Strategy question
Three large enterprise customers each demand a different governance feature before expanding their contracts: one wants approval workflows for agent actions, one wants field-level redaction, and one wants SIEM export and audit APIs. With a lean team, how would you prioritize, align sales and engineering, and decide what becomes roadmap, what is solved through configuration or services, and what you decline?
- Glean
- Strategy
- Hard
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What this question tests
Tests prioritizing across three conflicting enterprise requests with a lean team, and deciding what becomes roadmap versus configuration versus a decline.
How to approach it
- Clarify each ask precisely: approval workflows for agent actions, field-level redaction of sensitive data, and SIEM export with audit APIs, and confirm which are contract blockers versus nice-to-haves.
- Check for overlap with the underlying audit and permissions infrastructure, since SIEM export and approval workflows likely share a common event-logging foundation.
- Score each by revenue at risk, number of other customers who would also benefit, and whether it can be solved through configuration or professional services instead of core product.
- Decide field-level redaction may be partially solvable via existing connector-level exclusion configuration for this customer, while approval workflows and audit APIs need real roadmap investment.
- Align sales and engineering with a shared one-pager: what ships as product, what ships as configuration or services, and the committed timeline for each customer.
- Communicate declines clearly, for example a fully custom per-field redaction UI, with the reasoning and any workaround offered.
What a strong answer includes
- Finds the shared infrastructure, an audit and event log, that both SIEM export and approval workflows can build on, avoiding duplicated work.
- Distinguishes what services or configuration can solve today from what genuinely needs new product, instead of roadmapping everything.
- Uses revenue at risk and reusability across customers as explicit scoring criteria, not just whichever customer complains loudest.
- Proposes a clear communication plan to sales so expectations with each of the three customers are set honestly.
Common mistakes
- Promising all three customers a full custom build without checking for shared underlying infrastructure.
- Letting the loudest or largest customer dictate roadmap without checking reusability for others.
- Failing to align sales before committing timelines that engineering cannot hit.
Likely follow-up questions
- Which of these three would you say no to first, and how would you explain it?
- How would you avoid rebuilding this same conflict next quarter with new customers?
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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