Strategy question
If you owned Glean’s API and partnership strategy for agent interoperability, how would you decide where to be open and extensible for developers versus where to enforce stronger controls for enterprise trust, stability, governance, and supportability? Be explicit about the principles and tradeoffs that would shape your roadmap.
- Glean
- Strategy
- Hard
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What this question tests
Tests articulating a coherent set of principles for when to be open and extensible for developers versus enforce stronger controls for enterprise trust, and how those principles shape the roadmap.
How to approach it
- State the core principle: be open and extensible where developers building on top of Glean create differentiated value without touching sensitive data flows or governance-critical behavior.
- Enforce stronger controls where the API surface touches permissions, data access, or agent actions with real-world side effects, since inconsistency there directly threatens enterprise trust and compliance.
- Apply the principle concretely: keep the search and retrieval query API extensible and flexible for developer experimentation, but keep permission enforcement, audit logging, and write-action approval centralized and non-configurable by individual integrations.
- Use this principle to resolve roadmap conflicts, for example prioritizing flexible query parameters (open) over allowing partners to bypass centralized permission checks for performance (controlled).
- Communicate the principle explicitly to partners and enterprise customers so both audiences understand why some areas are flexible and others are locked down, building trust through consistency rather than case-by-case exceptions.
- Revisit the boundary periodically as new integration patterns emerge, since a capability that seemed governance-critical today might be safely opened once shared infrastructure, like the unified policy layer, matures.
What a strong answer includes
- Draws the open-versus-controlled line at whether the API surface touches governance-critical behavior, not an arbitrary internal-versus-external split.
- Gives a concrete example, flexible query parameters open, permission enforcement centralized and locked, showing the principle applied, not just stated abstractly.
- Uses the principle to resolve a specific roadmap conflict, showing it's an operational decision tool, not just a philosophy.
- Proposes revisiting the boundary as shared infrastructure matures, avoiding a permanently static line that can't adapt.
Common mistakes
- Stating a philosophy without a concrete example of how it resolves an actual roadmap tradeoff.
- Drawing the line inconsistently, opening governance-critical behavior for convenience in one case and not another.
- Treating the open-versus-controlled boundary as fixed forever instead of something that can evolve with infrastructure maturity.
Likely follow-up questions
- How would you decide if a new integration pattern belongs on the open or controlled side?
- What would you do if a major partner wants an exception to a controlled area?
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More questions from Glean
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