Facebook SWE Product Design Interview

I've recently finished my fb onsite and had a product design (/product architecture) round.

I couldn't find lot of information online when I was preparing for this interview and how it is different from System design, hence I decided to share my experience over here.

Disclaimer: The experience depends completely on the interviewer but should be the similar for most people.

Focus should be on requirements clarification, api design, Database, DB schema and High level design. Api design includes endpoints, http verb, request and response format.

Areas surrounding scalability such as sharding, replication, load balancers, quorum, consistent hashing etc are not the focus areas. A good interviewer will stop you if you are going into these areas and ask you to focus on what is most important to him/her.

For example, for a system like ticketmaster, the discussion will be surrounding the concurrency and race conditions and how to avoid booking etc.

As I mentioned above, the area of focus purely depends upon the interviewer. I've heard about interview experiences where the entire interview was spent on API design where as for others, the interviewer was just like a system design. It's a good idea to ask the interviewer as to what you need to focus on.

P.S: I was rejected.