1 min lesson
The practical / take-home exercise
For each case in "The practical / take-home exercise", name the signal and the response you would use.
Step 1 of 2
This is the round most likely to make or break the offer. The exact form is inference, strongly supported by Cursor's paid-practical-project culture - confirm yours with the recruiter - but expect a realistic GTM assignment drawn from the actual work.
The common shapes are a launch plan, a positioning document, a feature blog post or a messaging teardown of a competitor. Treat whatever you get like real work, because that is exactly what it is sampling.
Tiered launch, narrative arc, channel sequencing.
Show the cut: what ships first, to whom, in what order.
End with the metric that says it worked.
ICP, alternatives, unique value, differentiated frame.
Honest against Copilot, Windsurf, Claude Code.
April Dunford structure is fine - judgment leads.
Actual copy a developer would respect, not a press release.
Specific, concrete, zero buzzwords.
Lead with the workflow it changes.
Where a competitor's narrative is strong and where it leaks.
What you'd say instead and why it's truer.
A defensible point of view, not a takedown.
Whatever the format, show both halves: the thinking and the artifact. A framework alone is empty; copy alone hides your reasoning. Make the thinking visible, then put real words on the page.
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Full explanation
Working the Exercise
Interactive diagram. Step through it with the Next and Previous controls below, or Tab to a region to read its detail.
The path from blank page to a defensible artifact. The live presentation is the gate where judgment is graded.
Cursor's culture prizes authentic, judicious AI use and screens hard against pasting raw model output. Use AI tools on this exercise - that's expected and honest - but show the editing, the taste and the developer-credible voice that comes from a human who knows the audience. Raw, hedgy, buzzword-laden AI prose is the fastest way to fail a round whose whole point is writing that survives a developer's BS detector.
When you present, open with the cut and the insight, not the deliverable. “Here's the one insight about the ICP everything hangs on and here's what I deliberately left out.” Then show the artifact. Leading with judgment frames the work as a decision you owned, which is the exact profile Cursor buys - a builder-writer, not a brief-passer.
A slick deck with no real copy, a positioning framework with no point of view or AI output you didn't rewrite all read as hollow to a panel of technical Cursor users. The grade is on substance: a true insight, an honest differentiator and words a developer would actually respect.
QHow should you use AI tools on the practical exercise, given Cursor's culture?