Company Context
You’re the PM for FlowOps, a B2B workflow automation platform used by mid-market healthcare providers and insurers to manage intake, prior authorization, claims exceptions, and internal approvals. FlowOps has 2,400 enterprise customers, ~1.8M weekly active end users, and processes ~95M form submissions/month. The product is configurable: customers can customize forms, validations, and routing without writing code.
FlowOps competes with ServiceNow, Salesforce Service Cloud, and vertical tools like HealthEdge. Your differentiation is faster configuration and lower total cost, but you’ve been losing deals in regulated accounts due to inconsistent enforcement of policy and audit requirements.
User / Market Scenario
FlowOps has two primary customization mechanisms:
- Business Rules (server-side): evaluated on record create/update and before workflow transitions. Centralized, auditable, consistent across channels (web, mobile, API). Slightly higher latency and requires careful versioning.
- Client Scripts (client-side): run in the browser to guide users (show/hide fields, inline validation, dynamic defaults). Fast feedback and better UX, but can be bypassed via API integrations, imports, or users with older clients.
Key Personas
| Persona | Segment | Primary Job-to-be-Done | What they care about |
|---|
| Intake Specialist (Frontline) | 45% of WAU | Submit accurate requests quickly | Speed, fewer errors, clear guidance |
| Operations Manager | 25% | Ensure SLAs and throughput | Fewer rework loops, predictable routing |
| Compliance Officer | 10% | Prove policy adherence in audits | Non-bypassable controls, audit trails |
| IT Admin / Platform Owner | 20% | Configure safely at scale | Maintainability, testability, low incidents |
The Problem
Over the last two quarters, FlowOps saw:
- Incident rate: 14.2 P1/P2 incidents per month related to “validation/routing not applied” (up from 8.1).
- Audit findings: 7 large customers failed internal audits because certain required fields were missing in records created via API imports.
- User friction: Frontline users complain that “the form keeps rejecting me after I hit submit,” increasing average submission time from 3.8 min to 4.6 min.
Your internal analysis suggests many customers implement critical requirements with Client Scripts for better UX, but these checks don’t run for API, bulk import, or mobile offline flows.
New Requirement Brief (Real Customer Request)
A top-20 customer (a regional insurer) requests a new policy:
- If the request type is “Urgent Prior Auth”, then:
- Diagnosis Code must be present and match ICD-10 format.
- Attending Physician NPI must be present.
- If member age < 18, require Guardian Consent.
- If any of these are missing, the request must not enter the “Clinical Review” queue.
- The UI should provide immediate guidance to reduce back-and-forth.
- The same policy must apply to requests created via:
- Web app
- Mobile app
- Partner API (30% of volume)
- Nightly CSV import (10% of volume)
The insurer threatens to churn at renewal (in 4 months) unless FlowOps can demonstrate non-bypassable enforcement and auditability.
Your Task (What you must deliver in the interview)
- Clarify the requirement: What questions would you ask to understand the true user need and risk (compliance vs UX vs operational routing)?
- Decide how to solve it: Provide a decision framework for when a requirement should be implemented as a Business Rule, a Client Script, or both.
- Propose an MVP design: Describe what you would ship in 6–8 weeks, including user experience, enforcement points, and how it behaves across channels.
- Prioritize and trade off: You have multiple similar policy requests in the pipeline—explain how you’d prioritize this work against other roadmap items.
- Define success criteria: What metrics and targets would you use to determine if your approach worked (product + business outcomes)?
Constraints
- Timeline: MVP must launch in 8 weeks; renewal decision in 16 weeks.
- Team: 4 backend engineers, 2 frontend engineers, 1 QA, shared data analyst (25%).
- Technical: Current rules engine supports server-side validation and routing gates, but rule evaluation adds ~120ms per transaction. Client scripts vary by customer customization and can conflict.
- Regulatory: Must support audit logs showing why a request was blocked/routed.
- Customer configurability: Customers can override default templates; you must minimize breaking changes.
You should assume you can add new platform primitives (e.g., “policy enforcement layer”), but only if they fit the timeline and don’t require a full rewrite.
