Facebook (Meta) Product Manager (PM) Interview Guide
Read our guide on what to expect in the Facebook interview and how to prepare.Want to land your dream job as a Facebook product manager (PM)? Don't dive into the Facebook (Meta) product manager interview until you finish our guide. Meta's interview process is known to be highly competitive, given its prominent position in the tech ecosystem.
This is an overview of what this Facebook PM Guide includes:
- What Does a Facebook (Meta) Product Manager Do?
- Facebook Interview Process and Timeline
- Facebook Product Manager Interview Questions and Answers
- How to Prepare for Your Facebook Interview
- Average Facebook and Meta PM Salary
What Does a Facebook (Meta) Product Manager Do?
Product management at Meta is incredibly rewarding, with its huge scale and mission to connect billions of users across the world.
Meta's product managers must be experienced in many different technical areas. They must be able to look at both Facebook and Meta’s global impact and work on product development, execution, and strategy.
Product managers at Facebook work in multi-functional teams alongside software engineers, data scientists, and marketers.
Facebook product manager roles are largely defined by where the product lives in the customer journey. This means that some PMs may spend their time working on products to increase shopping conversions in Facebook Marketplace (down-funnel), while others may focus on acquiring new users in emerging markets (top-of-funnel).
No matter the team, your work as a Facebook product manager will include:
- Working with and leading teams of software engineers to build products on a deadline
- Thinking strategically about Facebook and Meta’s long-term vision and how the products you build influence those goals
- Using data from Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp, and more to drive product decisions
Interview Process
While every candidate’s journey is unique, the Facebook interview process usually follows a similar formula.
Typically, there are 3 formal rounds of interviews for Facebook PM roles:
- Recruiter Phone Interview (1 Interview): This single phone interview with a recruiter is used to get to know you and understand how you might fit in at Facebook.
- PM Phone Screens (2 interviews): Your next interview series will be with product managers at Facebook who will evaluate your skills as a product manager.
- PM Onsite (3 interviews): Onsite interview rounds are the final part of the Facebook interview. On-site interviews cover the entire scope of your PM role.
How long is the Facebook Interview Process?
On average, candidates will hear back from phone interviews within a week or two.
Similarly after the on-site interview, Facebook may take up to two weeks to return the results to you.
Once you pass the on-site interview, expect the process to actually sign and negotiate the offer to be even longer as you get the paperwork all completed.
From start to finish, it can take between four to six weeks to finish a Facebook interview.
Facebook Recruiter Phone Interview
A recruiter will first call you to understand your motivations and qualifications for the role on a 45-minute phone call.
Why do you want to work at Facebook as a PM? Be prepared to talk about your past experiences, why you are interested in Facebook, and why you have chosen Product Management specifically.
Your recruiter may also review your resume with you to ensure you have product management background and an interest in technology.
While technical skills are not a requirement for Facebook interviews, it's important to display technical interest to your recruiter.
If there are particular products or teams you are interested in this can be a great time to share these, although these preferences typically won’t be used until after you’ve received an offer.
Facebook PM Phone Screens
Next, you will have a phone interview with two current product managers at Facebook.
You will get 45 minutes for two interviews covering product sense and execution questions.
It’s important to note that the feedback from all interviews, including the phone interviews, are included in your final hiring evaluation. In some cases you may receive two phone interviews.
The phone screen is different from the on-site interviews in that they’re usually graded differently. The PM phone screen is to get a general understanding of your skills as a product manager before advancing you.
Because many on-site interviews are held virtually because of COVID-19, they can feel similar to the phone screen interviews.
Facebook On-Site Interviews
Following the phone interview is the final on-site interview. A typical on-site interview for an individual contributor consists of 3 rounds: 1 product sense, 1 execution, and 1 leadership & drive.
Additionally, for candidates who may receive an offer as a PM Manager (as opposed to an individual contributor) there will be 2-3 additional XFN interviews.
These are interviews with PMs and are most similar to the leadership & drive interviews. You’ll be asked questions about how you work with partner teams and to share stories that demonstrate effective cross-functional work you have done in previous roles.
These questions allow you to go deeper into more past experiences given that PM Managers tend to have held more roles for a longer period of time than individual contributors.
If a particular team has shown interest in your application then you may have an interview with a hiring manager on that team as well as additional team-specific interviews. If you don’t have these set-up, don’t worry! Most candidates will pass the main track and then match with teams or simply receive an offer to join and find a team during bootcamp (Facebook's team matching process).
Potential Follow-up Interviews
If the signal from one of your interviews is highly positive and the signal from another interview didn’t quite meet the bar, you may be asked to redo a single interview for product sense or execution.
If this happens, don’t worry! The new interviewer won’t see what didn’t go perfectly in the previous interview so it’s a fresh chance.
