Metrics question
A live enterprise agent is generating strong customer demand for expansion, but engineers report unresolved reliability gaps in the current design. How would you decide what to ship next, including what evidence or thresholds you would require to expand safely, what you would defer, and how you would manage the conversation with the customer’s leadership team and internal engineering partners?
- Decagon
- Metrics
- Hard
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What this question tests
Tests deciding what to ship next when customer demand for expansion collides with known reliability gaps, including setting evidence thresholds and managing both customer and internal conversations.
How to approach it
- Quantify the reliability gaps precisely: which failure modes, frequency, and severity, and whether they're isolated to specific workflows or systemic across the agent.
- Set an explicit threshold for safe expansion, for example a maximum acceptable error or escalation rate on the new scope, based on the risk profile of the requested expansion.
- Decide what to defer versus ship: expand into workflows unaffected by the known reliability gaps now, while explicitly holding back expansion into higher-risk areas until the gap is fixed.
- Prepare the customer conversation with concrete evidence, current performance data and a committed fix timeline, rather than a vague not ready yet.
- Prepare the internal engineering conversation by aligning on the same threshold and timeline, so the team isn't caught between sales pressure and their own risk assessment.
- Propose a monitored, phased expansion with rollback criteria, so growth continues where safe while the reliability fix is tracked to a hard date.
What a strong answer includes
- Separates the requested scope into safe-to-expand-now versus blocked-until-fixed, instead of a binary yes or no on the whole expansion.
- Sets a quantified threshold, an error or escalation rate ceiling, before any customer conversation, rather than deciding case by case under pressure.
- Brings the same threshold and evidence to both the customer and engineering conversations, avoiding two different stories to two audiences.
- Proposes a phased, monitored expansion with rollback criteria, showing growth doesn't have to wait entirely on the fix.
Common mistakes
- Expanding into all requested scope under revenue pressure despite known reliability gaps.
- Telling the customer a different story than what's shared internally with engineering.
- Setting no explicit threshold, leaving the safe-versus-blocked line subjective and hard to defend later.
Likely follow-up questions
- How would you decide the acceptable error rate for a new, higher-stakes workflow?
- What would you do if engineering can't commit to a fix timeline?
More metrics questions
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More questions from Decagon
Learn the skill behind it
Chapters of the AI PM course that teach what this question tests.
- Chapter 9: Prove it paid off: outcomes, economics, and pricing
- Chapter 2: Data fluency: SQL, logs, and reading the truth yourself
- Chapter 14: Get the job: the AI PM interview loop