Facebook Product Manager Mock Interview: Meta Movies
Nice to meet you. My name is Celena.
How would you design a product around Movies for Facebook?
I think my first question before we get started would be…
Is this a product you are envisioning existing with the Facebook app or would this potentially be separate?
You can be as open as it despites on this question. The constraint is that it is something that Facebook itself as a company would launch.
One more question. What do you think about hardware versus software? I know the portal is a big bet for Facebook. So… Do you think about the lens’s direction? Like hardware direction.
This is a great question. The question is there a hardware angle here? You can certainly brainstorm in that direction if you would like to. You are not constrained by that.
Okay. Awesome. I think the way I would like to go about this:
First I will talk about Facebook's mission and strategy and why we might be interested in getting into a movie product.
From there I will do a customer segmentation and prioritize one.
And then we will do a quick brainstorm about potential pain points and needs. Prioritize one of those.
And then from there, we will come up with a few solutions. And we will evaluate on impact. Or it may be a couple of other key metrics to pick one.
And then I walk you through how I think I would do MVP.
Sounds great! Thanks for mapping it out.
Awesome. So I am just going to take a quick break to write down my thoughts here.
All right. So. Facebook's mission is to connect the world and bring people closer together and 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 would be interested in moving further into the movie space. I think movies and cinema and entertainment, in general, are something that people have used to connect together since movies were invented.
And I think it has really global appeal. It does not matter where are you from. Pretty much everyone enjoys getting together with friends and families and broader social communities around movies.
Also, I think Facebook is making a lot of big bets in the general video realm. So on Facebook watch, I know, there is a big push to really make Facebook a home for entertainment. And not just that social use case but you would actually be going to the app specifically to entertain in your downtime.
I know thinking about the platform Instagram TV also pursuing a similar approach to really provide a hub to all of that types of content.
I think there is a division between. There is creator content and then there is kind of more premium kind of produced content.
Maybe we could talk about what it means to be a movie. Does necessarily predicate it is coming from Hollywood or wherever or would we include maybe creator movies and individual movies?
Overall I think that movies are something that's important to think about. There are some competitors. I think Netflix would be the first one that comes to mind. And it is crowded. I mean Amazon offers movies as well, also Hulu.
I want to think about how can we offer something that's really differentiated.
Got it. On that note. What do you think you would lean into when you think about the competition to Facebook?
Yeah. I would say what is Facebook's strength 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 a watching experience but also in terms of content recommendation.
I would say that would be the angle that I want to really emphasize here to help us provide something that people would really be excited about.
Now I am going to do a quick customer segmentation.
All right. The way that I see it in terms of segmentation for a movie product I feel there are two big buckets.
On the one hand, there are creators. And on the other hand, there are viewers.
Digging a little bit deeper into the creator site I felt like there were three constituencies.
There is a professional creator of vertical which includes kind of major professional like Hollywood type. You know, major motion films.
Then I would say there is a kind of professional influencer. I think longer form content you do not necessarily think of as the same types of influencers on Instagram. Maybe that is more like indie film creators not on the same level as Hollywood.
And then on a viewer side, I thought I could bucket that maybe around high usage and low usage.
I think what is our goal here 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 scale or scope, and impact. How many potential users are in here? And which segment did we think might be the most impactful to work for?
That sounds like a great call. You can go with that.
I think the one that stands out to me would maybe be beyond the creator's side. I think missed one of my buckets where was the third type of creator which is that everyday person who might want to create a movie.
I think I want to go in that direction. And here is why. It is specifically around that kind of competitive advantage around the social graph. I feel like you could leverage that to make the creator experience actually making a movie a more social experience.
I have not fully fleshed out how this might be the case but to me, that feels right now when you create content it's siloed. Either you are alone on your phone or you are a fully professional person with the whole team.
Is there some way we can unlock that creative experience that is more social?
Got it. Super interesting. You are sort of thinking about like the creative experience being a social one basically.
And I think if we look at the scope of this segmentation. If we consider pretty much every 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 very large creator sites which are more kind of concentrated within influencers. Or seriously concentrated in like Fox and Sony and those types of places.
Are you OK with that direction?
Yeah. That sounds good. I would love to hear maybe just one quick thing about one of the other customer segments. And why you didn't pick that one?
I thought about the viewer side as well. And this is really a two-sided market to me. There is the creation and then you have viewing. I think right now Facebook Watch has a pretty good UI in terms of viewing. And I think we could leverage that.
We have really good kinds of social features around. If you are watching together you can comment or react and you can see the reactions going by. And I think that this is a great start.
I think that's exciting but to me, it's a much more kind of zero to one unmet social side that I don't feel is being served right now.
I think that's a great innovative perspective which is that socialness. You know. And I evilly might come from the viewer's perspective from someone looking at this problem. But there is actually a way to add a socialness to creatives' perspective. I some curious to see what comes up with.
Yeah. Ok. 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.
