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Demo Interview Prep

Traction Complete · Product Manager · Thu 2026-04-30 @ 2:00 PM PT

When
Thu 2026-04-30 · 2:00 PM PT
Format
Demo presentation to panel
Sandbox
completedemo--demo239
Username
hi@andrea-antal.com.demo
Logistics

The setup

Date / time Thursday, 2026-04-30 at 2:00 PM Pacific Time
Format Live demo presentation to a 3-person panel. Likely combines (a) walkthrough of the assignment work, (b) Q&A on PM thinking, and (c) discussion of how the work was done.
Recording TC uses Metaview to record/transcribe interviews. Email Karen in advance if you want to opt out.
Salesforce sandbox completedemo--demo239.sandbox.lightning.force.com
Login username hi@andrea-antal.com.demo
SF admin contact Bryan Licas — blicas@tractioncomplete.com
Recruiter contact Karen Atara (Hiring Lead) — for any logistics or scheduling issues
Activation status: Sandbox accessed and confirmed working 2026-04-23 (43k matched / 66k processed leads visible at provisioning). Re-staged to a clean state by 2026-04-26 — the assignment provides a 30-company CSV to import and enrich. Sandbox is intentionally empty for the exercise; no data was lost.
Panel

Who's in the room

Three interviewers, three different lenses. Tailor parts of the demo to each — don't over-index on one.

Bryan Licas
CPO · already met

Lens

  • Customer empathy (CS background)
  • AI fluency, agentic workflows
  • Self-starters & initiative
  • Owns Product + CS + Support + Sales

What landed last time

  • Migration story (data + people)
  • Direct customer outreach at Ting
  • saga.cc & Claude Code projects
  • LalaMove scale-up

Likely cares about

  • Tied to revenue / adoption
  • Customer voice in the work
  • How AI was used in your prep
Ernesto Valdes
CTO · new

Background

  • Lead Dev → VP Eng → CTO
  • ~11 yrs at TC / Traction on Demand
  • Salesforce Platform App Builder
  • ML certification

Likely cares about

  • Technical credibility — do you understand the platform?
  • Data model literacy (Lead, Account, Contact, Opportunity, custom objects)
  • Honest scope / effort tradeoffs
  • How you'd partner with Engineering

Don't

  • Bluff Salesforce mechanics — he'll catch it
  • Hand-wave on technical feasibility
Scott Wilton
Director, Product Design · new

Likely cares about

  • UX thinking — user journeys, not feature lists
  • Design partnership posture
  • How you frame problems before solutions
  • Visual / structural clarity in your presentation

Levers to pull

  • Show user thinking first, mechanics second
  • Reference the user persona explicitly (Director/VP RevOps)
  • Talk about where design partnership would unblock the work

Background gap

  • Worth a quick LinkedIn check before Mon
Brief

The assignment

Source: Traction Complete/Product_Management_2026_Demo.pdf (received 2026-04-23). Captured verbatim from the brief.

Setup

Background — about TC (per the brief)

The 8 signals (verbatim quotes + context)

SignalQuote / data
1 · Customer interview
Enterprise · $380K ARR · Financial Services
"We've been trying to roll TC out more broadly for about six months and it keeps stalling. Legal is asking RevOps to document how the AI is classifying our accounts — they want to know what logic is behind the industry assignments, not just what the output is. I honestly don't have a good answer for them, and neither does RevOps. It's slowing down internal adoption more than anything else."

Context: 3-year contract signed 2025, locked through end of 2027. Expansion realistically starts at renewal.
2 · Customer interview
Fast-growing SaaS · $55K ARR
"Marketing can't use the TC data for ABM. The industry field is blank on a ton of accounts, and where it is populated they're not confident it's right — they've flagged a few obvious ones, like a software company coming back as Manufacturing. We ran three enablement sessions trying to get adoption. I'm not sure if this is a data quality issue or if we set something up wrong."

