Strategy question
After several flagship deployments, customers are asking for overlapping but not identical capabilities. How would you decide which lessons should become reusable implementation playbooks, which should become configurable product features, and which should remain bespoke work? Explain the criteria you would use and how you would feed those decisions into Decagon's core roadmap.
- Decagon
- Strategy
- Hard
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What this question tests
Tests generalizing lessons from custom flagship deployments into reusable product decisions, distinguishing playbooks, configurable features, and one-off work.
How to approach it
- Categorize each customer ask by how common the underlying need is across the base versus how deployment-specific it is.
- Route asks that are common but process-related into reusable implementation playbooks, such as a standard onboarding sequence.
- Route asks that are common and require product change into configurable features, such as a settings toggle rather than custom code per customer.
- Keep genuinely rare, deployment-specific asks as bespoke work, but track them to see if they recur.
- Feed the pattern data back into the core roadmap on a regular cadence, using deployment frequency as the promotion trigger.
What a strong answer includes
- Uses a clear frequency threshold, such as requested by three or more flagship customers, as an illustrative bar for becoming a feature.
- Distinguishes process knowledge that becomes a playbook from product capability that becomes a feature, since conflating them wastes effort.
- Keeps a tracking mechanism for bespoke asks so they don't silently repeat without ever getting generalized.
- Ties this into a regular roadmap review cadence rather than an ad hoc decision each time.
Common mistakes
- Turning every one-off customer request into a permanent product feature, bloating the product.
- Never revisiting bespoke work to check if it has quietly become a repeated pattern.
Likely follow-up questions
- How would you decide between a playbook and a configurable feature when a request could be either?
- What would trigger you to sunset a feature that turned out to be used by only one customer?
More strategy 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 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