets in the general video realm so on Facebook watch
03:30 - 04:00 I know there's a big push to really make Facebook a home for entertainment and not just that that social use case but that you would actually be going to the app specifically to to be entertained in your downtime um I know thinking about the platform Instagram TV also pursuing a similar approach to really provide a hub for all of that types of content so I think there's the division also between there's creator content and then there's kind of more premium kind of produced content so movies to me would
04:00 - 04:30 maybe sit within there I think we could talk about you know what does it mean to be a movie does that necessarily predicate it's coming from Hollywood or wherever or would we include maybe creator movies and individual movies not yeah overall I think that movies is something that's important to think about there are some competitors and was faced I think Netflix would be the first one that comes to mind and it's crowded I mean amazon offers movies as well Hulu so I want to think about how can we offer something that's really
04:30 - 05:00 differentiated got it yeah and and on that note like I suppose what what what do you think you'd lean into when you think about the competition to Facebook yeah so I would say what is Facebook's strengths that these other providers don't have and that to me is really the social graph the power of that connection between friends and family enables you to unlock so much more value both in the watching experience but also in terms of content recommendation so I would say that would be the angle that I would want to really emphasize here to
05:00 - 05:30 help us provide something that people would really be excited about awesome cool okay so now I'm gonna do a quick customer segmentation cool all right so the way that I see it in terms of segmentation for a movie product I feel like there's two big buckets on the one hand there are creators and on the other hand there's viewers so digging a little bit deeper on the creator site I felt like there were three constituencies
05:30 - 06:00 there's a professional creator of vertical which includes kind of major professional like Hollywood type you know major motion films then I would say there's kind of professional influencer I think longer form content you don't necessarily think of as like the same types of influencers on Instagram so maybe that's more like indie film creators not not quite on the same level as like Hollywood and then on the viewer side I thought I could bucket that maybe around huge like high usage and low usage so I think you know what is our
06:00 - 06:30 goal here you know is creating a movie product for Facebook is there any more specific goal you want me to focus on when I prioritize here otherwise I would probably prioritize on scale or scope and impact so basically how many potential users are in here and which segment did we think maybe might be most impactful to to work for that sounds like a great call you can go with run with that yeah okay so I think the one that stands out to me
06:30 - 07:00 would maybe beyond the creators side and I'm actually I think I missed one of my buckets here which was a third type of creator which is that everyday person who might want to create a movie um and I think I want to go in that direction and here's why it's specifically around that kind of competitive advantage around the social graph I feel like you could leverage that to make the creator experience of actually making a movie a more social experience I haven't fully fleshed out how that might be the case
07:00 - 07:30 but to me that feels like right now when you create content it's siloed either you're alone on your phone or you're like a fully professional person with the whole team but is there some is there some way that we can unlock that creative experience that's more social got it yeah super interesting so you're sort of thinking about like the creative experience being a social one basically like and I think if we look about the scope of this segmentation if we consider pretty much
07:30 - 08:00 any user that has created some sort of video content in the past and maybe take a percentage of those that have not yet might be pulled into the market with this product I think that actually has a very large scope compared to the other creator sites which are more kind of concentrated within influencers or seriously concentrated in like Fox and Sony in those types of places got it got it make sense um are you okay with that direction yeah that sounds good I'd love
08:00 - 08:30 to hear maybe just like one quick thing about maybe one of the other customer segments and why you didn't pick that one yeah so I thought about the viewer side as well and this is really like a two-sided marketplace to me you have the creation and then you have the viewing but I think right now Facebook watch already has a pretty good UI in terms of viewing and I think we can leverage that and we have really good kind of social features around if you're watching together you can comment or react and
08:30 - 09:00 you can see the reactions going by and I think that that is a great start um I think that's exciting but to me it's much more kind of zero to one unmet need around that social side that I don't feel as being served right now I'm a creator side got it yeah I think that's a great innovative perspective which is that socialness you know and I evilly might come from the viewers perspective from someone looking at this problem but there's actually a way to add a social nastasi what be come up with yeah okay
