Handling a Prospect's Demand for a Guaranteed Ship Date on an Unscoped Feature
Company: Paxos
Role: Product Manager
Category: Product / Decision Making
Difficulty: medium
Interview Round: Other
A company you are trying to win as a customer asks you to guarantee the date a particular feature will ship. Your team has never discussed or scoped this feature. What do you do?
```hint Find what the date is protecting
Before you decide between yes and no, work out what the client needs the feature for and what happens on their side if it arrives late.
```
### Clarifying Questions
- Does the client want a contractual guarantee with penalties or termination rights, or a written target date in the proposal?
- Is signing the deal conditional on this feature, and how significant is this client compared with the customers we already serve?
- Have other customers or prospects asked for something similar, or is this request unique to this client?
- Who is talking to the client right now (a salesperson, me, or someone in leadership), and has anyone already suggested a date?
### What a Strong Answer Covers
- Discovery of the client's underlying problem and the real driver behind their deadline before any date is discussed
- An assessment of whether the feature belongs on the roadmap for many customers or would be a one-off build, and what it would displace
- How a credible estimate is produced with engineering, including unknowns such as security, compliance or partner dependencies, and how the uncertainty is expressed
- The options put to the client and to internal stakeholders (commit, phase, offer an alternative, or decline) and the reasoning for the one chosen
- How the commitment is communicated and kept: one consistent message with sales and leadership, written terms on scope and dependencies, and regular updates
### Follow-up Questions
- A salesperson already told the client a date before you were involved. How do you handle it?
- Engineering can only give a wide range with low confidence, and the client wants one date written into the contract. What do you agree to?
- How would your approach change if several other prospects started asking for the same feature?
Overview: A product manager scenario about a prospective client who wants a guaranteed delivery date for a feature the team has never scoped. It tests discovery of the client's real need, roadmap fit, estimation under uncertainty, and how to make and communicate a commitment the company can keep.