Product design question
Lawyers will rarely ask for 'better queuing' or 'stronger isolation,' but they will care deeply about accuracy, latency, reliability, auditability, and security. How would you uncover those needs and translate them into clear infrastructure product requirements and prioritized engineering work? Be specific about discovery methods, requirement framing, and how you would separate must-haves from nice-to-haves.
- Harvey
- Product design
- Hard
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What this question tests
Tests translating implicit, non-technical user needs into concrete infrastructure requirements and prioritized engineering work.
How to approach it
- Interview lawyers about outcomes they care about, accuracy, speed, and trust, rather than asking directly about infrastructure, since they will not name technical mechanisms.
- Translate 'I need to trust the answer' into infrastructure requirements: citation accuracy, audit trails, and consistent latency under load.
- Translate 'it needs to be fast during a deadline crunch' into a specific latency and reliability requirement under peak concurrent usage, not average-case performance.
- Frame requirements with engineering in specific technical terms, like p99 latency targets and isolation guarantees during peak load, derived from the lawyer-facing outcome.
- Separate must-haves, like accuracy and auditability, which are non-negotiable for legal work, from nice-to-haves, like marginal speed improvements once a baseline is met.
- Validate the translated requirements back with a few lawyers using concrete before-and-after scenarios, not technical jargon, to confirm the translation was correct.
What a strong answer includes
- Translates outcome-language, like 'I need to trust this', into specific infrastructure requirements such as citation accuracy and audit trails.
- Distinguishes peak-load performance from average-case performance as the real requirement behind 'fast', a subtlety generic discovery would miss.
- Separates non-negotiable must-haves, accuracy and auditability, from nice-to-haves using the legal domain's actual risk tolerance.
Common mistakes
- Asking lawyers directly about infrastructure specifics they cannot meaningfully answer.
- Treating all requirements as equally must-have without a legal-risk-based cut.
Likely follow-up questions
- How would you validate that a translated requirement actually reflects what the lawyer meant?
- What would you do if engineering says a must-have requirement is infeasible in the timeframe?
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Learn the skill behind it
Chapters of the AI PM course that teach what this question tests.
- Chapter 4: Discovering and Sizing AI Opportunities
- Chapter 7: Designing AI UX and Oversight
- Chapter 14: Interviewing for AI PM Roles