Strategy question
You're given 12 months and a lean team to materially increase enterprise trust in Glean agents. How would you define and sequence the security and governance roadmap across access controls, agent action guardrails, explainability/auditability, and admin observability, and what criteria would you use to choose the first 2-3 bets?
- Glean
- Strategy
- Hard
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What this question tests
Tests sequencing a broad enterprise trust roadmap under real time and team constraints, and defending the choice of first bets with clear criteria.
How to approach it
- Group the roadmap into four pillars: access controls, agent action guardrails, explainability and auditability, and admin observability.
- Talk to enterprise security buyers and lost-deal notes to find which pillar is currently the top blocker to signing or expanding contracts.
- Score candidate bets on deal-unblocking impact, engineering effort, and how foundational they are, for example permission-aware retrieval underpins almost everything else.
- Pick 2 to 3 bets that both unblock revenue and build reusable infrastructure, for example fine-grained access controls plus an audit log for agent actions.
- Sequence the remaining pillars into quarters, and set explicit checkpoints to re-prioritize as customer feedback and incidents come in.
- Defend the sequencing to leadership using near-term deal impact for the first bets and a stated path to the deferred pillars.
What a strong answer includes
- Chooses access controls as a likely first bet since ungoverned data exposure is usually the hardest blocker to enterprise trust.
- Uses deal-stage evidence, like specific lost or stalled Fortune 500 deals, to justify the sequencing instead of guessing.
- Explicitly defers one pillar, for example full explainability, and states what interim mitigation covers the gap.
- Ties agent action guardrails to a concrete risk, like an agent writing to Zendesk or ServiceNow incorrectly.
Common mistakes
- Trying to advance all four pillars at once with a lean team and diluting impact everywhere.
- Picking bets based on what is technically interesting rather than what unblocks real enterprise deals.
- Ignoring that access controls are often the prerequisite for the other three pillars to matter.
Likely follow-up questions
- How would you decide if a bet is failing halfway through the 12 months?
- Which pillar would you cut if the team shrank further?
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More questions from Glean
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