Strategy question
An agency asks for a Claude workflow tailored to a specific public-sector process, with auditability, review gates, and policy controls that may not exist in the current product. How would you decide whether to keep this as a bespoke agency solution or turn it into a reusable capability on Anthropic’s broader enterprise roadmap?
- Anthropic
- Strategy
- Hard
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What this question tests
Tests judgment on when a custom agency request should be generalized into the core roadmap versus kept as a one-off, balancing delivery speed against platform scalability.
How to approach it
- Assess how specific the request is to this agency's process versus a pattern likely shared across other public-sector customers.
- Estimate the cost of building it reusable now versus bespoke, including the ongoing maintenance burden of custom code.
- Check the pipeline for other agencies asking for similar auditability or review-gate features.
- If the pattern repeats, fold it into the roadmap with this agency as a design partner; if not, scope it as bespoke with a time-box.
- Set a review point, for example six months out, to revisit whether the bespoke solution should be generalized.
What a strong answer includes
- Uses evidence of repeat demand, not just this one agency, for example assume three other agency deals cite the same audit-log gap.
- Explicitly costs out the maintenance debt of a purely bespoke solution against a slightly slower reusable build.
- Keeps the bespoke option on the table when a request is genuinely agency-specific instead of generalizing everything by default.
- Names who owns the decision, since it usually needs both sales and platform product buy-in.
Common mistakes
- Generalizing every custom request into the roadmap and diluting focus with low-reuse features.
- Building bespoke work indefinitely and accumulating unmaintainable one-off code across agencies.
Likely follow-up questions
- What would change your answer if this agency represented a huge contract but no others asked for it?
- How would you sunset a bespoke feature if it never gets reused?
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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