Meta’s New Interview Question

Imagine you get an analytical interview question like this:

Should meta build a new product that helps local businesses advertise even though we already have a full tech stack for ads?

This is very different than what you usually see during an Analytical interview. What would you do?

. . .

Meta has spent years perfecting their interview process. With great communication as well as a consistent and unbiased approach to asking and grading candidate responses, Meta’s process has been replicated at countless companies.

A hallmark feature of their process has been the use of standardized interview questions which are used with all candidates for a particular role (like product management). Whether they are for behavioral interviews or case interviews, there is a limited number of questions that are approved for use with candidates, making it easy for candidates who do a little research to prepare for these questions in advance. Meta even encourages this: their recruiters will go as far as recommending getting a coach (such MJ) to help prepare for interviews.

The question above breaks all that.

This new question is completely different from the standard question format called “Success Measurement” or colloquially the “metrics” question. Unlike Success Measurement, this question requires you to make a choice, which makes it a strategy question. Because of this, the standard Analytical interview playbook no longer applies, and a new approach is necessary.

The inclusion of a strategy question in Meta’s interview process was pretty glaring, and this new question comes as no surprise to Product Simply. The question is, where do we go from here?

First things first: don’t panic. In the past 2 weeks as of writing this article, I have only had 2 clients report a question in the new format. The way to think of what’s happening is something like an A/B test. They’re rolling out the new question format progressively, observing results, refining, with the likely outcome of either replacing the Success Measurements question with the new one, or even introducing a new case interview type. In either case, the likelihood that you get this question remains low, so your preparation should still focus on the standard questions.

In my next post, I’ll go over a general approach to answering this unique type of strategy question, which I’m calling “Data Driven Decision-making”.

Good luck with prep!