Product design question
Design onboarding for a developer trying Claude's API for the first time.
- Anthropic
- Product design
- Easy
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What this question tests
Tests product design fundamentals for a developer tool: reducing time to first success for a technical but unfamiliar audience.
How to approach it
- Define the user precisely: a developer who knows how to code but has never called an LLM API, versus one migrating from OpenAI.
- Identify the core pain point: unclear which endpoint or model to use, and no fast way to see a working response.
- Prioritize a single goal for the first session: get a real API call returning a real completion in under five minutes.
- Design the flow: instant API key generation, a copyable curl or SDK snippet pre-filled with that key, and a live playground before any code is written.
- Add migration specific help, like an automatic OpenAI to Claude request translator, for developers coming from a competitor.
- Define success as time to first successful call and day two return rate, and state you would confirm which of those the team prioritizes.
What a strong answer includes
- Leads with a runnable example over documentation, since developers trust code they can execute over prose they must read.
- Calls out the specific friction of API keys and billing setup, proposing a free sandbox key with rate limits so no card is needed to try it.
- Includes a playground that shows the raw request and response side by side, teaching the API shape while the user experiments.
- Sets a concrete success metric: percent of signups reaching a successful API call within 10 minutes.
Common mistakes
- Designing a generic onboarding checklist instead of one built around the specific friction of calling an LLM API for the first time.
- Forgetting that many developers arrive mid migration from another provider and need comparison, not a fresh start.
- No success metric, making it impossible to know if the onboarding actually works.
Likely follow-up questions
- How would you handle a developer who gets an error on their first call?
- What would you cut if you only had two weeks to ship this?
- How would onboarding differ for a solo hobbyist versus an enterprise engineering team?
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More questions from Anthropic
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