Product design question
Design the onboarding and payment-review flow for a Ramp customer making its first high-value payment to a new overseas vendor. How would you decide what KYC/KYB information to collect upfront versus later, when to trigger sanctions or manual review, and how to keep the experience low-friction for legitimate businesses while still meeting regulatory requirements?
- Ramp
- Product design
- Hard
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What this question tests
Tests product design for a regulated onboarding flow, balancing upfront friction against later risk triggers while meeting real KYC and KYB requirements.
How to approach it
- Collect only the minimum KYC or KYB information legally required to initiate the relationship upfront, deferring deeper verification until a risk signal appears.
- Trigger enhanced verification or manual review specifically when a payment crosses a value threshold, involves a new vendor, or matches a sanctions or watchlist flag.
- Design the low friction path for the common case, a legitimate business paying a known or low risk vendor, to move through with minimal delay.
- Design a clear, honest status experience during manual review so the customer understands why a specific payment is taking longer rather than feeling stuck.
- Work with compliance to define exactly what counts as sanctions or manual review triggers before building the flow, rather than guessing at thresholds.
- Measure both compliance outcomes, false negative and false positive rates on flagged payments, and business outcomes, time to complete a first payment for legitimate customers.
What a strong answer includes
- Separates upfront collection from risk triggered deeper review explicitly, which is the concrete design pattern that reduces friction for the common case while still meeting regulatory bar.
- Defines review triggers with compliance directly rather than guessing at thresholds, which is critical given the real regulatory stakes in cross border payments.
- Measures both compliance accuracy and business friction together, recognizing that optimizing only one would either create risk or kill legitimate business volume.
Common mistakes
- Collecting maximum KYC and KYB information upfront for every customer regardless of risk, creating unnecessary friction for legitimate low risk businesses.
- Designing review triggers without direct compliance input, risking either regulatory gaps or overly aggressive false positive review rates.
Likely follow-up questions
- How would you handle a legitimate customer who gets flagged for manual review repeatedly?
- What would you do if a sanctions match turns out to be a false positive on a critical first payment?
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More questions from Ramp
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