Product design question
How would you add an edit option in the application for HR_admin user only for leave details of a particular staff member?
- Product design
- Easy
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What this question tests
Tests precise, permissions aware feature design: scoping an edit capability correctly to one role without breaking existing access controls.
How to approach it
- Clarify the requirement: only the HR admin role can edit leave details for a specific staff member, others should retain view or no access.
- Confirm existing role definitions and permission structure in the application before designing new access logic.
- Propose the design: a role check gating an edit button visible only to users with the HR admin role, with an audit log of changes.
- Address edge cases: what happens if an HR admin's role changes mid session, and how conflicting edits are prevented.
- Define success: zero unauthorized edit attempts succeeding, verified through access control testing.
- Confirm with the interviewer whether this needs to support multiple HR admins per staff member or a single owner.
What a strong answer includes
- Scopes the edit permission precisely to the HR admin role, with the button and API access both gated, not just the UI element hidden.
- Proposes an audit log capturing who edited what and when, since leave data changes need traceability for compliance and dispute resolution.
- Addresses the edge case of concurrent edits or stale sessions, ensuring a role change or session timeout is re validated before an edit is accepted.
- Sets a validation step, testing that non HR admin roles genuinely cannot edit via the UI or a direct API call.
Common mistakes
- Hiding the edit option in the UI only without enforcing the same restriction at the API or backend level.
- Ignoring audit logging, which is important for accountability when editing sensitive leave records.
Likely follow-up questions
- How would you prevent a non HR admin from editing via a direct API call even if the UI hides the button?
- What would you log to support a dispute about a leave record change?
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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