Product design question
Scale forward deploys to understand real workflows before building. If future end-users in a government agency have different needs from the senior sponsor who is funding the project, how would you gather the right feedback, separate core pain points from feature requests, and turn that into a prioritized roadmap for the first release?
- Scale AI
- Product design
- Medium
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What this question tests
Whether you can reconcile a sponsor's stated priorities with end users' actual needs, and turn mixed feedback into a prioritized roadmap rather than defaulting to whoever holds the budget.
How to approach it
- Gather feedback from both groups deliberately and separately: structured interviews or workshops with actual end users doing the daily work, and a separate conversation with the senior sponsor about strategic goals and success criteria.
- Distinguish core pain points, recurring problems that block daily work, from feature requests, specific asked-for solutions that may not solve the underlying pain.
- Look for overlap between the sponsor's strategic goals and end users' daily pain, since the strongest roadmap items usually satisfy both, not just one side.
- Where the sponsor's ask and end users' pain diverge, bring evidence back to the sponsor rather than silently picking a side, so the roadmap decision is transparent and defensible.
- Prioritize the first release around the highest-overlap items, explicitly noting sponsor-only asks and end-user-only asks as separate, lower-priority tracks for future releases.
What a strong answer includes
- Treats sponsor and end-user feedback as two distinct inputs gathered deliberately, rather than defaulting to whichever voice is easiest to hear.
- Separates pain points from feature requests, a specific and important distinction, since a requested feature does not always address the real underlying problem.
- Handles divergence transparently by bringing evidence back to the sponsor instead of quietly overriding them or blindly following them.
Common mistakes
- Prioritizes only the senior sponsor's asks because they hold the budget, without validating against actual end-user pain.
- Treats every feature request as a core pain point without separating the underlying need from the specific solution asked for.
Likely follow-up questions
- How would you handle it if the sponsor rejects your evidence-based pushback.
- What would the first release look like if sponsor and end-user priorities barely overlap.
More product design questions
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More questions from Scale 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