"Roadblocks or obstacles are common when working on projects. It's essential to navigate them and quickly find solutions to ensure timely delivery and success of your projects. Steps to handle roadblocks or obstacles:
Gauge the potential imapct and decide if it's something that needs immediate solution or something that can be handled later.
If it needs urgent solutions, try to understand the rootcause of the roadblock or obstacle and dig deep.
If it's a already seen problem before, try"
Anonymous Stork - "Roadblocks or obstacles are common when working on projects. It's essential to navigate them and quickly find solutions to ensure timely delivery and success of your projects. Steps to handle roadblocks or obstacles:
Gauge the potential imapct and decide if it's something that needs immediate solution or something that can be handled later.
If it needs urgent solutions, try to understand the rootcause of the roadblock or obstacle and dig deep.
If it's a already seen problem before, try"See full answer
"Before I start, can I ask some clarifying questions?
Is Facebook Reels the same as Facebook Watch where a user can go to Watch and consume short clips, react, comment and share them?
In terms of measuring success, are you looking at a segment of users like the reel creators or viewers, or is that up to me? (Assume interviewer will say it's totally up to me)
Can I also assume that I am looking at the product across platforms as well? Android, iOS, desktop (Assume answer is yes)
Thanks fo"
Riku H. - "Before I start, can I ask some clarifying questions?
Is Facebook Reels the same as Facebook Watch where a user can go to Watch and consume short clips, react, comment and share them?
In terms of measuring success, are you looking at a segment of users like the reel creators or viewers, or is that up to me? (Assume interviewer will say it's totally up to me)
Can I also assume that I am looking at the product across platforms as well? Android, iOS, desktop (Assume answer is yes)
Thanks fo"See full answer
"Assumptions:
Part of the core FB product and not standalone app/
Education for children in 13-18 range
Goal: To improve the education of children while building stronger social networks with their family/friends and thus further the mission of the company of bringing the world together and offering tools to form communities.
Key user segments:
Students (middle and high school)
Teachers
Parents
For the purpose of this exercise, I would like to focus on the student user gr"
P K. - "Assumptions:
Part of the core FB product and not standalone app/
Education for children in 13-18 range
Goal: To improve the education of children while building stronger social networks with their family/friends and thus further the mission of the company of bringing the world together and offering tools to form communities.
Key user segments:
Students (middle and high school)
Teachers
Parents
For the purpose of this exercise, I would like to focus on the student user gr"See full answer
"You are working on a SaaS product that currently uses Basic Authentication (username/password) for API and application access. The security and compliance teams have mandated moving to a more secure, modern authentication mechanism — OIDC (OpenID Connect). Design the authentication system migration from Basic Authentication to OIDC. Discuss the architecture changes, the migration approach, and the rollout strategy. What are the technical challenges, impacts on customers, backward compatibility"
Anonymous Stork - "You are working on a SaaS product that currently uses Basic Authentication (username/password) for API and application access. The security and compliance teams have mandated moving to a more secure, modern authentication mechanism — OIDC (OpenID Connect). Design the authentication system migration from Basic Authentication to OIDC. Discuss the architecture changes, the migration approach, and the rollout strategy. What are the technical challenges, impacts on customers, backward compatibility"See full answer
Software Engineer
System Design
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"Let me try to explain it with simple life analogy
You're cooking dinner in the kitchen. Multithreading is when you've got a bunch of friends helping out. Each friend does a different job—like one chops veggies while another stirs a sauce. Everyone focuses on their task, and together, you all make the meal faster.
In a computer, it's like different jobs happening all at once, making stuff happen quicker, just like having lots of friends helping makes dinner ready faster."
Praveen D. - "Let me try to explain it with simple life analogy
You're cooking dinner in the kitchen. Multithreading is when you've got a bunch of friends helping out. Each friend does a different job—like one chops veggies while another stirs a sauce. Everyone focuses on their task, and together, you all make the meal faster.
In a computer, it's like different jobs happening all at once, making stuff happen quicker, just like having lots of friends helping makes dinner ready faster."See full answer
"clarify:
so does the 5% drop a sudden drop or overtime in the one week
does it broadly drop 5% or it dropped only in some regions or in some segments like new acqusition / frequent active customers?
or does the 5% drop also happened last year same period?
DAU = acqusition x activation x retention
segment:
I will first quickly do some EDA to find out problem, like calculate the DAU drop in new customer, tenured customer, between regions to find out is there any difference.
then I will also look"
Yuexiang Y. - "clarify:
so does the 5% drop a sudden drop or overtime in the one week
does it broadly drop 5% or it dropped only in some regions or in some segments like new acqusition / frequent active customers?
or does the 5% drop also happened last year same period?
DAU = acqusition x activation x retention
segment:
I will first quickly do some EDA to find out problem, like calculate the DAU drop in new customer, tenured customer, between regions to find out is there any difference.
then I will also look"See full answer
"What is Facebook Live?
Facebook Live is the posting of a live video -> Virtual events, QA, conversation, presentation/performance.
It can be on your Facebook page, event, or group.
Mission
Facebook's mission is to connect people and bring the world closer together.
The mission of Facebook Live, from my perspective, is to enable individuals to engage ( message), discuss, and learn in real-time with their role models, influencers, and others to discover and establish stronger connect"
Reach G. - "What is Facebook Live?
Facebook Live is the posting of a live video -> Virtual events, QA, conversation, presentation/performance.
It can be on your Facebook page, event, or group.
Mission
Facebook's mission is to connect people and bring the world closer together.
