Design a verified antiques marketplace inside Facebook Marketplace

You are a PM on Facebook Marketplace. Design a verified antiques marketplace that lives inside Marketplace.

Context

Antiques are high-value, one-of-a-kind items. Buyers worry about fakes and condition; sellers range from people clearing a relative's house to professional dealers. Marketplace today is built for quick, local, low-value deals.

Clarifying questions to ask first

Is the goal new users, more transactions or revenue from fees?
Local pickup only, or shipping too?
Do we verify ourselves or partner with appraisers?

How to approach it

Clarify the business goal and tie the product to the company's mission before touching solutions
Segment users by behaviour or need (not just age), cover the whole ecosystem, and pick one segment with explicit criteria
Walk the end-to-end journey and separate real pain points from feature requests
Brainstorm a range of solutions (quick fix, data/ML, moonshot) and prioritise with impact vs effort
Define a North Star, funnel metrics and guardrails, then call out risks, edge cases and mitigations

Framework: Goal & mission -> Ecosystem & segment choice -> Journey & pain points -> Solutions & prioritisation -> Metrics & guardrails -> Risks & edge cases

Sample answer

Buyers split by intent: serious collectors vs casual decor buyers
Sellers split by expertise: one-off estate sellers vs dealers
Collectors are the underserved, high-value segment; trust (authenticity, condition) is the core pain

Journey: discover > assess authenticity > negotiate > pay > collect/ship > dispute
Solutions: verified-seller badge, appraiser partner network, condition-report template, escrow for items over a threshold, collector alerts by category
Metrics: North Star = completed verified sales; guardrails = dispute rate, counterfeit reports, time to first sale

Start with collectors buying from verified dealers: condition reports, partner appraisals and escrow above a price threshold. Measure completed verified sales, guarded by dispute and counterfeit rates.

What interviewers look for

Ecosystem segmentation (buyers, sellers, verifiers)
Trust and authenticity design
Liquidity vs quality trade-off
Guardrails for high-value transactions