Meta Product Designer Interview Guide

The Meta Product Designer interview loop typically goes through these stages:

1. Recruiter call
2. Initial interview 
3. Full onsite loop:
   Presentation
   Background interview
   App critique
   Problem solving
   Cross-functional (XFN) partnership interview (some roles only)
4. Debrief, leveling and team matching

This is a 30 minute call with your recruiter about your

• background
• experience
• long-term goals
• why Meta

to confirm your track and also set the level at which the rest of your rounds will be evaluated against.

Use this call to settle if the XFN partnership interview applies to you. Also, establish a good rapport with your recruiter by being upfront about your background and what you want out of your career. They’re known to advocate for a candidate later in the process so they're good people to have on your side. 

This round is positioned as the gatekeeper to the onsite interviews. It’s a 45-minute video call where you’ll present your past work to a Meta product designer. You’ll have roughly 30 minutes to present and 10 minutes at the end for your own questions.

You should be prepared to talk through at least 2 product design case studies/work samples via a presentation deck. 

You should pick a project with some real meat on the bone. Some ways to ensure you can show both “breadth and depth” ownership we’ve seen work really well are:

• An example of you being deeply involved in the end-to-end ownership through all stages of the product design process
• Working on cross-platform products web, mobile, desktop
• Working with XFN partners like SWEs, PMs, UXRs, content design, etc.
• Bonus: A project where it influenced team culture and has instances of you mentoring others and making decisions 

For each case study, you should cover:

• An overview of your role, product owner, members of your team and delivery timeframe
• A clear problem statement and the audience you were designing for, supported by success metrics
• The design decisions you and your team made, including the list of options you explored but didn’t choose (and why)
• How the product took shape (the data that fueled your decisions, your individual contribution, tradeoffs, working with other XFN partners, the standups, testing)
• Hi-fi mockups and videos of complex prototypes to show both the end-to-end flow and a deep dive into the part of the design you found hardest. This is the core of the round. 
• Your retrospective analysis on whether the product met its goals and what the entire process taught you. You should also mention what you’d do differently if you could go back.

You’ll present this deck a SECOND time during the onsite interviews, if you clear this screen.  

To keep the guide lean, we’ll discuss the candidate-reported questions and the advice from our coaches in the onsite section. 

The official focus areas of the initial interview are listed below too, though only the first 5 apply to the initial interview. 

During the onsite, you'll sit through the following rounds:

1. Presentation
2. Background interview
3. App critique
4. Problem solving
5. Cross-functional (XFN) partnership interview (some roles only)

Across the Product Designer loop, Meta scores you on 7 focus areas:

• Interactive and experience design: designing products and flows that people find easy to use
• Elevating visual design and craft: creating products with a high level of visual polish, and showing that you understand typography and layout well enough to make deliberate choices with them
• Growing continuously: seeking out opportunities to grow and learn and being able to show how your past experiences have made you a better designer
• Delivering product thinking: influencing product strategy and finding and solving the problems that lead to effective products
• Driving results and impact: working autonomously and taking ownership and responsibility for the outcome of your work
• Communicating effectively: communicating clearly with different stakeholders across the different mediums your work goes out in
• Partnering: building working relationships with peers and cross-functional partners so you can accomplish mutual goals together

Each round has its own specific combination of these which we’ve listed below.

The presentation is a 45-minute round where you present 2 projects from your portfolio to a panel of interviewers and then answer their questions. Our coaches say the full loop presentation “will be very similar to the initial interview”, so you can adapt the deck you built for that round to fit this one.

Read between the lines of what the initial interviewer asked about your presentation and use that to adjust your presentation before this round. Beef up the sections they showed extra interest in and plug in any gaps you felt were exposed. 

You’ll have roughly 30 minutes to present, reserving 15 for the Q&A at the end. 

During the Q&A, the panel will put you in the hot seat and probe deep into a particular project to understand why you made certain decisions and expect you to defend yourself.  

They may even ask a couple of behavioral questions on your interests in design and where you have your sights set on taking your career next. These questions are a device to assess what team you’d be a perfect fit for. 