The mission of Facebook Live, from my perspective, is to enable individuals to engage ( message), discuss, and learn in real-time with their role models, influencers, and others to discover and establish stronger connect"See full answer
"I started going through the different main area of focus
stakeholder alignment with Product and engineering; resource alignment
getting it into the backlog and then prioritization
spoke about Sprint planning and timelines and timely communication back to stakeholders to be on track for this end to end
demo / pilot options
(but HM already wasn't too happy about the response and asked me the Question again)"
Anonymous Hummingbird - "I started going through the different main area of focus
stakeholder alignment with Product and engineering; resource alignment
getting it into the backlog and then prioritization
spoke about Sprint planning and timelines and timely communication back to stakeholders to be on track for this end to end
demo / pilot options
(but HM already wasn't too happy about the response and asked me the Question again)"See full answer
"I would start with the User feedback- both explicit (from surveys) and implicit(from Product insights on app usage/drop offs). Then understand the business direction/priorities that Paypal wants to take with Venmo and come up with a Iteration plan that starts with "low hanging fruit" first and then builds to more ambitious products. The goal is to find features that are at the intersection of "valuable(to users), feasible(for dev) and usable(to users) . Once we prioritize these features, I would"
Abhijit B. - "I would start with the User feedback- both explicit (from surveys) and implicit(from Product insights on app usage/drop offs). Then understand the business direction/priorities that Paypal wants to take with Venmo and come up with a Iteration plan that starts with "low hanging fruit" first and then builds to more ambitious products. The goal is to find features that are at the intersection of "valuable(to users), feasible(for dev) and usable(to users) . Once we prioritize these features, I would"See full answer
"I'm going to assume I'm the PM for Events.
Clarifying Questions:
Is there any reason why we're improving Events, perhaps any bugs or feature requests? I'll assume improvement is open-ended
Are we scoped to Facebook mobile or web? I'll assume no
I'd like to break this problem down into three areas: goals, users, and solutions. Let's talk about goals first.
Higher-level goal for Facebook & Events
The higher-level goal for Facebook is to bring people closer together and empower"
Aryan B. - "I'm going to assume I'm the PM for Events.
Clarifying Questions:
Is there any reason why we're improving Events, perhaps any bugs or feature requests? I'll assume improvement is open-ended
Are we scoped to Facebook mobile or web? I'll assume no
I'd like to break this problem down into three areas: goals, users, and solutions. Let's talk about goals first.
Higher-level goal for Facebook & Events
The higher-level goal for Facebook is to bring people closer together and empower"See full answer
"there's no audio the last ~10 minutes from the interviewer so we can't get a sense of the feedback from the interviewer.
I did think it took the interviewee a little too long to figure out the issue itself and could have benefited from taking some time to think and gather thoughts before jumping into drivers of the issue."
Sabi M. - "there's no audio the last ~10 minutes from the interviewer so we can't get a sense of the feedback from the interviewer.
I did think it took the interviewee a little too long to figure out the issue itself and could have benefited from taking some time to think and gather thoughts before jumping into drivers of the issue."See full answer
"Recently, I was listening to an episode of Lenny Rachitsky’s podcast (aptly named Lenny’s Podcast), where he interviews Christian Idiodi, talking about the essence of product management. In the open sequence, Christian talks about the essence of this job being “you wake up on behalf of someone else, and you have to do it well enough that they give you something back in return.” This statement really struck a chord with me and resonated with why I love being a product manager. Customers and their"
John F. - "Recently, I was listening to an episode of Lenny Rachitsky’s podcast (aptly named Lenny’s Podcast), where he interviews Christian Idiodi, talking about the essence of product management. In the open sequence, Christian talks about the essence of this job being “you wake up on behalf of someone else, and you have to do it well enough that they give you something back in return.” This statement really struck a chord with me and resonated with why I love being a product manager. Customers and their"See full answer
"To improve the passenger experience at a major metropolitan airport, I would focus on streamlining the pre-arrival, arrival, and post-flight stages of their journey. Pre-arrival, we could integrate flight details into the Uber app and provide predictive ETAs to help passengers plan better. At the airport, we could partner with authorities to create dedicated drop-off and pickup zones, along with clear in-app navigation to reduce confusion. Post-flight, we could implement dynamic pickup zones, vi"
Prashant S. - "To improve the passenger experience at a major metropolitan airport, I would focus on streamlining the pre-arrival, arrival, and post-flight stages of their journey. Pre-arrival, we could integrate flight details into the Uber app and provide predictive ETAs to help passengers plan better. At the airport, we could partner with authorities to create dedicated drop-off and pickup zones, along with clear in-app navigation to reduce confusion. Post-flight, we could implement dynamic pickup zones, vi"See full answer
"I wish there were more real-life examples, more practical information that actually demonstrates the wealth of experience. In the beginning, we are introduced to 3 pillars: trust, high productivity, and growth mindset. It would have been nice to see 1 example for each of these pillars in practice. the interview response was very theoretical and diplomatic. Very shy in providing even small real-life examples e.g. question what are the example guidelines teams would set by themselves to identify w"
Anonymous Krill - "I wish there were more real-life examples, more practical information that actually demonstrates the wealth of experience. In the beginning, we are introduced to 3 pillars: trust, high productivity, and growth mindset. It would have been nice to see 1 example for each of these pillars in practice. the interview response was very theoretical and diplomatic. Very shy in providing even small real-life examples e.g. question what are the example guidelines teams would set by themselves to identify w"See full answer