Design APIs and data flows for video meeting experience used by internal and external teams

Problem Statement Description

Design the APIs and data flows for a video meeting experience that supports collaboration between internal employees and external partners, vendors, customers, or contractors. The primary user lens is operations managers who rely on meetings to coordinate work, resolve blockers, track decisions, and ensure follow-through across organizational boundaries.

The system must handle the end-to-end meeting lifecycle: scheduling or joining a meeting, authenticating different participant types, managing permissions, enabling real-time audio/video/chat interactions, capturing relevant meeting artifacts, and making post-meeting information available to the right systems and users. The design should account for both product experience and platform needs, since multiple internal tools or partner-facing workflows may need to create, join, observe, or consume meeting data.

This is a Technical PM exercise, so focus on clarifying requirements, defining API boundaries, identifying key data entities and flows, and making trade-offs around reliability, privacy, security, interoperability, and scale. You are not expected to design low-level video codecs or network protocols, but you should show how the product and technical architecture work together to improve meeting effectiveness.

The experience should consider:

- Core users and participant roles, including internal organizers, external attendees, operations managers, guests, admins, and service accounts.

- Key APIs needed across the meeting lifecycle, such as meeting creation, invitation, identity verification, join access, participant state, chat, recording, transcription, summaries, action items, and post-meeting exports.

- Data ownership and permissions for internal versus external participants, including what information can be viewed, retained, shared, deleted, or synced to other systems.

- Real-time and asynchronous data flows, including events during the meeting and artifacts generated after the meeting ends.

- Reliability expectations for joining, presence, media state, notifications, artifact generation, and integrations with calendars, identity providers, CRM, ticketing, or workflow tools.

- Privacy, security, and compliance requirements, including authentication, authorization, audit logs, encryption, consent, external sharing controls, and data retention.

- Observability and operational readiness, including API health, latency, error handling, usage analytics, abuse detection, incident response, and customer support diagnostics.

- Rollout and product trade-offs, such as building for extensibility versus speed, supporting many external integrations versus a controlled ecosystem, and balancing meeting intelligence with participant trust.

Your goal is to define a coherent technical product design that enables effective, secure, and reliable video meetings across internal and external teams, while giving engineering enough clarity to build APIs, data contracts, permission models, and operational safeguards.