Since this one interview can be very high leverage, we almost always recommend booking a mock interview (or three!) with Exponent to prepare - you don't want to miss out on being this close to an offer!
Sample Facebook Product Manager Resume and Cover Letter
Not sure how to structure your resume for a job at Facebook and Meta? Use our product manager resume checklist to make sure your resume is ready!
Some things to include:
- Job Description Focused: Your resume should be laser-focused on the Facebook PM job description, specifically. Because Meta’s products are focused on social media and broader connectivity, this candidate’s resume emphasizes their previous experience in those areas.
- One Page: It seems simple, but a single page resume is the only type you should be sending out. If you can’t summarize your relevant experience to a single page, it’s time to start trimming it back.
- Mention Specifics: The best way to get your PM resume to stand out is to focus on specifics for the role. If this PM role requires previous React experience to work with Meta’s team, mention it in your resume.
While it’s never fun to revamp your resume for each role you apply to, the results are dramatic when you do! Facebook is one of the most competitive companies to work for around. Nearly 250,000 candidates apply to work at Facebook each year.
Sample Interview Questions
Facebook Product Manager Interview Questions and Answers
You will have to answer 3 types of questions at Facebook to assess your skills as a product manager
- Product Sense
- Execution
- Leadership & Drive
Expect interviews for these higher-level jobs (L5 and above) to ask more domain-specific questions.
Facebook Product Sense and Product Design Interview Questions
This interview focuses on your product knowledge, creativity, instincts, and awareness.
Questions could focus 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 questions that could come up in this interview are looking at an existing Facebook Product like Groups, Events or Birthdays and figuring out how you’d evolve it.
Your interviewer will be able to give you guidance along the way, although they will expect you to lead the conversation. In this interview it’s very important to have a structure in your thought process and to be able to revert back to your original idea / goal.
Commonly, the questions asked in the product sense interview will guide you to design a product in an open-ended space without requiring you to talk about Facebook in any way.
In this case, you may choose to explain areas where your product ideas could integrate into Facebook or stay more focused on the user experience which could even exist in a separate app.
Inside of Facebook new product experiences really are tested in a variety of ways! Most importantly, emphasize what you would focus on and why.
Below: Watch a Microsoft PM answer a question about how to design Instagram Stories during a Meta PM interview.
The most commonly asked product sense questions asked at Facebook and Meta are:
- What is your favorite product and why? Watch video answer
- How would you improve Instagram Stories? Watch video answer
- How would you build a Facebook product for blood donation? Watch video answer
- How would you monetize Facebook Messenger? View our answer
- How would you monetize WhatsApp? View our answer
- You are a PM for Facebook Travel. What would you build? Watch video answer
- Design a better doctor search and visit experience. Watch video answer
- How would you build a product for movies on Facebook? Watch video answer
- How many ads should Facebook Newsfeed display? View our answer
Check out our database of the most frequently asked product design interview questions at Facebook.
In these interviews, Facebook is looking for:
- How you take an ambiguous idea and create a great product
- Your ability to empathize with the user
- Intentional design choices
- Prioritization to get things done
Always Mention Tradeoffs in Product Sense Interviews
While we have a full guide to product design questions in our course, one tip for these questions is to always mention tradeoffs.
As you identify ideas and solutions, your Facebook interviewer may ask you to sketch out what your interface could look like and how people would use it.
Don’t be afraid to use a whiteboard or piece of paper to think out loud. If your interview will be virtual take some time to find the best solution that works for you to share drawings.
A whiteboard behind you works, but many people find they prefer to join the call from a second device with a camera pointed at a piece of paper, or a tablet in a sketch app on screen-sharing mode.
Facebook Execution Interview Questions
This is a very analytical, metric- and KPI-focused interview.
Meta is a deeply data-driven company with more than 2 billion users. Given the large amount of data Facebook has available, they expect product managers to be able to look at data to make decisions.
In your execution interview, Facebook will ask questions about how you identify and prioritize opportunities, and execute against them to build products.
This interview will focus on how you analyze a set of constraints and problems to come up with the right set of metrics to measure success. Facebook will also ask how you adapt your plans and troubleshoot problems with new information and changing circumstances.
Below: Watch a Facebook product manager answer a question about how to measure success on Facebook Marketplace.
The most commonly asked execution questions at Facebook are:
- How would you measure success for Facebook Events? Watch video answer
- Friend requests are down 10%, what would you do? View our answer
- You’re the PM of Facebook Reactions. Reactions are up but comments are down. What would you do? View our answer
- How would you measure the success of Facebook dating? View our answer
- If you were the PM of FB Marketplace, what goals would you set? Watch video answer
Check out our database of the most frequently asked execution questions asked at Facebook.
