Difference Between Product Design Interview and System Design Interview

Meta / Facebook

In a Facebook/Meta interview (Software Engineering Roles including Site Reliability Engineers and Enterprise Engineers), the Product Design and System Design interviews serve distinct purposes and require different approaches:

Usually, the coding interviews and behaviour interviews (culture fits) are the minimal requirements, but the design skills (Product Design or System Design) determines the level of seniority.

Product Design Interview

Goal: To evaluate your ability to create user-centric products that solve real-world problems effectively.
Focus: How you think about user needs, prioritize features, and craft solutions that align with business goals.

Typical Questions

“How would you design a feature that allows users to manage their privacy settings?”
“Design an onboarding experience for a new user on Facebook.”

Skills Assessed

Understanding user personas and pain points.
Crafting intuitive and scalable user experiences.
Balancing user needs with business objectives.
Analyzing trade-offs between different product features.

Key Approach: Frameworks like CIRCLES (Consider the user, Imagine scenarios, Requirements, Cut and prioritize, List solutions, Evaluate trade-offs, Summarize).

System Design Interview

Goal: To assess your ability to architect complex distributed systems that are scalable, reliable, and performant.
Focus: How you design the technical backend and infrastructure to support high traffic and robust application performance.

Typical Questions

“Design a scalable newsfeed system like Facebook‘s.”
“How would you design a URL shortening service?”

Skills Assessed

Understanding of distributed systems and architecture principles.
Ability to choose appropriate technologies (databases, load balancers, caches).
Awareness of scalability, fault tolerance, data consistency, and latency.
Trade-offs between different architectural choices.

Key Approach: Using frameworks like RESIST (Requirements, Estimation, Storage, Interface, Scalability, and Trade-offs) and focusing on handling technical challenges.

In summary

Product Design focuses on user experience and product functionality.
System Design focuses on backend infrastructure and technical scalability.
Preparation for both requires practice with mock scenarios, but with an emphasis on different aspects (user needs vs. technical architecture).

From the Meta Recruiter:

This interview will focus on system design and architecture – think distributed systems and APIs – very focused on building/implementing a structure/product. One example of a question: How would you build a chat system that handles millions of concurrently connected users? Be sure to be very thorough in your explanation, we are generally looking for a boxes and arrows diagram on the whiteboard.

I have also attached a few white papers for you to read, they demonstrate our approach to designing systems/products and should hopefully give you a sense of what we look for (Haystack is an example of a complete system with product design elements, i.e. the API and CDN, and the rest are more systems design focused).

Software Engineer Interview Experience

Interview Tips

Interview Questions

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