Strategy question
How would you grow MCP adoption among third-party tool developers?
- Anthropic
- Strategy
- Hard
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What this question tests
Tests platform and ecosystem thinking: how to grow a two sided developer market around a new open protocol.
How to approach it
- Clarify whether the goal is more MCP servers built or more usage of existing servers inside Claude.
- Segment potential builders: OSS maintainers wanting distribution, SaaS vendors like Stripe or Slack wanting a Claude integration, and agencies building for clients.
- Map the funnel from hearing about MCP to a published, maintained server, and find the step with the biggest drop off.
- Lower the cost to build with SDKs, scaffolding templates, and a reference server for common patterns like auth and pagination.
- Lower the risk of low usage by giving servers visibility through a directory surfaced inside Claude Desktop and Claude Code.
- Confirm with the interviewer whether the target is breadth of servers or depth of usage on a few flagship ones.
What a strong answer includes
- Names the chicken and egg problem directly: developers need users, users need integrations, so Anthropic must seed both sides, for example by building or funding servers for the top 20 tools itself.
- Proposes a certification or quality bar so a directory listing signals reliability, not just existence, similar to how the Chrome Web Store curates extensions.
- Suggests instrumenting server install and call volume so Anthropic can see which categories (dev tools, CRM, data) have demand gaps.
- Ties adoption to Claude Code specifically, since engineers already there are the natural first wave of MCP builders.
Common mistakes
- Treating this as a marketing problem instead of a tooling and incentive problem.
- Ignoring that most developers will not build a server unless it is nearly free effort or drives real usage back to their product.
- No mention of trust or security review, which matters since MCP servers can execute code and touch user data.
Likely follow-up questions
- How would you measure whether MCP adoption is actually working?
- What would you do if a major tool vendor refused to build an official server?
- How do you prevent the directory from filling with low quality or abandoned servers?
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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 9: Prove it paid off: outcomes, economics, and pricing
- Chapter 14: Get the job: the AI PM interview loop