Ok. I thought of four pain points around the whole creation process being not social.
What are some pain points that people experienced by creating alone?
The first one is wondering if my idea is any good. Is the overall theme that I'm approaching my script or 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.
The next one is maybe that it's a lonely experience. I think this one especially came to mind given we are in our social distance times right now. But I see a ton of people on my feed 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. Is there some way we can make that a more communal experience?
The next one was around like... Okay, maybe I lack all the skills needed to get my movie to full fruition. 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.
Is there a way to bring in more people with more skills somehow?
And then the last one. As one person I only have a certain amount of reach in terms of my general population that I can reach out to friends and families and my network.
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. What are the priorities here with the pain points?
I think I really want to measure the impact on the goal. If our goal is to make a movie product for Facebook that is inherently social which one do we believe will have the most impact?
I would probably try to see which one is the biggest pain.
I think there's definitely some immediacy around the loneliness of creating. And I think this one is differentiated too because most of the ways that individual people create a video for social media with the front-facing camera is in itself a lonely experience.
So that one to me feels highly impactful to this goal.
I think another one that stands out is can my audience be bigger? I think there actually might be an opportunity to tie those two together. 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 really thought a lonely experience one was interesting because it's kind of a not thought about the problem but definitely true. And yet particularly presently a problem for this day. So... Yeah.
I think it's interesting cuz it's almost inherent in the workflow today of how they do exist. That to me signals that there's maybe a new way to think about it that could be really addictive.
To mention one that I didn't pick so lacked skills. I think that that's an interesting one that to me feels a little bit outside of Facebook's wheelhouse. I would expect that that's more on the like Final Cut Pro. Maybe Reddit boards or wherever creatives go to meet up and collaborate together.
And I think that probably it would be better served to focus more on that in the 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 main pain point is the loneliness here.
Okay. So I will take a minute now to brainstorm some solutions for this.
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.
You could join this particular subset and let people know about your general project timeline. And 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 networking between creatives.
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 the portal called the portal audience. This would be a way to really quickly get viewers earlier on in the creative process. 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. But it would be kind of a one-to-many.
I think there are 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 more people in your creative room.
And the last idea. This one is a little bit out there but I think there's an opportunity to maybe like create a movie together through Facebook.
I got this idea through like the moments that you can share like with your friends. When it's your anniversary there you can create a movie of your friendship. What if we went even a step further with that?
And we made it so that you could create an actual 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 creating a movie over time.
I'm thinking even further about this now maybe it could be like, you know, the movie boyhood. How they kind of record little snippets. If it's a minute a day but just over his whole life. So maybe you could make a video of your life on Facebook.
I think that would align really well with them. The rest of the platform has 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 I guess also hearing your preference on which one you want to dive into. And which one sounds exciting?
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.
I think that's the one I want to go with to put metrics around it. It would be like the impact I might think about effort as well I think this one is probably a little higher effort than creating groups for moral support for example.
But I think the impact would be super high on making movies a more inclusive social creative process. And potentially impact a lot of people's lives for the better if they are able to kind of сhronicle 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. You just said about everyone having their own personal movie. And like what that even means for people and how they view their lives. But yeah I'm curious 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. I think this would be...
Probably it could live under creating a video post in the near term. And it could ask you like oh do you want to add this to your movies?
Actually, maybe it could be super lean. Whenever you're sharing a story or something instead of collecting it into memories you could say do you want to add this to your movie?
And that could be the first discovery point. And then it could explain to you it's collecting movies over the course of your life.
I think there could be a separate entry point within the 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 video pop-up and you could hit record.
There probably needs to be some really 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 was just doing a little moment. Maybe you don't want them in there the whole time.
And then there's somewhere you need a database to store all of these movies. If this is longer form content then there's definitely storage that we need to think about.
And then there is a publish versus editing mode. I think there probably needs to be some sort of my library of existing and process movies and ones that are already published.
I'm curious, YouTube is obviously a place also for people to upload and brainstorm and create some of these. How will you really leverage some of that social stuff to differentiate it from YouTube?
I think it's really about tagging other people to be able to add one of their videos to your life movie or your thriller. I think both can work.
And maybe you can even have people as contributors over time.
I think with YouTube you finish something you upload it. That's it. Maybe there's a little bit of editing you can do versus this kind of a continuous ongoing project that again can be asynchronous. That you can tag your friends and do it later and in little chunks that merged up into something.
Totally. Yeah. It sounds like we're almost inventing a new type of in general 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. What is some work worries that you have? This is a new type of content. It could be a lot of work. But what are some of the key issues that you're worried about when you're thinking about moving instruction or designing the structure?
I think the first thing that comes to mind is privacy. If you are chronicling someone's entire life I think there are 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.
I think there's another one around like retention. If this is something that you're not posting for years then the value to the user goes down. I mean there's a huge peak in value when you post it.
There's definitely value in 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 makes sense. Yeah. I guess I'm also curious...
