Strategy question
You've shipped a bespoke Text2SQL workflow for one large customer, and leadership wants to know whether it should become a repeatable product. What criteria would you use to decide which components should be standardized into reusable software, which should stay configurable, and which should remain fully custom?
- Scale AI
- Strategy
- Hard
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What this question tests
Tests deciding which parts of a bespoke technical workflow to standardize, keep configurable, or leave fully custom, using reusability and maintenance cost as the deciding criteria.
How to approach it
- Break the Text2SQL workflow into components: schema understanding and mapping, query generation, query validation and safety checks, and result formatting or explanation.
- Assess reusability per component: is schema mapping logic tied to this customer's specific database structure, or is the underlying approach (schema introspection, example-based grounding) generalizable across customers.
- Standardize components that are structurally similar across customers regardless of their specific schema, likely query generation and validation logic, since the core techniques don't change much between databases.
- Keep configurable the schema mapping and terminology layer, since every customer's database naming and business vocabulary differs meaningfully, but the underlying mapping mechanism can be shared.
- Keep fully custom only pieces tied to genuinely unique customer requirements, for example a bespoke approval workflow specific to this customer's compliance process.
- Validate the classification with a second customer's Text2SQL needs before fully committing engineering to productization, to catch components assumed reusable that actually aren't.
What a strong answer includes
- Breaks the workflow into components first, rather than deciding reusability for the feature as one monolithic unit.
- Distinguishes standardizable technique, query generation and validation, from customer-specific configuration, schema and vocabulary mapping, a genuinely different reusability question.
- Keeps only truly customer-unique pieces, like a bespoke compliance workflow, fully custom instead of defaulting everything non-trivial to custom.
- Proposes validating the classification against a second customer before full productization investment, catching false assumptions about reusability early.
Common mistakes
- Treating the whole workflow as either fully reusable or fully custom instead of decomposing it into components.
- Assuming reusability without checking against a second real customer's actual requirements.
- Standardizing schema-specific logic that doesn't actually generalize, creating a fragile product that breaks per customer.
Likely follow-up questions
- How would you validate that a component is really reusable before committing to productize it?
- What would you do if the second customer's schema breaks your standardized query generation logic?
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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