Meta Product Sense Interview (questions, process, prep)

If you’re interviewing for a PM role at Meta, the product sense interview is one of the three types of interviews you’re going to need to crack. With challenging, open-ended questions such as “How would you improve Facebook groups?”, “Design a jobs product for Facebook” or even “What should Meta do next?”, you’ll need to be extremely well-prepared.

To help you, we’ve created this guide to give you everything you need to know to prepare for the product sense interview, including top tips, an introduction to an answer framework, example questions, and a practice plan to make sure you land that Meta product manager job.

Here’s a brief overview of what we’ll cover.

1. What is the Meta product sense interview?
2. How to demonstrate product sense
3. How to answer product sense questions
4. List of Meta product sense questions for PMs
5. How to practice product sense questions

Ready? Let’s get into it.

Click here to practice with Meta PM ex-interviewers

1. What is the Meta product sense interview?

The product sense interview is one of three types of interviews you’ll face if you’re applying for a product manager role at Meta. The others are the “execution interview” and the “leadership & drive interview,” which is a behavioral type of interview.

As an ex-director of product outlines in this insider article on the Meta PM interview, Meta / Facebook often describes its product process as "Understand, Identify, Execute."

The product sense interview focuses on the first two parts of this process: how you work to understand the problem you are trying to solve, and how you identify the best way to start solving that problem. You’ll be tested on the third part - how you execute the solution - in the execution interview.

You will face product sense questions both at the first-round stage (phone or video interview) and at the onsite interview. On both occasions, you’ll start with the bigger picture before breaking the problem into smaller components. You’ll be expected to lead the conversation, and you’ll need to sketch out your answer on a whiteboard, or the online equivalent.

For a closer look at the PM interview process at Meta, as well as more information on the two other types of interview rounds within it, take a look at our ultimate Meta product manager interview guide.

2. How to demonstrate product sense

Your Facebook interviewer will be looking for good product understanding, the right instincts, awareness of the different factors and considerations at play, and enough creativity to breed innovation. If you’ve got all those things, you’ve got product sense.  

To convince the interviewer that you possess these qualities, you’ll need to do these nine key things:

To see some more useful guidance about what's expected of you in the product sense interview, check out this very helpful guide to the PM onsite interview from the Meta team.

Right, now that you know what the interviewer will be looking for, let’s take a look at a method to help you answer product sense questions.

3. How to answer product sense questions

As we mentioned above, it’s very important that you use a framework to approach the problems you’ll face in your product sense interview. PMs use frameworks all the time for a reason - they help you follow a logical process and establish some order in what is often a quite chaotic environment. In the interview, don't keep your framework a secret - share it with the interviewer so they know you've structured your thought process and can follow it with you.

There are three types of product sense questions you might be asked: product design, product improvement, and product strategy. For all three, we recommend structuring your answer with the BUS framework, although there are plenty of other valid frameworks to choose from (you can even make up your own). 

3.1 The BUS framework

The BUS framework is a three-step approach to the product process. 

1. Business objectives
2. User problems
3. Solutions

The BUS framework’s main benefit is that it forces you to approach problems in a logical order: you only start considering solutions when you’ve first established the business objectives and have found a relevant problem which is impacting them. That’s to say, it’s no good providing a solution to a problem if you can’t link it back to how this helps meet your business objectives.

It also makes it easy to pivot at any moment of the interview without losing your focus.

Learn how the BUS framework can be applied to each type of product sense question by reading our specific guides: product design, product improvement, and product strategy.  You’ll notice that for product strategy, we outline a slightly different method, but it is in fact extremely similar to BUS, just without the "User problem" part.

Once you’ve got a solid understanding of how to use the BUS framework (or your framework of choice), you’ll want to start putting it into practice. So let’s take a look at some example questions.

4. Meta product sense questions for product managers

As we mentioned above, product sense questions can be broken down into 3 categories, with subtle differences between each:

• product design questions will ask you to design a new product from scratch. They're to test if you can combine a strong eye for design and UX with an understanding of business objectives.
• product improvement questions are testing the same thing, but instead you'll be asked how you'd improve and existing product.
• product strategy questions come from a more high-level perspective . They test your ability to understand competitive markets and to create a product roadmap that responds to the business strategy.

It’s also common to face a “favorite product question”, but these generally take the form of product improvement questions (e.g "What’s your favorite app? How would you improve it?").

We’ve analyzed the data on Glassdoor to find real questions asked in the Meta product sense interview for product managers. Twice, we’ve provided a link to a step-by-step approach to the problem that you can refer to as you practice answering it yourself.

Let’s take a look.

Exercise: Watch the videos below to see how ex-Facebook PMs answer two different product sense questions: "How would you design an antiques marketplace?" and "How would you improve Facebook groups? Pause the videos throughout so that you can construct your own answers and see how they compare. 

Now that we've got a good sense of what type of questions you might be asked, let's move on to how to practice them.

5. How to practice product sense questions

We've coached more than 15,000 people for interviews since 2018. There are essentially three activities you can do to practice for interviews. Here’s what we've learned about each of them.

5.1 Learn by yourself

Learning by yourself is an essential first step. Moreover, product sense questions are open-ended, complex, and need practice. We'd recommend using the three guides we mentioned above - product design, product improvement, and product strategy - to get your head around how to construct your answer. 

For an overview of the product design process at Facebook, watch this video by ex-VP of design at Facebook, Julie Zhuo.

We also recommend that you watch some mock interviews on our product management YouTube channel. That way you can see what an excellent answer looks like.

Once you’re in command of the subject matter, you’ll want to practice answering questions. But by yourself, you can’t simulate thinking on your feet or the pressure of performing in front of a stranger. Plus, there are no unexpected follow-up questions and no feedback.

That’s why many candidates try to practice with friends or peers.

5.2 Practice with peers

If you have friends or peers who can do mock interviews with you, that's an option worth trying. It’s free, but be warned, you may come up against the following problems:

• It’s hard to know if the feedback you get is accurate
• They’re unlikely to have insider knowledge of interviews at your target company
• On peer platforms, people often waste your time by not showing up

For those reasons, many candidates skip peer mock interviews and go straight to mock interviews with an expert. 

5.3 Practice with experienced PM interviewers

In our experience,  practicing real interviews with experts who can give you company-specific feedback makes a huge difference.

Find a Meta product manager interview coach so you can:

• Test yourself under real interview conditions
• Get accurate feedback from a real expert
• Build your confidence
• Get company-specific insights
• Learn how to tell the right stories, better.
• Save time by focusing your preparation

Landing a job at a big tech company often results in a $50,000 per year or more increase in total compensation. In our experience, three or four coaching sessions worth ~$500 make a significant difference in your ability to land the job. That’s an ROI of 100x!