Strategy question
A large enterprise wants to roll out Glean agents, but the security team blocks deployment because they lack visibility into what data agents access, what actions they take, and why responses were generated. How would you prioritize investments across transparency, auditability, permissions, and admin controls, and what framework would you use to make those tradeoffs?
- Glean
- Strategy
- Hard
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What this question tests
Whether you can prioritize enterprise trust investments using a clear framework rather than building every requested control at once, and connect the fix to the specific blocking concern.
How to approach it
- Map the security team's stated concern to specific gaps: no visibility into data access (transparency), no record of actions taken (auditability), no control over what agents can do (permissions), no dashboard for oversight (admin controls).
- Prioritize auditability and transparency first, since without a record of what happened, permissions and admin controls have nothing to verify against, making them the foundational layer.
- Use a framework weighing deal-blocking severity (is this literally stopping the rollout) against implementation cost, and sequence auditability and basic transparency as quick, high-severity wins before deeper permission granularity.
- Treat fine-grained permission controls and a full admin dashboard as fast follows, scoped based on what this and similar security teams actually ask for in review, not built speculatively.
- Validate the sequencing with the blocked customer directly: confirm that shipping auditability and transparency first would actually unblock their deployment before committing engineering time.
What a strong answer includes
- Sequences auditability before permissions and dashboards with a clear dependency argument, not an arbitrary order.
- Uses deal-blocking severity as the explicit prioritization criterion, tying the framework directly to unblocking real revenue.
- Validates the plan with the actual blocked customer instead of assuming the sequencing is correct.
Common mistakes
- Tries to build all four areas at once instead of sequencing by what actually unblocks the deployment.
- Never checks with the customer whether the planned first release would truly satisfy their security team.
Likely follow-up questions
- What would you do if the security team's real requirement is broader than what unblocks this one deal.
- How would you scope the first admin dashboard release to avoid over-building.
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More questions from Glean
Learn the skill behind it
Chapters of the AI PM course that teach what this question tests.
- Chapter 4: Discovery and strategy for AI products
- Chapter 9: Prove it paid off: outcomes, economics, and pricing
- Chapter 14: Get the job: the AI PM interview loop