You're a Facebook product manager and want to build a restaurant review and booking platform like Yelp!. How would you pitch this idea to your leader? What data would you need? If you build it, come up with a goal for your team.

Question

You're a Facebook product manager and want to build a restaurant review and booking platform like Yelp!. How would you pitch this idea to your leader? What data would you need? If you build it, come up with a goal for your team.

Asked at Meta (Facebook) over a year ago

700 views

Asked at

700 views

Answers (1)

To answer this question, Log in.

Top Meta (Facebook) interview questions

What is your favorite product? Why?89 answers | 263k views
How would you design a bicycle renting app for tourists?62 answers | 82.5k views
Build a product to buy and sell antiques.54 answers | 66.8k views
See Meta (Facebook) PM Interview Questions

Top Execution interview questions

Imagine you were in charge of Facebook Watch. What metric would you want to measure?13 answers | 9.1k views
Weekly active users (WAU) for iPhone app dropped. What happened?10 answers | 6.3k views
You are the PM of Instagram stories. What goal would you set and how would you measure success?10 answers | 14k views
See Execution PM Interview Questions

Invite members
Invite by email

Add another

Leonardo Fernandes · Answer 1 · 2022-01-09T16:20:31+0000

1) Clarification

By booking, do you mean that if a person wants to go to a restaurant, he/she will reserve, through this platform, their table?
- Yes, that's correct.
Just to make sure, we are assuming review here to be just like a feedback from the customer who have already tried that restaurant, right?
- Exacty.

2) Goal

Facebook's mission is to bring and connect people from all over the world. Having an product or platform like Yelp! is at the center of this mission, because it would actually help to grow the community, since going to a restaurant is a social thing.

With that in mind, I believe that the goal of this platform should be engagement. We want people using it, reacting to it, sharing their experiences, so that we can grow the usage, therefore the time spent on the platform. Moreover, we can think about possible revenue streams later on. Does it make sense?

Now, regarding my past experiences, I would make sure to pitch an idea by containing the following topics:

- Who are our customers?

- Is it big enough?

- What problem are we going to solve for them?

- Is this a real problem worth solving?

- How are we going to solve this problem?

- Is the solution efficient?

- What are our competitive advantages?

Is that ok? Do you have any thoughts here?

3) Customers

Regarding customers, I would leverage Facebook's environment in following way

How many people recommend the restaurants?
How many people post pictures, videos, etc using a restaurant as a location?
Who are those people in terms of demographics (age, gender, usage of the platform, devices)?
What are the level of engagement of those posts (reactions, shares, comments, etc)?
What are the level of engagement of those people in general?

4) Problems and Customer Journey

Well, thinking about customer journey:

- People want to hang out with their friends

- They start talking to each other in-person or over messaging

- Someone might throw some options and give opinions on that

- Meanwhile, others might be searching on Google or Yelp! about that option

- If it's good, they all agree, set up a time and have fun

- If they do not agree, they keep searching until they find something

Thinking about some problems:

It's time consuming to find a place to go
After deciding on the place, they have to know or decide about reservation
The distance might be a problem
Drinking alcohol, they should call an Uber or osmething like that
The want to make sure to have a good experience, so quality (food, environment, service) offered by the place is important

First of all, I would like to focus on the last pain point, which is knowing the quality of the chosen place. Ultimately, this translates to time spent on searching.

For this part, we could search for the following metrics:

Avg number of reviews per restaurant page
Avg rating of reviews per restaurant page
Number of reviews per restaurant over number of location added on posts (maybe it's possible to estimate how many people went)
How many people likes and follows restaurants pages? Is there a correlation between this and reviews/ratings?
How many people unlike or unfollow restaurants pages?
How many posts/interactions on average restaurants do?

5) Solutions

Thinking about solutions and depending on what data shows

A simple app where you would have a list of restaurants with reviews, and you could use many filters to choose your restaurant.
- Impact High: I understand that it's basically what Yelp! does.
- Cost Medium: There's a substancial cost of organizing information.
A app created to help restaurants get more reviews by sending the bill over Facebook. In order to customer pay the bill over Facebook Pay, he will need to post a review that would immediately go to Restaurant page and his newsfeed, for instance.
- Impact Medium: This would help people, but not sure if it's substancial
- Cost Medium-High: It needs to develop integrations.
Finaly, we could develop an AI system to understand your taste and preferences by looking at your posts on Facebook and Instagram, therefore suggesting accurate options of restaurants.
- Impact High: In addition to find restaurants based on many filters, it would save a lot of time searching.
- Cost High: Well, developing this recommendation system would be very hard.

Looking at impact and cost, given that we are trying to launch a new product, I would go for number 1. To test this idea, I would build an MVP focused in 1-2 cities, for example NYC and Los Angeles. In this MVP, we could aggregate restaurants pages in one place, organize it as a list format or something like that, and put some simple filters (max 3). Then, we could test with a focus group and understand the experience of choosing a restaurant.

Data collected here would include:

Did they visit the restaurant researched?
Did they review that restaurant? What review did they give to the restaurant compared to the previous ones?
How did engagement increase/decrease, regarding posts, etc?
How much time did they take to choose one?

6) Summary

Wraping up, we covered the sections to include in the pitch of building a restaurant review platform. The section are Customers, where we came up with some metrics to study them, Problems, where we discussed journey and prioritized a pain point, and Solutions, where we brainstormed some solutions and chose only one, explaining how to test and some metrics of success.