AI & Technical question

Build the payment API for a charity event.

Practice this question out loud. An AI interviewer asks it, follows up like a real interviewer would, and scores your answer. Type or speak.

What this question tests

Technical product thinking for a payments system, including compliance, reliability, and a scoped MVP.

Clarify scope: one time donations for a single event, or a reusable API for recurring charity campaigns.
Identify requirements: PCI compliance for card data, receipt generation for tax deduction purposes, and refund handling.
Decide build versus buy: use a payment processor like Stripe for card handling rather than building raw payment infrastructure.
Design the API surface: create donation, get donation status, issue refund, and generate tax receipt endpoints.
Address reliability: idempotency keys to prevent double charges, and webhook handling for asynchronous payment confirmation.
Define success as payment success rate, charge failure rate, and time to generate a tax receipt after donation.

Correctly chooses to build on top of an existing processor like Stripe rather than reinventing card handling and compliance.
Names a specific real requirement, PCI compliance and tax receipts, that a generic 'build an API' answer would miss.
Proposes idempotency keys explicitly, showing awareness of a common real world payment bug, duplicate charges.
Gives an illustrative number, e.g. assumes targeting a 99.9 percent payment success rate excluding user declined cards.

Proposing to build raw card processing instead of using an existing PCI compliant processor.
Ignoring double charge risk and idempotency, a classic and serious payments bug.
No mention of receipts or compliance needs specific to charitable donations.

Chapters of the AI PM course that teach what this question tests.