Product design question
Sierra is launching an enterprise support agent for a new customer that must handle high-volume conversations in both French and English. Walk me through how you would discover requirements with the customer, define the first launch scope, and decide which intents, channels, integrations, and escalation paths must be in v1 versus deferred.
- Sierra
- Product design
- Hard
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What this question tests
Tests bilingual, high volume MVP scoping: discovering requirements and deciding what launches in v1 versus later.
How to approach it
- Run discovery with the customer to map their highest volume intents in both French and English and current channel mix.
- Prioritize v1 scope around intents with both high volume and stable, well documented policies in both languages.
- Choose channels for v1 based on where volume is highest today, deferring lower priority channels like SMS to a later phase.
- Scope integrations to only the systems required for the v1 intents, deferring nice to have integrations that do not block launch.
- Define escalation paths explicitly for both languages, ensuring French speaking customers are not routed to English only human agents.
- Set a v1 versus deferred list in writing with the customer, including a rough timeline for what comes next.
What a strong answer includes
- Uses volume and policy stability together as the v1 filter, not just volume alone, since unstable policies are risky to automate early.
- Explicitly checks that escalation paths work in both languages, a detail many candidates miss when focused only on the AI agent itself.
- Confirms scope in writing with the customer rather than leaving in scope versus later as an internal assumption.
Common mistakes
- Scoping v1 by volume alone without checking whether the policies behind high volume intents are stable enough to automate safely.
- Forgetting to verify human escalation works properly in both languages before launch.
Likely follow-up questions
- How would you decide which channel to launch first if French volume is concentrated in voice?
- What would you do if the customer insists on full channel parity at launch despite the timeline?
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More questions from Sierra
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