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Yezhisai M's avatar

I've been really enjoying this series and this post is hands down the strongest yet. I especially love your framing of first-order product and second-order thinking, it's a great way to capture the systemic evolution of strategy as opposed to the more linear, milestone-driven nature of traditional short- and long-term goal setting.


One idea that could be an interesting follow-up is related to ethics and bias, perhaps as part of the system deconstruction section. Something like: “How do you ensure your AI product aligns with ethical standards and avoids unintended bias?” It could provide insight into how candidates consider the broader societal impact of the AI systems that they’re building.


Overall, I love how these questions push candidates to think beyond execution and into systems-level reasoning. Looking forward to your next set of posts in this series!

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Athens's avatar
1dEdited

Great thoughts!

1) Would you say Q1 and Q5 are similar, but Q1 is a fine-grained version? Also, for Q5, I'm thinking of how pitching "Renting out Bed and Breakfast for SF conferences" sounded like 20 years ago - fair example?

2) Also, broken link to Part 1 and Part 2 :P

http://link_to_part_1/ ....

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Jaclyn Konzelmann's avatar

1) #1 is more about me believing in your idea....#2 is about your ability to storytell and get creative / persuasive. Less about the idea for #5, more about how you might go about convincing an audience of something (if you want to pick an idea as an example to demonstrate this in action, totally fine too)

2) Thank You!! (This is what I get for waking up at 4am to make edits and schedule this post 😆

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Udhay | AI Cloud Reef's avatar

Amazing structure of questions. Would you also be able to share some of the best answers to these questions?

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Jaclyn Konzelmann's avatar

Great Question! I will follow up with a post on some of the takeaways I had while reading answers - what types of things stood out, what managed to shine and impress me. I can't share the exact answers submitted as those are the work of the candidates and not me - and I want to respect that. But I will certainly talk about things from my perspective in a way that I'm hoping will be insightful and helpful to you!

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Udhay | AI Cloud Reef's avatar

Yes. Thanks Jaclyn. Thoughts on what aspects of thinking was impressive would be a gold mine.

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Nikhil Tayal's avatar

Do you think candidates should get direct feedback on why “not proceeding” when they passionately apply for a role, create a video outlining everything the role expects with a real demo of the prototype they made? I think that is what is sorely missing in the hiring process. Sending canned rejections are the worst thing a company can do imho.

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