Product design question
Design a Workflow Builder that lets non-technical lawyers automate recurring tasks.
- Harvey
- Product design
- Medium
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What this question tests
Tests product design for a no code automation tool aimed at users who are experts in their field but not in software.
How to approach it
- Define the user: a lawyer who wants to automate a recurring task, like generating a standard NDA or a routine compliance checklist, without writing code.
- Identify the core tension: the builder must be simple enough for a non technical lawyer, but flexible enough to encode real legal logic and exceptions.
- Design the building block: a step by step, plain language workflow editor, where each step is described as an instruction rather than code or logic syntax.
- Include a testing mechanic: let the lawyer run the workflow against a sample document before publishing, so they can catch mistakes without technical debugging skills.
- Add guardrails: version history and a required review step before a workflow can run unsupervised, since a bad automation could produce many bad documents fast.
- Confirm with the interviewer whether the first use case is document generation, checklist automation, or both, since the building blocks differ.
What a strong answer includes
- Uses plain language steps described in terms lawyers already use, like conditions and clauses, rather than programming concepts like variables or loops.
- Includes a built in test run against a real sample document, catching errors before a workflow goes live rather than after.
- Adds version control and an approval gate, recognizing that a workflow lawyers rely on repeatedly needs the same rigor as a legal template.
- Prioritizes a small library of pre built templates for common tasks, letting lawyers customize rather than build from a blank canvas.
Common mistakes
- Designing a generic no code builder without addressing legal specific needs like clause conditionals and exceptions.
- No testing or preview step, risking a flawed workflow generating many bad documents before anyone notices.
- Ignoring that lawyers may not trust an automation they cannot fully inspect, so hiding the logic entirely would undermine adoption.
Likely follow-up questions
- How would you handle a workflow that needs a legal judgment call mid process?
- What would you do if a published workflow started producing errors after a law change?
- How would you help a lawyer debug a workflow that is not working as expected?
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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 7: AI UX and human oversight: design for a system that is wrong sometimes
- Chapter 14: Get the job: the AI PM interview loop