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.

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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

  1. Interview lawyers about outcomes they care about, accuracy, speed, and trust, rather than asking directly about infrastructure, since they will not name technical mechanisms.
  2. Translate 'I need to trust the answer' into infrastructure requirements: citation accuracy, audit trails, and consistent latency under load.
  3. 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.
  4. Frame requirements with engineering in specific technical terms, like p99 latency targets and isolation guarantees during peak load, derived from the lawyer-facing outcome.
  5. 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.
  6. Validate the translated requirements back with a few lawyers using concrete before-and-after scenarios, not technical jargon, to confirm the translation was correct.

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