In the execution interview, Facebook is looking for:
- Goals: Being mindful of how the goals (especially quantitative goals) can be gamed or how they can sometimes be counter indicative of progress.
- Metrics: What would you use to measure if the product is healthy? Which one would you prioritize? What happens if one is decreasing and the other is increasing?
- Navigating a complex tradeoff: “A” or “B” option—how do you know what to show to which communities of users?
- Debugging: Say you notice a specific metric dropping week after week. The interviewer will present a problem statement and you should ask questions to describe how you’d approach this challenge and determine what’s causing this metric to drop.
The key to success in these interviews is starting at a high-level with the goals of the product, and then drilling deeper into actions and metrics. We recommend employing the GAME framework for key metrics questions, as demonstrated in this PM lesson.
For role-play execution-style questions, we recommend getting a mock interview partner in our Slack Channel and testing yourself. Generally, the biggest tips here are to structure your thinking aloud, and state all assumptions you make as you go through the problem. Check out a sample role play execution mock interview video to get a sense of how they work.
The Meta PM Interview Rubric
Alexis and Adrienne, former PMs at Facebook and Google, share insights below on how candidates are graded during the execution interview at Meta.
Understand the question and define metrics
It’s easy to fall into a trap and treat execution questions like math problems to be solved. A candidate might believe there is a correct Facebook product metric the interviewer is looking for and try listing every single aspect of the problem. This leads to rabbit holes.
The interviewer is looking for your ability to define a reasonable north star goal for a product and suggest a metric that is aligned with the goal.
Example: "Once, I was defining success metrics for a language learning app in an interview, and I suggested weekly active users (WAUs) as our goal metric. The interviewer pushed back on this choice."
Interviewer: "Why weekly and not daily? If you’re trying to learn a new language, you would practice daily."
Candidate: "Using a language learning app daily would be ambitious for your average user, especially when competing with apps such as Instagram and TikTok. Daily metrics wouldn't capture people who use it once per week. For example, people who only have time to learn a new language on weekends."
The interviewer agrees. Alternatively, you could have responded like this. This is an incorrect answer.
Candidate: Actually, you’re right. Our goal should be to make language learning a daily habit, so I’m going to change the measurement cadence from weekly to daily and measure daily active users (DAUs) instead.
This is why it’s important to be really clear up front about what the product goals are, and the assumptions you are making.
**Below: ** A sample interview rubric used to evaluate a candidate on the question, "Define success for a language learning app."
Focus your answer
When interviewees are asked to "Define success for Bumble (an online matchmaking app)," they often list 10+ metrics to focus on. They're worried about covering all aspects of the problem.
In this case, however, less is more. It’s more interesting to have a discussion on 5-6 metrics than 20-30 metrics.
Then, it’s best to end with an opinion on what the one primary metric should be, and 2-3 secondary metrics that aid the primary metric in showing the full picture.
Here’s how to do that in action:
Example: Define success for Bumble.
Define product metric downsides
An OK candidate might list general downsides to their product metrics. They might talk about counter metrics such as cannibalization of the company’s other products or abusive behavior.
However, the best counter metrics are specific to the north star metric you’ve defined.
If you wanted to to over-optimize your north star, what are ways your decision-making would be flawed?
Below: Venmo is launching a debit card. Define success.
Facebook Leadership and Drive Interview Questions
In your leadership & drive interview, Facebook will focus on understanding how you motivate a team, drive alignment, build relationships, and work with others.
While the product sense and execution interviews use hypothetical cases, the leadership & drive interview focuses on behavioral questions about how you’ve worked with others in the past.
Your interviewer will ask four to five behavioral questions to assess your ability to build and support a team, and lead efforts. Focus areas include:
- Taking ownership: How could you have prevented failure in your past instead of blaming external factors? How do you resolve conflicts instead of avoiding or ignoring them? How have you taken on and solved a challenging situation, whether or not you were told it was your problem to solve?
- Being introspective: Are you aware of your weaknesses? Are you willing to learn and grow?
- Supporting people: Do you appreciate that people have different needs and motivations? Are you able to adjust leadership style to specific situations, collaborating, reconciling differences?
- Grit and scrappiness: Can you stick with something? Can you get something done with insufficient resources because you care?
Being relaxed, calm, and confident is the key to success in these interviews. However, there are definitely parts of this interview you can prepare for.
For instance, create a story bank of experiences that you can use in the interviews, and practice some of these questions with a practice partner in our Slack Channel to get more confident and comfortable.
As you answer your interviewer’s questions, ask yourself if your responses include examples that show how you:
- Demonstrate initiative.
- Exhibit introspection and self-awareness.
- Can be open about your failures and talk through examples of what you’ve learned from them.
- Lead and support a team, including conflict management.
