AI & Technical question
Vault’s architecture must balance fine-grained document permissions, fast search latency, fresh indexes, and AI workflows over sensitive data. As the PM, how would you define the product requirements, decision criteria, and tradeoffs for this architecture with engineering, and where would you draw the line between PM ownership and engineering ownership?
- Harvey
- AI & Technical
- Hard
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What this question tests
Tests defining requirements for an architecture with competing constraints, permissions, latency, freshness, and drawing a clear PM versus engineering ownership line.
How to approach it
- Define requirements as outcomes: permissions with no leakage, latency acceptable for live attorney workflows, and indexes fresh within a defined window.
- State the core tradeoff: stricter permission checks add latency, so set a latency ceiling instead of treating fast and secure as unbounded goals.
- Make permission correctness a hard, non-negotiable requirement, while latency and freshness stay tunable based on document sensitivity and matter urgency.
- Draw the line: PM owns the thresholds and tradeoff calls, engineering owns the technical design that meets them.
- Set a joint checkpoint where engineering proposes options with tradeoffs, and PM makes the final call on which to ship.
- Validate the chosen tradeoff with real attorney workflows, since a reasonable latency number might still feel slow in practice.
What a strong answer includes
- Sets permission correctness as a hard floor while treating latency and freshness as tunable, reflecting legal data's real risk asymmetry.
- Draws ownership at thresholds versus implementation, a clean line rather than a vague strategy-versus-tech split.
- Requires engineering to present tradeoff options, not one design, so PM's threshold-setting role has real decisions to make.
Common mistakes
- Treating fast, fresh, and secure as equally flexible instead of setting permission correctness as a hard floor.
- Blurring PM and engineering ownership so neither is accountable for the final tradeoff.
- Setting thresholds without validating them against how attorneys actually experience latency.
Likely follow-up questions
- How would you set the freshness window for an actively litigated matter versus an archived one?
- What happens if engineering says the latency ceiling is infeasible?
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Learn the skill behind it
Chapters of the AI PM course that teach what this question tests.
- Chapter 1: Foundations: the model and the decisions it forces on you
- Chapter 8: Evals: define good and make the number defensible
- Chapter 6: Agents and agentic architecture