09:00 - 09:30 so I'm going to take a minute now to brainstorm some pain points that creators would have around it being maybe not that social in the creative process awesome take your time okay so I thought of four pain points around the whole creation process being not social it so what are some pain points that people experienced by creating alone
09:30 - 10:00 the first one is wondering is my idea any good so is the overall theme that I'm approaching my script or that just the general pitch of my movie is that something that is interesting and valuable to people I think that's something that could be really hard if you're in your own personal mental echo chamber to know and if you make a movie that no one's interested in you basically wasted all your time so that's the first one the next one is maybe that it's a lonely experience I think this one especially came to mind given we are in us socially distance times right now
10:00 - 10:30 but that I see a ton of people on my feed you know recording themselves alone in their various places so is there some way to make that recording process a little bit more communal I know a lot of movies are even trying to be recorded via zoom right now this interview itself is being recorded via zoom right now so is there some way we can make that a more more communal experience the next one was around like okay maybe I lack
10:30 - 11:00 all the skills needed to get my movie to full fruition so maybe I'm really great at filming but I'm not good at acting or maybe I'm great at script writing or sound editing but not not the next step so is there a way to to bring in more people with more skills somehow and then last one this was around that maybe like Ken my audience be bigger like as one person I only have a certain amount of reach in terms of my my general population that I
11:00 - 11:30 can reach out to a friends and families and my network so is there an opportunity to leverage more people to bring that bigger audience and make the movie more of a success got it this is an awesome list yeah what are you sort of thinking your the priorities here with the pain points so I think I really want to measure like impact to goal so if our goal is you know to make a movie product for Facebook that is inherently social which one do we
11:30 - 12:00 believe will have the most impact so I would probably try to see which one is the biggest pain so looking through I think there's definitely some immediacy around the loneliness of creating and I think this one's differentiated too because most of the ways that individual people create video for social media is with like the front-facing camera is in itself a lonely experience so that one
12:00 - 12:30 to me feels highly impactful to this goal let me see and I think another one that stands out is like can my audience be bigger I think there actually might be an opportunity to tie those two together if if you're doing this in a more social way because there may be as an endpoint that the audience would be magnified those results totally yeah I think I I really thought a lonely experience one was interesting because it's kind of a not thought about problem but definitely true and yet particularly
12:30 - 13:00 presently a problem for this day so yeah I think it's interesting cuz it's it's almost inherent in the workflow today of how how they do exist so that to me signals that there's maybe a new way to think about it that could be really additive to mention one that I didn't pick so lacking skills I think that that's an interesting one that to me feels a little bit outside of Facebook's wheelhouse um I would expect that that's more on the like Final Cut Pro maybe
13:00 - 13:30 reddit boards or wherever creatives go to to meet up and collaborate together and I think that um probably it would be better served to focus more on that in essence of socialness in itself got it yeah that makes sense okay so we're gonna focus on this I'm lonely and maybe we'll see if the audience can be brought in as a result but really the the main pain point is the loneliness here okay so I will take a minute now to brainstorm some
13:30 - 14:00 solutions for this okay okay so I've thought of three potential solutions here the first one is something we could probably MVP via groups but this would be around creating creative groups for moral support kind of throughout the movie process so um you could join this particular subset and let people know about your general projects timeline and
14:00 - 14:30 they could kind of check in with you and give you kudos and be a sounding board for ideas as you move on and I could see this being really beneficial to also have like networking between creatives so that if you're part of this group then you can more easily work together in the future and kind of percolate from the height of mind of creative ideas the next idea I had was this new feature for portal called portal audience so this
14:30 - 15:00 would be a way to really quickly get viewers earlier on in the creative process so if you're recording via portal people could just join in and drop in and see what you're up to and you could talk to them um but it would be kind of like a one-to-many I think there's some privacy concerns there we could talk about how we can set up those features but that could be a fun way to kind of get get more people in your creative room and the last idea so this one is a little bit out there but I think there's an opportunity to maybe like create a movie together through
15:00 - 15:30 Facebook so I got this idea through like the moments that you can share like with your friends when it's your anniversary and there you can create a movie of your friendship so what if we went even a step further with that and we made it so that you could create an axe while recording movie with your friends and film each scene and kind of hand it off so you could even do it asynchronously and kind of slowly create a movie over time mmm I'm thinking even
