Product Management Topics
Product leadership, vision articulation, roadmap development, and feature prioritization. Focuses on product strategy and business alignment.
Problem Definition and Framing
Covers the skills and practices used to clarify, diagnose, and scope ambiguous business or product problems into actionable problem statements before proposing solutions. Candidates should demonstrate structured and insightful clarifying questions to understand business context, current and desired states, target users and user needs, success metrics and desired outcomes, constraints such as budget, timeline, technical dependencies, and compliance, stakeholder perspectives, and existing performance baselines. Includes separating symptoms from root causes, surfacing and testing hypotheses, identifying data to collect and analyze, performing root cause analysis, breaking complex problems into prioritized subproblems, and defining acceptance criteria and next steps or experiments to reduce uncertainty. Encompasses discovery techniques and basic user research to surface user pain points and opportunities, requirements scoping including scope boundaries, risks and trade offs, and the ability to write a concise problem statement in your own words. At senior levels also assess strategic framing, avoiding premature solutions, aligning stakeholders, and presenting an executive narrative that links diagnosis to measurable outcomes and implementation trade offs; for junior candidates emphasize curiosity, systematic thinking, and the ability to prioritize information needs rather than jumping to implementation.
Decision Making and Trade Offs
Covers how candidates make difficult decisions when facing competing priorities, limited resources, ambiguous information, or stakeholder disagreement. Interviewers expect a clear recounting of a real situation, the options considered, the criteria and frameworks used to evaluate trade offs, how risks and benefits were weighed, who was consulted, and how the decision was communicated and executed. Candidates should describe measurable outcomes, lessons learned, and what they would do differently. This topic assesses judgment, prioritization, structured thinking, stakeholder management, and the ability to reflect on trade off outcomes.
Stakeholder Impact Awareness
Evaluate understanding of how technical decisions affect different stakeholders and the ability to incorporate those perspectives into research and product decisions. Topics include identifying key stakeholder groups such as customers merchants and delivery agents, selecting appropriate business and human centered metrics, anticipating negative externalities and equity concerns, prioritizing trade offs under conflicting objectives, collecting qualitative and quantitative feedback, and communicating outcomes to cross functional partners.
Lyft-Specific Product Problems & Analytical Approaches
Lyft-specific product challenges, problem framing, hypothesis generation, and data-driven decision making, focusing on experimentation design, metrics, and feature prioritization within the ride-hailing and on-demand transportation context. Includes product discovery, A/B testing, funnel analysis, and stakeholder alignment to improve rider and driver experiences and marketplace efficiency.
Problem Formulation and Requirements Analysis
The ability to clarify ambiguous product problems, identify and prioritize key success metrics, surface constraints, and scope the research or engineering work. Topics include translating product goals into measurable objectives, selecting primary and secondary metrics, distinguishing offline surrogate metrics from online business key performance indicators, surfacing latency and cost constraints, considering fairness and privacy requirements, and defining clear success criteria and evaluation plans. Interviewers will assess how candidates scope work, choose baselines, and plan stepwise validation.
Applied Problem Solving and Business Acumen
Demonstrate how you align technical solutions with measurable business outcomes. Provide examples of identifying high impact problems, scoping solutions, quantifying benefits and costs, selecting business oriented metrics, balancing short term experiments with long term investment, and communicating tradeoffs to product and operations stakeholders. Interviewers assess the ability to prioritize work that drives customer value and company goals.
Prototyping and Validation Strategy
Focuses on designing and evaluating prototypes to validate product ideas, features, or models before full implementation. Topics include choosing the right prototype fidelity from paper sketches to interactive prototypes, defining clear hypotheses and success criteria, selecting the right users or segments to test with, and deciding what to measure qualitatively and quantitatively. Covers experiment design principles such as control and treatment groups, split testing, sample size and statistical considerations, instrumentation and metrics collection, and using qualitative feedback to iterate. Emphasizes annotating what to test, how to recruit participants, how to interpret results robustly, and how to incorporate findings into subsequent iterations or production plans.