Strategy question
Several public-sector customers request different workflow logic, retrieval behavior, and policy controls for their agents. How would you decide what to ship as a customer-specific solution versus what to invest in as a reusable platform capability?
- Sierra
- Strategy
- Hard
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What this question tests
Tests deciding what to ship as customer-specific versus reusable platform capability when several public-sector customers request different workflow and policy behavior.
How to approach it
- Catalog each customer's specific request and tag by category: workflow logic, retrieval behavior, or policy controls, since each has different reusability potential.
- Check for overlap across agencies, policy controls like audit retention rules are more likely to generalize across public-sector customers than agency-specific workflow steps.
- Weight regulatory commonality heavily: public-sector customers often share compliance frameworks even when their day-to-day workflows differ, making policy controls a strong platform candidate.
- Build the overlapping policy and retrieval capabilities as configurable platform features, and leave genuinely agency-specific workflow logic as scoped customization.
- Confirm the reusability hypothesis with at least one more prospective public-sector account before committing full platform investment.
- Document the boundary explicitly so future agency requests are triaged against the same criteria.
What a strong answer includes
- Uses compliance-framework overlap, not just feature-request overlap, as the signal for what belongs on the platform.
- Separates policy and retrieval capabilities from workflow logic, since they have different reuse rates across public-sector customers.
- Validates reuse with a second prospective account before committing, rather than generalizing from one customer's request.
Common mistakes
- Treating every public-sector request as agency-specific without checking for regulatory overlap.
- Building a platform feature based on one customer's request with no validation from a second account.
Likely follow-up questions
- How would you handle two agencies whose policy requirements directly conflict?
- What would you do if a customization request turns out to generalize after all?
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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