Facebook RPM Interview Cheat Sheet

Execution

The product development framework that every Facebook PM is taught during PM Bootcamp for new hires at Facebook is Understand, Identify, Execute which means:

• Understand the people problem you are trying to solve.
• Identify the best way to start solving that problem.
• Execute that solution flawlessly.

While this framework is taught once you join the company, the PM hiring committee at Facebook is looking for candidates who intuitively use some variant of this framework already. The Product Sense interview evaluates your ability to Understand and Identify, while the Execution interview is focused on understanding if you make the decisions necessary to get things done and prioritize effectively.

Unlike most other companies, Facebook’s Execution interview focuses much more on data driven decision making rather than project management.

This interview will ask you to put yourself in the shoes of a Facebook PM and force you to evaluate different trade-offs, figure out the right metric to track, remove roadblocks for your team etc. This interview is meant to assess if you can make sound decisions and tactically get the right things done on a daily basis to build your product vision.

This interview usually is comprised of 4–5 behavioral questions and is meant to help access if you can effectively lead and inspire a product team, deal with conflict, facilitate communication, etc.

‍

Your Execution Interviewer is looking to see:

• If you are able to measure what matters and then use your analytics into data driven decisions
• If you can effectively callout and weigh different trade-offs to make informed product decisions
• If you can effectively prioritize your limit time and resources to drive maximum impact

‍

Example Facebook Execution Interview Questions:

• Daily active usage of Facebook Dating dropped 25% overnight. How would you diagnose the problem?
• What core metric would you look to measure your team’s success as the PM for Facebook Dating?
• Imagine you run ads to promote the awareness and growth of Facebook Dating and achieve a new user acquisition cost of $10. Walk me through how you would evaluate if this ad campaign effort is worth scaling at this price point.
• Imagine you are testing a new algorithm match suggestions you show in Facebook Dating. This algorithm is leading to a statically significant increase in total matches but also a statically significant decrease in total messages sent. What do you think is happening? Would you ship or roll back this algorithm?

Product Sense

The product sense interview will test if you can turn a big ambiguous problem space into a great product that can potentially create value for billions of people. Product Sense Interview Questions will typically be in the form of one very deep hypothetical “what would you build for x” with a series of follow-up questions to understand your thought process.

‍

Facebook PMs are taught to not discuss DAU or MAU, which are common terms at nearly all other tech companies. Instead, they consider DAP and MAP, which are daily active people and monthly active people respectively. This is because a core tenant of Facebook is creating products which solve real people problems rather than the company’s problems.

‍

Your Product Sense Interviewer is looking to see:

• Can you clearly articulate who you are building for, why, and how it fits into the Facebook mission?
• Can you provide thoughtful reasoning for why Facebook should or should not focus on specific aspects of the broadest possible product opportunity at hand?
• Can you provide a thorough vision for your desired MVP experience to test your hypotheses as well as your desired end state for this product, say 3 years out? This comes down to concretely defining priorities and goals.
• Can you zoom out from your personal user needs and think about how this product could scale and provide maximum value to Facebook’s global user base of over 2 billion people.

Example Facebook Product Sense Questions:

• What would you build to differentiate Instagram Reels from TikTok?
• Design a better way to find roommates in a new city.
• How would you improve the Peer to Peer payments product on either Messenger or Whatsapp?

Leadership & Drive

Leadership at Facebook is driven by influence rather than formal authority. Thus Facebook PMs are able to build strong relationships across engineering, design, data science, UX research, content strategy, legal and more to drive impact. The leadership and drive portion of the interview also ties back to the understand, identify, and execute framework. While good PMs are able to analyze problems from this lens, great PMs can bring all their cross-functional peers along the journey as well and help them collectively understand the problem, identify the right solution, and perfectly execute that solution.

The Product Sense and Execution interviews focus on how you think about current and future Facebook products. In contrast, the Leadership & Drive interview focuses on your past experiences and is meant to help assess if you can effectively lead and inspire a product team, deal with conflict, facilitate communication, etc.

‍

If you see the role of the PM to be the CEO of a product, Facebook is likely not the place for you.

‍

Your Leadership & Drive interviewer will be looking for:

• Are you introspective? Can you openly and honestly share your failures and how you learned and grew from them?
• Can you rally a team around a shared goal even when things obstacles arise?
• Are you a supportive leader? Can you adjust your leadership style to adapt to the needs of different people?
• Are you scrappy and resourceful?
• Do you have the grit and determination to push through tough challenges and set that example for your team?

‍

Example Facebook Leadership & Drive Questions:

• Tell me about a time when you failed
• Tell me about a time when you didn't have the resources to get something done but got it done anyway
• What’s something you have built or created outside of work?
• What would you do if your designer wasn’t meeting expectations?
• How would you describe the core responsibilities of a PM?