Should We Ship This AI Feature? Challenge

What You'll Be Doing

You are the PM at Northline, the outdoor gear retailer from the Practice challenge. Leadership wants the AI shopping assistant expanded into a trip planner: a customer describes a trip — “four days on the John Muir Trail in late September, two people” — and the assistant returns a complete gear list with everything added to cart.

The CEO wants it live for Black Friday, eleven weeks out. You have three engineers, no ML team, and a model vendor contract you cannot change. Your engineering lead thinks it’s buildable. Your customer support lead has read the complaint queue and is against it.

You have to make the call: ship it, cut the scope, or kill it. Then defend it.

Constraints to consider

Eleven weeks, three engineers, no ML specialist on the team.
The catalog service is read-only to your team and its stock data refreshes every four hours.
Legal has told you that any recommendation framed as safety advice needs a documented review process before it goes live.
Whatever you ship, your team supports in production over the Black Friday weekend — there is no other on-call.
You cannot hire, and you cannot borrow engineers from another team.

AI Usage Guidance

We expect you to use AI tools. We evaluate how you use them — not whether you use them. Evidence of iteration, redirection, and critical evaluation scores higher than a polished output with no process documentation.

The single highest-signal indicator: your video answer to the mandatory AI question. If you cannot name a specific moment where you redirected AI output, evaluators will assume you did not.

Mandatory AI question for your video: Walk me through one moment where you disagreed with, pushed back on, or redirected what the AI gave you — and what you did instead. Name the specific moment. Explain what the AI produced that didn’t meet the bar, what you did differently, and why.

Communication clarity matters for this role. We assess structure, stakeholder awareness, and ability to simplify complex ideas — not presentation style or accent.

What You'll Accomplish

Make an explicit ship / cut / kill decision under a real constraint set and defend it

Define a success metric specific enough to be instrumented before launch

Name a concrete failure mode of a model-powered feature and sequence work to de-risk it first

Demonstrate scoping judgment — what gets cut, and what that costs

Communicate a decision to a mixed executive and engineering audience in five minutes

How Your Work Will Be Scored

Product Judgment & Decision Quality Metric & Risk Definition Scoping & Sequencing Video Walkthrough & Communication AI Fluency

What to Submit

File 1 — Recommendation Memo

Document · 1 pageRequired

Format: .pdf, .doc, .docx, .rtf, .txt, .md

Your decision, your reasoning, and the eleven-week scope you are committing to. Lead with the decision.

File 2 — README Document

DocumentRequired

Format: .pdf, .doc, .docx, .rtf, .txt, .md

Three required sections:

Section A — Written analysis: the tradeoffs behind your call, the strongest argument against it, and why you made it anyway. 300–400 words.
Section B — Metric and risk: one success metric you would instrument before launch, stated precisely enough that an engineer could implement it; and the single failure mode most likely to hurt Northline, with the specific thing you’d do in the first two weeks to reduce it.
Section C — AI Usage Log (Mandatory): This is not a trick. We want to see how you work with AI — not whether you used it. In a short section of your README, document your AI collaboration process. For each significant interaction with an AI tool, briefly note: what you asked the AI to help with / what it gave you / what you kept, changed, or rejected — and why. Three interactions documented is sufficient. The log does not need to be exhaustive.

File 3 — Video Walkthrough

Video · 4-5 minutesRequired

Format: .mp4, .mov, .webm

Record as MP4 or MOV and upload directly on the Provn platform as a separate file. Cover: (1) your decision and the one-sentence reason, ~45 sec; (2) the scope you’d commit to and what you cut, ~90 sec; (3) your metric and your riskiest assumption, ~60 sec; (4) the mandatory AI question, ~60 sec; (5) what you’d do differently with more time, ~30 sec. Speak naturally — we assess the quality of your reasoning, not verbal polish.