15:30 - 16:00 further about this now maybe it could be like you know the movie boyhood how they kind of record little snippets like I don't know if it's a minute a day but just over his whole life so maybe you could make the video of your life on Facebook I think that would align really well with them the rest of the platform having your memories over time yeah super interesting and so for that last idea like is sort of I would love to hear a little bit more kind of like what you're imagining and and I guess also hearing your preference on which one you want to dive into and which one sounds
16:00 - 16:30 exciting in terms of I think I think I am excited about this last one as I'm thinking about it more I think really it aligns well both on the social experience with being able to create something together but also in Facebook's bread-and-butter which is you know kind of collecting memories and moments between you and your friends and family so I think that's the one I want to go with I think you know to put metrics around it it would be like impact I might think about effort as well I think this one is probably a
16:30 - 17:00 little higher effort than creating groups for moral support for example but I think the impact would be super super high on making movies a more inclusive social creative process and maybe potentially impact a lot of people's lives for the better if they are able to kind of Chronicle their life over time and everyone could have their own personal movie that could be very rewarding and special yeah totally and I mean there's a lot of interesting thought they're just like even though Stephen you just said about everyone having their own personal movie and like what that even means for people and how
17:00 - 17:30 they view their lives but yeah I'm serious like yeah tell me a little bit more about kind of what you're imagining in this experience and let's just maybe poke out some of the features or hear a little bit about what the high priority features would be yeah absolutely so I think this would be probably it could live under here creating a video post in the near term and it could ask you like oh do you want to add this to your movies so actually maybe it could be super super lean whenever you're like sharing a story or something instead of kind of collecting it to memories you
17:30 - 18:00 could say do you want to add this to your movie and that could be the first discovery point and then it could explain like yeah you know it's collecting movie over the course of your life I think there could be a separate entry point within Facebook watch if you're like I'm a more real deal video creator and I'm gonna have my army of socially distant creators to make this amazing thriller I don't know and so then you could go to watch specifically and I think then there would be probably some sort of like of the video pop-up and you could hit record there probably need to be some really
18:00 - 18:30 basic editing just probably trimming on the ends initially I don't think we need to get too far into kind of more mechanics of effects and sound editing at the initial point and then there's probably something of like tagging people in the project so you can probably add people in and remove them I could see if someone's just doing a little moment maybe you don't want them in there the whole time and then there's some where you need a database to store all of these movies if this is longer form content then there's definitely
18:30 - 19:00 storage that we need to think about and then maybe it's like do you have like a publish versus still editing mode I think definitely so there probably needs to be some sort of like my library of existing and process movies and ones that are already published definitely I'm curious like so you know and and maybe the dancer sort of baked is my question but YouTube is obviously a place also for people to upload and brainstorm and create some of these like maybe lower fidelity or sort of like
19:00 - 19:30 lighter-weight videos or moving experiences and so Facebook's like in this world that Facebook is creating like how will you really leverage some of those social stuff to really differentiate it YouTube yeah I think it's really about like tagging other people to be able to add one of their videos to your your life movie or your thriller I think both can work um and yeah maybe you can even have people as contributors over time so I think with
19:30 - 20:00 YouTube right you finish something you upload it that's it maybe there's a little bit of editing you can do versus this is kind of a continuous ongoing project that again can be asynchronous that you can tag your friends and do it do it later and little chunks that measure up to something totally yeah it sounds like we're almost inventing a new type of in general like that doesn't really exist right now but like what if we can make these movie experiences that were both living and social in the way that they were created and added to yeah I love that living is the exact word yeah
20:00 - 20:30 I'm curious like for you also like so what are some work worries that you have about this like you know obviously this is a new type of content it could be a lot of work but like what are some of the key issues that you're worried about when you're thinking about moving instruction or designing the structure yeah I think the first thing that comes to mind is privacy so if you are chronicling someone's entire life I think you know there's a lot of questions there and maybe someone's ok with it when they start but then they're 40 and they're no longer okay with it so how how do we manage that um I think
