Strategy question
A top-20 law firm needs an admin feature to pass a security review in 6 weeks, but IT wants SCIM, Security wants immutable audit logs, Design wants a simpler workflow, and Engineering says all of it cannot ship in time. How would you drive alignment, decide what ships now vs later, and communicate that decision internally and to the customer?
- Harvey
- Strategy
- Hard
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What this question tests
Whether you can drive fast, defensible scope decisions under a hard deadline with genuinely conflicting stakeholder demands, and communicate the tradeoff honestly to both internal teams and the customer.
How to approach it
- Get explicit clarity on what the security review actually requires to pass versus what is merely desired, since IT, Security, and Design may be conflating a hard gate with nice-to-have improvements.
- Rank the four asks, SCIM, immutable audit logs, simpler workflow, against the actual pass criteria: audit logs are almost always a hard security-review requirement, SCIM is often required for enterprise identity but may have a manual workaround for six weeks, a simpler workflow is usually a quality improvement, not a gate.
- Decide ship-now as immutable audit logs plus a minimum viable SCIM integration or a documented manual provisioning workaround, deferring the full simplified workflow redesign to the next release.
- Bring engineering into the scoping conversation directly rather than negotiating scope without them, since their six-week estimate is the actual constraint being managed against.
- Communicate the decision to the customer with the reasoning, what ships now and why, what is deferred and when, so the customer sees a credible plan rather than a missed deadline.
What a strong answer includes
- Separates true security-review gates (audit logs) from desirable-but-deferrable asks (design polish), using the actual review criteria as the tiebreaker.
- Proposes a concrete middle path, like a manual SCIM workaround, instead of treating it as all-or-nothing.
- Communicates honestly to the customer with the tradeoff reasoning, not just a scope cut.
Common mistakes
- Treats all four stakeholder requests as equally urgent instead of checking what the security review literally requires.
- Makes the scope decision without engineering in the room, then finds out later the six-week estimate does not hold.
Likely follow-up questions
- What would you do if the customer refuses the manual SCIM workaround.
- How would you handle Design pushing back on shipping the less-polished workflow first.
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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