Company Context

Meta operates large-scale social and community platforms including Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, and WhatsApp. The company has strong identity, social graph, groups, messaging, and trust-and-safety capabilities that could support a product helping people find compatible roommates when moving to a new city.

Problem

People relocating for work, school, or life changes often struggle to find trustworthy, compatible roommates quickly. Existing options are fragmented across Facebook Groups, Marketplace listings, off-platform spreadsheets, and messaging threads. Internal research suggests that users care about more than price and location: compatibility on lifestyle, cleanliness, schedule, guests, pets, and safety matters just as much. The challenge is to design a Meta product that helps users discover, evaluate, and connect with potential roommates while reducing scams, awkward mismatches, and drop-off during the search process.

Assume the initial launch market is 5 major cities with high relocation volume. Meta can leverage Facebook profiles, Groups, Messenger, and optional verification signals, but has limited engineering capacity for a first release and must show early product-market fit before broader rollout.

Deliverables

1. Define the target users and prioritize the most important use case for an MVP.
2. Identify the core user needs and jobs-to-be-done for both roommate seekers and room listers.
3. Propose the product vision and the key features for an MVP, including what you would explicitly exclude.
4. Explain the main trade-offs you would make around trust, privacy, liquidity, and matching quality.
5. Define success metrics and how you would know whether the product is achieving product-market fit.

Constraints

• MVP must launch within 12 weeks using existing Meta surfaces where possible.
• Team capacity: 1 PM, 4 engineers, 1 designer, shared trust-and-safety support.
• No full end-to-end rental transaction flow in v1; payments and lease signing are out of scope.
• Must minimize privacy risk and avoid exposing sensitive personal information by default.