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.
I'm curious. I guess as a last maybe follow-up question. What metrics would you look at here to see or evaluate the success of this product? And 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.
I think in terms of metrics there definitely depends on what stage of this is.
At launch, I would be concerned more tactically. Is this working are people able to use these features versus more downstream?
I'd be interested in engagement around the actual posts themselves. I think that does again call to question when are people posting. If we're posting more in chapters and we can test engagement sooner.
I think retention is another one. I think my first metric would probably be click-through and maybe a number of installments added on average per user.
I probably want to look at the monthly number. This is something that I wouldn't expect people to do it necessarily every day but probably a couple of 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 want to look at the average number of friends included in a creative process. I think the key hypothesis here is this isn't solo creating this is a social living creator experience. 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.
On the retention side, I'd probably want to look at the two-month retention for the feature. Of the users who added something a month ago are they still adding 30 days later basically?
Got It. Super helpful. Cool. Well, are there other pieces to this interview that we didn't get to touch on? Are there pieces you wanted to add or clarify or hone in on before we start to wrap it up?
I guess maybe there's something around discovery. I mentioned maybe we could put that in stories as a first point. But I do want it to be differentiated.
Do we do a big splash? Do we even launch a movie like boyhood to promote this? How do we let people know that this is a new special different way of chronicling your life? And creating a video that is social and living.
I think there's an opportunity to make a really big splash to actually do a video. 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.
Yeah. I think it's interesting. It sounds like there are a couple of angles here. About your own living story. Desire to chronicle one's life. Creative energy. Which direction it goes would be interesting.
I do think there are two user segments. I think there's the one which chronicles your life and there's the other one which is more like I'm an indie film.
The last question. Which one of those two user populations would you prioritize?
I think the more general user as we talked about it. It really sounded to me like a big opportunity that could impact any everyday person. I think the scope is much larger I think that's great if indie film producers can get value out of that same feature set.
Maybe long-term we would want to put some more professional additional advanced features on there. I think again thinking about the wheelhouse of Facebook is really for the everyday civilian. It's not necessarily an artistic product that we do have creator content on there. I would want to design it for the everyday person.
Well. We do a deep breath and you know the interviews are done. Great job Selena. That was really great. Why wouldn't you love to hear your thoughts on the kind of how that went for you and any self-feedback that you have before I jump into some of the feedback that I wrote about? What made this interview so great?
Overall I think it went really well I like the idea. I feel it grew as we were talking about it. Which is always kind of fun. I think in interviews in general if you feel 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 actually taken some time to dry out the flow.
I don't think I missed anything major but in general, I think that's a point to pause and at least think about what is the user journey. And what is each step that's important to take? And then I can pick one to add more color to talk through more detail.
We try to keep these videos a little short. I did push you along a little bit. 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.
Let me just jump into some of the things that I thought you did really well and just overall thoughts about the interview.
First of all that you had. You started off really strong with really great questions and great follow-up questions. Ask about the portal and how this question fits 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. 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 you even asked some deep questions which are always kind of cool especially in higher level more senior Facebook or PM interviews broadly.
I'm like what is a movie, what does that even mean? 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 always staying grounded in the mission and the goals and the competitive advantage of Facebook.
Even at the very end, the last question I just asked you is if we're doing this because Facebook is for everyday people it's more of a social ecosystem. It's not really an artistic platform right now. Maybe it could be at one point but it's more about the kind of everyday usage. And things like that.
Asking questions with proposing things is also really effective. So there was one point where you said something like 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. Also the ability to talk 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 for an actual interview. That's totally fine to go to these moonshot ideas.
And it's definitely less scoped out than 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.
This interview bit longer we might have even talked about it more Aaron kind of came up with ideas or thoughts around it. Showing that creative muscle which is so essential to a product design interview a successful product design interview question was really effective here.
I thought also you just had a thoughtful discussion around metrics towards the end. It was clear that not only you could 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 I wasn't totally clear on the MVP. I was okay so what exactly does this look like? What exactly would this experience be? We sort of scoped it out. You did it a little bit later in the interview.
I asked a question about YouTube but you can always just bring that forward in an interview. If you have the time just say: I know this might start to sound a little bit like YouTube. I'd love to discuss the competitive differentiation there before the interview was actually asked about that.
It shows that you're thinking about it.
I thought you did a really effective job and you went really thoughtful discussion and it was just cool to see the whole part design process from the beginning through the end of that product design. Obviously we could have further.
I think all really great points. Totally agree. I think we were aligned.
I was rushed through the MVP a little bit. I think again taking a minute there and just thinking what screens are essential? What should I do absolutely first? What does that pare down?
I think about especially on the competitive differentiation. If there's a little voice in your head saying like oh this sounds a little bit like this product. I not should be bled by you not by the interviewer.
Selena thank you so much for being on the show this is super valuable super helpful. You're an experienced PM interviewer and it's just been great to hear your perspective on this.