Product design question
You’re onboarding a large Arabic-speaking enterprise customer to Sierra. How would you discover their support workflows, identify the highest-value use cases, and define the v1 AI agent scope, including which intents to automate, which cases to escalate to humans, and what tradeoffs you would make across customer experience, implementation speed, and safety?
- Sierra
- Product design
- Hard
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What this question tests
Tests structured discovery and v1 scoping for a new large enterprise customer's AI agent, deciding what to automate, escalate, and defer.
How to approach it
- Run structured discovery with the customer's support leaders, pulling historical ticket data segmented by intent, volume, and current resolution time.
- Identify highest-value use cases by volume and business impact, not just ease of automation, since some low-effort intents may not matter to the business.
- Decide v1 automation scope: intents with high volume, low ambiguity, and clear resolution paths get full automation.
- Decide escalation scope: intents with regulatory sensitivity, high ambiguity, or low historical resolution consistency get routed to humans in v1.
- Weigh tradeoffs explicitly across three axes: broader automation improves cost and speed, narrower scope improves safety and customer experience, and implementation speed favors a smaller v1.
- Set launch criteria and a defined path to expand automated scope in fast-follow phases as confidence builds from real usage data.
What a strong answer includes
- Uses volume, ambiguity, and business impact together to decide v1 scope, not automation ease alone.
- Names regulatory sensitivity explicitly as an escalation criterion, appropriate for a large enterprise onboarding.
- Defines a concrete path to expand scope post-launch, rather than treating v1 scope as fixed.
Common mistakes
- Automating whatever is easiest to build rather than what matters most to the business.
- No plan for expanding scope after launch, leaving v1 permanently narrow.
Likely follow-up questions
- How would you validate an intent is ready to move from escalation to automation?
- What would you do if ticket data does not clearly separate ambiguous from clear-cut intents?
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- A large healthcare payer wants Sierra to launch a customer-support agent in 8 weeks. How would you discover requirements, choose the first workflows to automate, and define an MVP that is safe enough for launch but still delivers measurable value?Sierra · Product design · Hard
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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: Discovering and Sizing AI Opportunities
- Chapter 7: Designing AI UX and Oversight
- Chapter 14: Interviewing for AI PM Roles