20:30 - 21:00 there's another one around like retention so if this is something that you're not posting for years then the value to the user I mean there's a huge peak in value when you post it there's definitely value through chronolog chronicling it but can we make sure that people still stay engaged and excited if they're not posting it till that point do they want to post it in chapters is this something that we want to make visible sooner I think that's definitely something I'd want to experiment with pretty early on to understand totally that make sense yeah I guess I'm also
21:00 - 21:30 curious so yeah I mean obviously privacy will be important because you might not want to show everyone your life story you might want to show parts of it things like that yeah so I'm curious I guess like as a last maybe follow-up question like yeah what what metrics would you look at here to see or evaluate the success of this product and yeah feel free to add other pieces also by the way if there are other points you wanted to touch on that we didn't get to as we start to wrap up the interview mm-hmm so I think in terms of metrics
21:30 - 22:00 there definitely depends on like what stage if this is at launch I would be concerned more tactically like is this working are people able to use these features versus more downstream I'd be interested in engagement around the actual posts themselves um I think that does again call to question like when are people posting if we're posting more in chapters and we can test engagement sooner um I think retention is another one so I think my first metric would probably be like click through and maybe number of number
22:00 - 22:30 of installments added on average per user I probably want to look at the monthly number if this is something that I wouldn't expect people to do it necessarily every day but probably a couple times a month if that's really the use case we're going to I probably also want to look at the average length of an installment I think that has important implications on the storage side which is more of an infrastructure thing but I think that's important to consider and I probably also want to look at the average number of friends
22:30 - 23:00 included in a creation process I think the key hypothesis here is this isn't solo creating this is a social living creator experience so I would want to definitely validate that by seeing additional people added I don't know what the sweet spot is there but definitely more than one person yeah and on the on the retention side I'd probably want to look at the the two-month retention for the feature so of the users who added something a month ago are they still adding 30 days later
23:00 - 23:30 basically god I got a super helpful cool well is there other pieces to this interview that we didn't get to touch on or pieces you wanted to add or clarify or hone in on before we start to wrap it up um I guess maybe there's something around discovery so I mentioned maybe we we could put that in in stories as a first point but I do want it to be differentiated so do we do a big splash like do we even launch a movie like boyhood to promote this or how do we let
23:30 - 24:00 people know that this is a new special different way of chronicling your life and of creating video that is social and living I think there's an opportunity to make a really big splash to to actually do a video um even if that's like a year so yeah I would be considering that rollout plan or maybe we just want to focus on a particular country and tell the story of that country and then momentum yeah I think it's interesting like it sounds like there's a couple angles here also about like you know is it your own living story or is it you
24:00 - 24:30 know like and maybe really tapping into that desire to chronicle one's life but then also maybe just like this creative energy - and sort of like which direction it goes would be interesting I do think there's - user segments I think there's the one which chronicling your life and there's the other one which is more like I'm an indie film pretty yeah I guess yeah like a last question they didn't before really close and be like which one of those two pop user populations would you prioritize I think the more general user
24:30 - 25:00 as we talked about it it really sounded to me like a big opportunity that could impact any everyday person and so I think the scope is much larger I think that's great if indie film producers can get value out of that that same feature set and maybe long-term we would want to put some more professional additional advanced features on there but I think again thinking about the the wheelhouse of Facebook is is really for the everyday so civilian it's not necessarily a an artistic product that
25:00 - 25:30 we do have creator content on there so I would want to design for it for the everyday person awesome yeah okay cool well we do a deep breath and you know the interviews is done great job Selena that was really great why don't you would love to hear your thoughts on kind of like how that went for you and yeah any self feedback that you have before I jump into some of the feedback that I wrote about what made this interview so great yeah overall I think it went really well I like the
25:30 - 26:00 idea I feel like it grew as we were talking about it which is always kind of fun I think in interviews in general if you feel like that's how the report is going between you and the interviewer you're on a good track I think the one area where I maybe could have slowed down a little was around proposing the MVP I think I could have like actually taken some time to dry out the flow um I don't think I missed anything major but in general I think that's a point to to pause and at least think about okay like what what is the user journey what is each step that's important to take and then I can pick one to add more color to