For the presentation, the panel scores 6 focus areas:

• Communicating effectively
• Delivering product thinking
• Interactive and experience design
• Elevating visual design and craft
• Partnering
• Driving results and impact

Since the questions reported for this round are extremely context-bound to the candidate’s presentation itself, we’ll list the more generic line of questioning so you have a basic idea:

• What was the hardest flow you created from this project?
• What’s one thing you’d still change right now? What stopped you from doing that before it shipped?
• Pick one screen from this project and tell me why every element on it is where it is. 

If you’d like an interviewer to go through your deck and tell you exactly what to highlight, schedule a Meta-focused portfolio review on our platform. They’ll also help you predict the kinds of questions each interviewer on your panel is likely to ask, and show you how to answer them in a way that reflects your level and scores well.

This is a 30-minute behavioral conversation with a design manager that follows up on your presentation. The interview centers on your decision making skills and how you involve the people directly affected by it. The interviewer will also ask (again) about the plan you have for your career and how Meta is the natural next step for it. 

You’ll face questions about: 

• Your experience: They’ll most definitely ask about key moments in your work history so review your own resume and anticipate the kind of questions certain projects or details may raise
• Setbacks: Questions about projects that failed or working relationships that were hurt are almost guaranteed. It’s very important to be honest about what happened and not sugarcoat or try to emerge as a winner. The entire point here is to see if you recognize the consequences of your actions and are willing to learn from the ones that went south
• Challenging decisions: Be prepared to discuss a project where you had to roll with the punches or a time where you had to bite your tongue and design something that didn’t align with your personal vision

The round scores 5 focus areas:

• Partnering
• Communicating effectively
• Driving results and impact
• Growing continuously
• Delivering product thinking

Expect questions like:

• Has a piece of data or research ever made you throw out a design that you were pretty attached to?
• What’s a design decision you were confident about 2 years ago that you don’t agree with anymore?
• Think of an engineer or PM who’d describe working with you as difficult. Would they be right in saying so?

In the behavioral rounds, you need to land on the right story quickly and recollect details without dragging out your story. The best way to do that is to write a story bank of 6-8 stories before the loop and practice their delivery. A set like this covers 80-90% of the questions you’ll get. 

We recommend that you take the classic STAR framework and build it out into STAR+ (Situation, Task, Action, Result + the X-Factor: Learning) to structure your stories. The X-Factor at the end - Learning. You end each story with a personal takeaway and how it changed the way you work. This way, you’ll demonstrate intellectual humility which implicitly links to the focus areas of this round, especially Growing Continuously. 

Keep each answer short, because by the time you reach the 3-minute mark about 80% of the score you’d be allotted is already decided. Drudging on for much longer maybe gives you an extra 5-10% but eats into the time for another question that you could've scored better in.

The best way to carve out a win-win situation for both you and the interviewer is to say the short, concise version and then throw the ball in their court and ask if there’s a particular detail you should go deeper into.

This is a 45-minute session with a product designer where you’ll lead a live critique of a mobile app. The round is meant to expose how you judge product decisions and craft in someone else’s work because using design critiques to validate decisions is intrinsic to Meta’s operational environment. 

That operational environment extends beyond internal crits to the users themselves. Caterina F., Product Design Manager at Meta, says, "We recently started a collaboration with the National Federation of the Blind to get frequent feedback directly from regular screen reader users on Facebook and Instagram so we can update our product development roadmaps accordingly." You can read more about this in her piece “Why design systems are vital to achieving accessibility at scale”.

This is just an example of how your judgment must be anchored to user needs and go beyond just the UI. 

During the round, interviewers will either offer a short list and let you choose or decide for you. The app will be iOS or Android depending on the operating system you use. Reports mostly list popular apps like Spotify, Pinterest, DoorDash, Google Photos, Apple maps, etc. 

The round scores 3 focus areas:

• Delivering product thinking
• Interactive and experience design
• Elevating visual design and craft

Since the interviewer already is operating out of this context, we suggest you flip the script and organize your critique for the app around these topics too. It’s a good strategy to cover all the bases. 

Don’t waste your time by trying to list your critique to every app under the sun in an effort to prepare for this round. It’s smarter to have a flexible structure you can rely on for any app. Remember, you’re supposed to take the lead in this round so if you stall a lot and the interviewer has to keep stepping in to bail you out, you’ll lose points fast. 

