EDIT: I just had a call with my recruiter and they basically said think system design as boxes connected with arrows and product design as box with input and output. Hi, I am utterly confused on the difference between Meta’s system design vs product design. I am backend engineer who has worked on building APIs. Seems like product architecture design is more suited for my case but the description of both seem overlapping so im utterly confused. Can anyone help me understand? Thanks!
Here's what I got from my recruiter, not sure if you received the same: System Design Interview (45 minutes) - We will be using Excalidraw to support your remote design interviews. For the best experience, we recommend taking a few minutes to test the tool ahead of your interview. This is an exercise meant to evaluate your architecture or design ability. Expect to design a solution from scratch. You’ll be expected to drive the discussion. While you’ll be interacting with the interviewer, they want to hear your ideas on how to best design this solution. Focus Area: This interview likely focus on a distributed systems. We will test how you build systems or services at scale that support an end user product or service, so this is a “boxes and arrows” interview. - OR- Product Design Interview (45 minutes) - We will be using Excalidraw to support your remote design interviews. For the best experience, we recommend taking a few minutes to test the tool ahead of your interview. This is an exercise meant to evaluate your architecture or design ability. Expect to design a solution from scratch. You’ll be expected to drive the discussion. While you’ll be interacting with the interviewer, they want to hear your ideas on how to best design this solution. Focus Area: We will test how you build a product or API at scale that supports an end user product or service, think of this as an “API with input and output” interview.
Thank you! My recruiter just said “system design is distributed systems and product is API” What would you say designing a service like twitter fall under as per your recruiter discussion? I think it should be system design
I think you could be given "design twitter" in either interview but how you answer it would be different. e.g. for product design I would focus on user expectations: - what do users want to do - which operations must be synchronous, which can be asynchronous - how do they authenticate, what does discovery look like, why would you use a specific API Design To be honest they feel a lot like the product sense interviews you get in Product manager interview loops, but more technical. Could be worth watching a few of those videos to understand how the planning steps differ between product sense and system design.
Yeah don’t do the product design. They’re weird. Expectations aren’t the same as backend system design. If you’re used to standard backend system design, pick system design for both sessions.
Unfortunately I was told I had to do one of each because I'm being hired as a "product generalist."
Analog, when is your interview? Are you applying for E4 as well?
I’m surprised there aren’t any YT videos on product design interviews
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It doesn’t help that on the meta careers website the “product design” mock interview video is about designing a URL shortener (and frankly a bad one at that). I’ve anecdotally heard that product design should be customer focused (how they interact, what comes back from an API, why REST vs GraphQL) whereas system design is really for scaling how data flows through a system at scale. If anybody could give examples of the questions they’ve gotten it’d be great.
Exactly. i am utterly confused and the recruiter is not helpful