Product design question
How would you improve the developer experience for switching from OpenAI to open models on Together?
- Together AI
- Product design
- Medium
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What this question tests
Product design for reducing switching costs, the core friction in a migration-focused developer product.
How to approach it
- Clarify the user: a developer with an existing OpenAI-based app who wants to try open models for cost or control reasons but fears breaking changes.
- State the core pain point: rewriting API calls, prompt formats, and handling different model behaviors is risky and time consuming.
- Propose an OpenAI-compatible API endpoint, so existing code works with a one-line base URL change, removing the biggest technical barrier.
- Add a side-by-side evaluation tool, letting developers run the same prompts against their current model and candidate open models to compare quality before switching.
- Define success: percentage of new signups who successfully route production traffic within a set window, say 14 days, indicating true migration not just experimentation.
What a strong answer includes
- Leads with API compatibility as the single highest-leverage change, since it removes the rewrite cost that kills most migration attempts before they start.
- Proposes a built-in evaluation tool so developers can validate quality before committing, addressing the real fear of silently worse output.
- Names a concrete success metric, like time from signup to first production request, as the proxy for real migration versus idle trial accounts.
- Addresses the behavioral gap explicitly, since different models respond differently to the same prompt even with a compatible API.
Common mistakes
- Focusing only on cost messaging without addressing the actual technical switching cost of rewriting integration code.
- Ignoring that model behavior differences, not just API format, are often the real blocker to switching.
Likely follow-up questions
- How would you help a developer whose prompts were tuned specifically for GPT behavior?
- What would you measure to know the evaluation tool is actually driving migrations?
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More questions from Together AI
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