Interview Prompt: PM for Meta - Design a product to recommend doctors

Should we build it?

If yes, how would you design?

1. Assumptions

US only

No constraints

2. Product landscape and motivation

Competitors

  • ZocDoc - reviews, mostly scheduler
  • Yelp - can review doctors, but based on personality and non-medical things; but don't know who the other reviewers are
  • OneMedical - closed system
  • WebMD

Company Mission: Build the future of human connection and the technology that makes it possible

Product Mission: Help patients find the right doctor based on their needs

  • Trust based decision where people ask for recommendations through word-of-mouth and social proof
  • Meta already has millions of health related groups (e.g., parents of SF, chronic pain support) where users ask for doctor advice
  • With social graph and strong engagement in communities, Meta is well positioned to make doctor reco's more reliable, personal, and context aware

3. Customer segments

Patient

  • Life events - new parents
    • People share this online already so pretty natural
    • Extremely active in Facebook groups already (e.g., local parent communities)
  • Moving towns
    • People share this online already and may not know anyone in the area
  • Serious health issue - cancer
    • Hard because people might be reluctant to share info online
  • Chronic illness
  • General adults
  • Elderly

Doctor

  • OBGYN
  • Pediatrician
  • Primary care
  • Specialists
  • cons
    • Very hard to get ratings based on medical ability but could get other things (e.g., bed side manner, timeliness)
    • Doctors don't want this; Lawsuits potentially

Insurance

Hospitals

Caretakers or other decision makers

4. Pain points

Lack of trustworthy, personalized doctor recommendations

  • No trusted source: don't know if review is fake or reviewer shares your values
  • Information overload: too many options online and hard to know who to trust
  • Lack of contextual relevance: reviews don't account for parent specific needs (e.g., good with infants)

Non-medical dimensions very important

  • Want to find a ped that meets your personality and bedside manner needs
  • Want them to be available 24/7 via phone/text/messaging
  • Want to be able to schedule last minute

Fragmented conversations: doctor reccs are buried in old facebook threads, hard to search or extract insights

Finding a doctor in a new area

Schedule an appointment easily

Confirm whose in-network insurance purposes

5. Solutions

GenAIDoctorFinder: users describe with NLQ what they are looking for and where they live….insurance, location,...filter by tech saviness, general responsiveness

  • Could also put in medical problems and it could help give you some general WebMD type advice (but smarter) and help direct you to the right specialist

DoctorByFriends: Get recommendations from friends on who is good doctor vs bad.

Group Doctor Wiki: Each group can collaboratively create a trusted list of doctors (similar to Reddit "pinned recommendations" or Notion pages).

Facebook Health Hub (Long-term): A centralized tab for health help: find doctors, read advice, track appointments (integrated with Meta AI and local resources).

6. Evaluate

doctor

Pre-mortem: People can just use existing products and tools to accomplish this

7. MVP

P0

  • Users privately list who their preferred doctors are but make it available to friends that ask
  • One-Click Ask Feature: "Ask my network" feature that posts a templated question to your friends or a local Group ("Looking for a pediatrician in SF who's great with first-time parents").
    • Could also just ask your network privately (without any messages being sent; just retrieve other users doctors)
    • Could have automated prompts to respond and tag for future use.
  • Filter by tags like "pediatrician," “OBGYN”, "accepts Aetna," "great with nervous kids."
  • Could suggest group formations based on who provides info and who asks (e.g., parents with kids under 2, expecting parents)

P1

  • Could add in a scheduling component with B2B office management for doctors so that the doctors have an incentive to use it and connect it with insurance

Success metrics

  • MAU
  • Hours spent on product
  • Engagements (likes, posts, comments, etc)
  • Hours / MAU