Context: $185K expansion quote pending. Waiting to see improvement before signing.
3 · Post-churn interview
Churned · was $120K ARR · Mid-Market Tech
"We moved to D&B Hoovers about eight months ago. I told the team it was for better APAC coverage, which is part of it. But honestly the bigger issue was compliance — they kept asking how TC was determining industry classifications, and we could never give them a satisfying answer. D&B has SIC codes and source attribution baked in. That made the compliance conversation a lot easier."
4 · Customer interview
Enterprise power user · $290K ARR
"Our data team reviews every industry classification before we apply it. I know that sounds excessive, but we've been burned before — accounts getting routed to the wrong territory because of a bad industry tag. I'd love a way to run bulk overrides with confidence filtering so we're only reviewing the edge cases, not every single account. The manual review is killing our turnaround time."
5 · Sales update
Active prospect · $210K ARR deal at risk
Deal stalled in procurement. Prospect's legal team asking for documentation on how TC's AI classifies industries — specifically data sources used and whether classifications can be audited. AE escalated to SE; no clear answer. AE's impression: this is becoming a standard ask from enterprise legal teams for AI data products.
6 · Internal CS data
Last 90 days
Average CS ticket resolution time up 40% over the last two quarters. Headcount flat. Distinct cluster of tickets — mostly enterprise — taking 3–4x longer than average. The cluster is predominantly questions about industry classification: "Why is this account tagged as X when it should be Y?" and "Can we override this in bulk?"

CS lead note: "We're spending a lot of time explaining classifications we can't fully explain ourselves."
7 · VoC survey
15 accounts responding
60% said they want "more coverage" — the headline going to leadership. But verbatims show coverage complaints are mostly about missing/incorrect industry fields, not missing accounts. Survey question didn't cleanly separate the two; rollup is ambiguous.

Sample: 15 accounts — 2 enterprise, 8 mid-market, 5 SMB. Enterprise voices are underrepresented.
8 · Competitive intel
Market landscape
3 enterprise deals lost to D&B Hoovers last quarter. AEs noted D&B's pitch includes SIC code attribution and a "data transparency report" — documentation showing where each classification came from and confidence. Came up as a requirement in 2 RFPs in the last 60 days. TC has no equivalent artifact today.

SMB/mid-market: YC company Apex Data offering free accounts targeting customers with blank or unreliable industry fields.

Important context

CEO comment (secondhand). At a customer dinner last month, Dave (CEO) apparently told the $380K customer's VP of Finance: "we're working on making the AI more transparent." Not a formal commitment. You didn't hear it directly. Has come up twice in internal Slack threads. No clarity yet on what was actually said or promised.
Engineering capacity. From last week's 1:1 with EM (verbal, not written): "capacity for one medium-sized initiative this half — 6 to 8 weeks of focused work. Anything bigger needs to wait until H2 or get scoped down significantly."

Deliverables (~20 min present, then Q&A)

Sandbox exercise (live walkthrough on the day)

TC docs to read first

Interview-day structure (per the brief)

0–30 min Problem & solution review. Walk panel through prioritization, solution design, mockup, validation plan.
30–45 min Sandbox walkthrough. What you found in the TC environment — classifications that looked right, surprised you, or were inconsistent.
45–60 min Q&A & feedback. Open discussion. They'll push on reasoning, share their take, leave time for your questions.
From the brief, last line: "We're not looking for a perfect answer or a polished deck. The candidates who do best are the ones who can tell us what they chose, what they didn't, and why. Not just what they'd build."
Work plan

Sun Apr 26 → Thu Apr 30

Real working window: Mon, Tue, Wed full days while Nathan is at daycare. Sun + Thu morning are bookends. Adjust as you go.

DayGoal
Sun Apr 26 (light) Capture the brief into this doc. Skim the 6 TC help articles linked in the assignment so Mon isn't spent learning the UI. Don't start the sandbox import today — battery for the real days.
Mon Apr 27 (full) (1) Sandbox: import the 30-company CSV, run AI enrichment on 10–20 first, then full 30. Log observations in real time. (2) Re-read the 8 signals. (3) Land your core problem + recommendation by EOD. One-pager / outline locked.
Tue Apr 28 (full) Build the 4 deliverables: opportunity statement, 2–3 user stories, Jira-style ticket, metrics, UI mockup/prototype, validation plan. First end-to-end dry run aloud.
Wed Apr 29 (full) Second dry run, time it (target ~20 min for sections 1–4; sandbox walkthrough is its own 15-min block). Refine weak sections. Slide deck if using one. Backup screen recording of sandbox walkthrough in case live fails. Prep questions for each panelist.
Thu Apr 30 AM Light review only. Sandbox + deck open by 1:30 PM. Demo at 2:00 PM PT.
Strategy

Principles for the demo itself

Frame before features

Show your thinking, not just your output

Use AI authentically

Acknowledge what you don't know

Bring questions for each panelist

Risks

Traps to avoid

Day-of

Thu Apr 30 checklist

demo-prep salesforce-sandbox 3-panel b2b-framing ai-fluency