- Are passionate about what you’ve done.
Hiring Decision
At Facebook, candidates are evaluated with respect to criteria specific to each type of interview. Each interviewer will output a recommendation to either hire, or not, along with a high or low confidence.
They will also share any notes supporting their decision-making process. A single person will aggregate the feedback from all interviews and may recommend re-interviews if they are necessary or eventually reach a hire / no-hire decision.
In borderline cases, the hiring decision-maker will have live conversations with any relevant parties (your interviewers). Often, Meta leans towards a no unless proven otherwise due to the volume of applicants. You’ll essentially need to reach a hire recommendation for each of the types of interviews.
If you haven’t hit the strong hire mark across one type of interview but have done well in another type this will typically lead to a re-interview.
If you re-interview (available 6 months following an unsuccessful interview attempt), your most recent interviews will be the main factor influencing the hiring decision-maker, and your interviewers won’t know anything about previous attempts.
It’s impossible to say what ratings will get you hired, but it’s important to note that being at the okay level for all the interviews is not going to lead to a hire decision. Rather than worrying about what exact composition of ratings leads to a hiring decision, instead, focus on shooting for a Strong Hire across both Product Sense & Execution as well as reflecting on any particular interview that may not have gone perfectly, and why.
We suggest you book a mock interview (or three!) with Exponent to prepare - especially in the case that you would like someone else to understand what might have missed the mark in a previous attempt!
Interview Prep
Both the product sense and execution interviews are case studies / hypothetical questions and typically cover products that may be associated with Facebook (i.e. Birthdays, People You May Know, Ads, Marketplace, Video, Sports, Events, etc.), so it’s important to get more familiar with the many features of Facebook and its parent company Meta.
The hypothetical questions may also cover other products you use that aren’t related to Facebook Products, or questions that prompt you to create something new.
For both interviews, you’ll start with the big picture before breaking down the problem area into smaller components. In order to build a product solution or identify a KPI / metric, you’ll need to prioritize some elements (e.g. a specific user group or user problem).
When you do that, always consider what will have the biggest impact on the product / users. In both interviews, your interviewers will be assessing the following:
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Structure: Use a framework of your choice to solve the problem methodically.
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Ability to discuss tradeoffs: Feel free to use a prioritization framework to assess more complex scenarios, such as evaluating pros and cons of two possible solutions in order to choose the best one to implement.
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User empathy and ability to think about different user segments: For example, in the execution interview Facebook is expecting you to identify and track relevant metrics based on the specific user segment.
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Creativity and innovation: Especially important in product sense interviews, the creativity or uniqueness of the solution is as important as the process you go through in devising it.
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Our Favorite PM Interview Prep Resources:
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Full PM Interview Course (Exponent)
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Facebook product manager interview question database (Exponent)
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Learn Product Design from Google (Udacity)
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15-20 hours of PM Interview Prep (Fernando Delgado)
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Product Management Insights and Case Studies (Silicon Valley PM Group)
Peer Mock Interviews
One of the best ways to get ready for your upcoming interview with Meta is to start practicing with your peers.
Exponent offers a free daily mock interview prep tool. Connect with peers who are in the same interview processes as you to practice your skills.
Ask each other questions from this guide or one of the many other popular PM interview questions from our database.
Take turns pretending to be the candidate and hiring manager.
Product Management Interview Coaches
On average, successful candidates who landed the job after Exponent participated in at least 3 mock interview sessions.
Our experienced interview coaches can help you with everything form perfecting your resume to learning how to answer specific questions.
Connect with industry pros who already landed the job you’re after. They work as product managers and hiring managers in the roles you’re applying to.
Talk to our Facebook ex-interviewers and find a match for your career trajectory.
Former Facebook PM Interview Advice
Salary
Facebook Product Manager Average Salary and Compensation
Thanks to our friends at Levels.fyi, we’ve compiled a breakdown of the average compensation for product managers at Facebook.
- The average compensation for a Facebook L3 Regional Product Manager (RPM) is about $164k. L3 product managers tend to have very little variation in their compensation packages.
- The average compensation for a Facebook L4 Product Manager is $252k. The salary range for this position is between about $200k and $350k.
- The average compensation for a Facebook L5 Product Manager is $345k. The salary range for this position is about $300k to $400k.
- The average compensation for a Facebook L6 Product Manager is $492k. The salary range for this position is about $400k to $600k.
- The average compensation for a Facebook L7 Product Manager is $745k. The average salary range for this position varies greatly. Some employees report earning between $600k and $900k.
Facebook employees are subject to a 4-year vesting schedule for their RSUs. They vest 25% each year, or 6.25% every 3 months.
If you’d like to see more salary information for Facebook PMs by city and years of experience, check out our friends Levels.fyi.