To save you from that, our coaches who are Meta product designers have devised a reliable blueprint for you:

1. Start with the product itself and judge its value across all its use cases so that your critique isn’t narrow and doesn’t rest purely on how you use it. Compare it to its competitors to see what it does better and where it falls behind. Any critique that rests purely on personal taste will be flagged so tie each point back to the users the app was designed for. 
2. Move to visual design by listing out what UI works and what doesn’t in a very specific manner. Typography, iconography, padding, component inconsistencies, and the like are great topics to highlight. Spotting problems without proposing a fix will likely hurt your score so remember to verbalize the fix too. 
3. Progress into interaction design and where it’s relevant, use your trained eye to point out nuance like the difference between iOS patterns and Android ones.
4. End on improvements and recommendations. Reason why you think something is poorly executed or where the app might start to show its age. Talk about how you’d take the product forward if you could and what features you’d prioritise. 

This is a 45-minute session with a product designer. The interviewer gives you an open-ended design problem and you work through it on a whiteboard while the interviewer asks questions that are meant to help/steer you. The problem can be about hardware, software or a service; although the most common one that comes up is a software challenge. 

The interviewer wants to understand how you approach a problem and the steps you take to assess, iterate and execute. You’re expected to:

• Show your high-level problem-solving process
• Declare which use cases you want to design around
• Identify the core problem and explain how you’ll address it
• Acknowledge the constraints you’re working within
• Show how you weigh the pros and cons when you make decisions
• Bring in some outside-of-the-box thinking, such as considering new technologies
• Communicate your thought process throughout the interview

By the end of the 45 minutes, Meta says the interviewer should have something visual to look at, such as a user journey, a flow chart, a light wireframe or anything else that’s suitable for the prompt you got. 

The interviewer scores 3 focus areas:

• Delivering product thinking
• Interactive and experience design
• Communicating effectively

Prepfully candidates have reported facing the following prompts:

• How would you improve the experience of splitting the bill?
• Rethink the grocery store self-checkout experience.
• Create a social experience for music in virtual reality (usually given to candidates interviewing for VR and AR roles).
• Redesign the ATM. 

The ATM has been turning up in Meta design interviews since at least 2017 and is still a very typical question in this round. 

We have 4 tips for this round, in the order you'll need them:

1. Ask about the business that owns the product and which stakeholder within it you’re designing for. Some interviewers will even play the role of that stakeholder and ask you the questions that they would to help you shape the design.
2. You HAVE to be sketching ~20 minutes into this round. If you're faster in Figma or FigJam than in Excalidraw, use those.
3. This round is largely trying to answer how you collaborate. When the interviewer raises a point, taking it on and folding it into your design is a big green flag.
4. Don't hold out for a breakthrough idea. You don’t need an out-of-box idea to do well in this round. If one does come to you while you're working, put it on the board.

If this round applies to you, you’ll engage in a 45-minute behavioral conversation about how you build interpersonal relationships with peers outside design (PMs, engineers, researchers, etc.) to solve problems and drive progress. 

The aim of the round is to understand how you:

• Partner across functions in the org/company to find and solve problems
• Handle ambiguous or challenging situations to still deliver results
• Communicate the right information to different stakeholders to keep the gears going
• Build relationships with a diverse group of people to accomplish mutual goals

The interviewer scores 4 focus areas:

• Communicating effectively
• Partnering
• Driving results and impact
• Delivering product thinking

Expect questions like:

• How do you explain the same design decision to an engineer and an exec?
• Has an engineer ever said a design of yours can’t be built? What shipped in the end?
• What kind of feedback do you get from PMs about your designs? How do you incorporate it? 

Once again, build a story bank using the STAR+ framework, and make sure it includes both successes and failures. Friction is inevitable when multiple teams pool their resources and opinions, so don't sweep conflict under the rug. Show the interviewer that you can handle too many cooks in the kitchen, and if the broth did get spoiled, be ready to explain what you learned from it.

At the end of each round, interviewers get 24 hours to submit their notes and pick between Strong Hire, Hire, Leaning No Hire, or No Hire for you. 

The Hiring Committee, consisting of senior Product Designers, then reviews that feedback to make the final call and decide your level. 

If the committee signs off on a “yes”, you’ll then move into the Team Matching phase where you'll do 30-minute informal chats with HMs until you zero in on a fit.

• IC3: $148.8K
• IC4: $235.8K
• IC5: $347.2K
• IC6: $471K
• IC7: $798.6K
• IC8: $969.6K

View the latest compensation for Meta UX Designers on Levels.fyi