2 min lesson
Present like it's the real room
Make the call in this situation: "On the open prompt 'design Cursor's bug-triage system from scratch,' you realize you don't know how many tickets come in daily. The team is observing. What do you do?" Explain what supports it.
Step 1 of 2
Present like it's the real roomThe last 10 minutes
Close every rehearsal with a crisp recommendation: here's the problem as I scoped it, here's what I built, here's why, here's what I'd do next. Then self-score on the four dimensions this round actually grades.
My ninety-second close on design Cursor's bug-triage system from scratch. The problem as I scoped it: I assumed tickets, Discord and the forum as the inputs, no triage tooling yet, and picked one vertical to prove end to end. What I built: an agent-assisted pipeline that pulls every channel into one queue, clusters and dedups the reports, then scores each cluster by severity × impact into a one-page brief. Why: a human checkpoint after clustering and on the final ranking keeps a quiet-but-catastrophic data-loss bug from getting buried under a loud cosmetic one. What I'd do next: wire ARR exposure into the scoring and ship the first weekly quality brief, then watch whether time-to-resolution actually drops.
- Dimension
- Autonomy
- Pass looks like
- Stated assumptions, made calls, moved without permission
- Red flag
- Asked which approach to take repeatedly
- Dimension
- Product sense
- Pass looks like
- Tied the work to a real user-felt quality outcome
- Red flag
- Built a system with no clear user benefit
- Dimension
- Depth
- Pass looks like
- Went one layer past the obvious, with tradeoffs named
- Red flag
- Stayed surface-level, no hard choices
- Dimension
- Craft
- Pass looks like
- Clean, demoable slice you'd be proud to show
- Red flag
- Sprawling, half-working, presented as a shrug
| Dimension | Pass looks like | Red flag |
|---|---|---|
| Autonomy | Stated assumptions, made calls, moved without permission | Asked which approach to take repeatedly |
| Product sense | Tied the work to a real user-felt quality outcome | Built a system with no clear user benefit |
| Depth | Went one layer past the obvious, with tradeoffs named | Stayed surface-level, no hard choices |
| Craft | Clean, demoable slice you'd be proud to show | Sprawling, half-working, presented as a shrug |
Score 1–5 on each. The round is graded on your floor, so attack the lowest.