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Product Thinking Interview Guide: Build Traba

Author: Sumeet Bansal Last updated: 2026-03-09 Based on: 11 interviews conducted Oct 2025 – Mar 2026

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Philosophy

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Traba Design System — Core Tokens & Components

The single source of truth for all Traba UI. Every color, font, spacing value, and component spec lives here.

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Critical Rules

#	Rule	Detail

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Prometheus Framework

A framework for building and deploying AI-powered tools across Traba's non-engineering teams. Operators get a sandbox with guardrails where they can build, experiment, and ship using Claude.

The Mission: Field → Core

Traba's core job is to keep going out into the field, learn what works, and bring those operational learnings back into the core product. We're building an operational machine that keeps extracting signal from the edge and incorporating it into the center.

We think of it as concentric rings:

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Timezone Manifesto

Why We Prefer Luxon Over date-fns for Date Math

"The clocks of the world do not agree; they only pretend to."

Jorge Luis Borges, Labyrinths

TL;DR

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To tag a commit and use the commit date for the tag:

git checkout <commit hash>
GIT_COMMITTER_DATE="$(git show --format=%aD  | head -1)" git tag <tag name>

To fix commit timestamps:

git filter-branch --env-filter 'export GIT_COMMITTER_DATE="$GIT_AUTHOR_DATE"'

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Hi, thanks for your interest in ACM's backend development team! Your task is to write a design doc for a "quest system" that integrates into the membership portal and then schedule an interview that'll be some mix of design review, technical, and behavioral.

First you'll need to understand how the portal works at the API and database layers—the portal doesn't currently have a service layer—and then design appropriate API and database changes for the required functionality. Your priority should be a working design, not a clever one; bonus points if you explain why yours is definitively the best or if you consider multiple designs and explain the tradeoffs of each. There's no right answer and this is an exercise intended to see how you approach some functionality you'd reasonably be expected to implement as a backend developer for ACM—there's no limit to how deep your changes to the portal can go. The portal's being completely rewritten so don't worry about any current constraints (e.g. what

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Sumeet Bansal

CSE 131 PA4

fibonacci.boa

(def fib (n : Num) : Num
	(if (< n 3)
		1
 (+ (fib (- n 1)) (fib (- n 2)))

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(* FA18 CSE 130 Midterm Practice *)

(* FA14 *)
type expr = Const of int | Var of string | Op of string * expr * expr

let rec rename_var e n1 n2 =
  match e with
    | Const c -> Const c
    | Var s -> if s = n1 then Var n2 else Var s
    | Op (a,b,c) -> Op (a, rename_var b n1 n2, rename_var c n1 n2)

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from bs4 import BeautifulSoup   # for parsing HTML
import os                       # for managing files
import sys                      # for cleaner stdout
import urllib.request           # for downloading images
from fpdf import FPDF           # for generating PDFs

# page content saved as HTML file
inputfile = 'MUS-17-Tricia-Rose-reading.html'
output = inputfile[:-5] + '.pdf'