26:00 - 26:30 to talk through more detail def plan and also where we try to keep these videos little short so I did push you along a little bit but yeah normally in an interview we might have just read hold on that for 10 minutes and you might have drawn things all the way forward things like that virtual whiteboard yeah let me just jump into some of the things that I thought you did really well and just overall thoughts about the interview so first of all that you had you started off really strong with really great questions and the great follow-up questions like ask you a portal and how this question
26:30 - 27:00 fit into the Facebook ecosystem which also demonstrated your knowledge of Facebook generally and that ecosystem which is really effective for an interview you did a great job outlining the map of the interview and then you stuck to it mostly throughout the interview so here's where I'm gonna go and then every point you went there you're like I'm gonna write some notes about this I'm gonna write some notes about this I thought that the you you even asked some like deep questions which is always kind of cool especially in higher level more senior Facebook or you know PM interviews broadly I'm like
27:00 - 27:30 what is a movie like what does that even mean like what is the scope of this question and you sort of pushed on the edge of that which I thought was interesting from the philosophical perspective and then the other piece I really liked is he always stayed grounded in the mission and the goals and the competitive advantage of Facebook so why are we doing this like even at the very end the last question I just asked you if we're doing this because Facebook is for the everyday people it's more of a social ecosystem it's not really an artistic platform right now and maybe it could be at one point but it's more about kind of like
27:30 - 28:00 everyday usage and things like that I thought that you yeah so you know asking questions with proposing things is also really effective so there was one point where you said something like you know I can go in these different directions but I'm gonna pick this one what do you think and I thought it was really effective because it showed that you had the leadership but also the ability to trekkin with me as an interviewer I thought that you know you did a great job brainstorming a lot of fun ideas and we sort of latched on to the most moonshot idea and I love that you weren't afraid to go there in an actual
28:00 - 28:30 interview like that's totally fine to go to these moonshot ideas and it's definitely less scoped out some of the other ones like a creative group but it also allowed you to talk a little bit more creatively and brainstorm and kind of drive with the interviewer and we did a little bit of that and obviously this interview bit longer we might have even talked about it more Aaron kind of came up with ideas or thoughts around it and so just showing that creative muscle which is so essential to a product design interview a successful product design interview question was was really effective here and I thought also you
28:30 - 29:00 just had a thoughtful discussion around metrics towards the end - it was clear that not only could you brainstorm but you could also bring in those metrics just a couple points on things that I thought you could do like differently or maybe I wasn't sure about again I thought this interview was short so yeah I wasn't totally clear on the MDP I was like okay so what exactly does this look like what exactly would this experience be and we sort of scoped it out you did a little bit later in the interview and then I think yeah just you know I I asked a question about YouTube but you can always just bring that forward in an
29:00 - 29:30 interview if you have the time just say hey like I know this might start sound to be a little bit like YouTube I'd love to discuss the competitive differentiation there before the interview were actually asks about that just as it shows that you're thoughtful about it but not a huge faux pas in an interview um other than that I thought you did a really effective job and you went really thoughtful discussion and um it was just cool to see the whole part design process and you know from the beginning through the end of that product design
29:30 - 30:00 and obviously we could have further product meetings and discussions to scope out what that actual product would look like yeah we're gonna roll this out now right exactly yeah yeah any thoughts reactions to anything I just said or anything like that um I think all really great points totally agree like I think we were aligned I was like I rushed through the MVP a little bit so I think again taking a minute there and just thinking like what what screens are essential what what should I do absolutely first like what does that pare down um yeah and then always like think about especially
30:00 - 30:30 on the competitive differentiation like if there's a little voice in your head saying like oh this sounds a little bit like this product like I not should be bled by you not by the interviewer so totally totally but Selena thank you so much for being on the show this is super valuable super helpful obviously you're an experienced p.m. interviewer and yeah it's just been great to hear your perspective on this yeah I was super fun nice to see you also give a few zoom all right thanks Lena and good luck to
30:30 - 31:00 everyone watching with your interview good luck [Music] you [Music]