Business Strategy & Performance Topics
Business strategy, competitive analysis, market opportunities, and strategic innovation. Includes market research, competitive positioning, and business planning.
Market Research and Sources
Covers methods and information sources for researching a market opportunity or industry. Candidates should demonstrate how to define the market and relevant questions to answer, identify and use secondary sources such as industry analyst reports, government statistics, company filings, trade publications, subscription databases, and public financial data, and conduct primary research such as customer interviews, surveys, and expert calls. Key skills include market sizing and growth estimation using top down and bottom up approaches, competitor mapping and positioning, segmentation and customer need analysis, identifying barriers to entry and regulatory constraints, estimating addressable market and serviceable market, validating assumptions, triangulating multiple data sources, and recognizing data quality and bias. Interviewers may probe frameworks for structuring market research, how to prioritize information needs, how to convert findings into market opportunity estimates and go to market implications, and how to document sources and assumptions.
Market Research and Competitive Landscape
Broad market analysis capabilities including identifying major competitors, assessing market dynamics and pricing strategies, sizing markets using top down and bottom up approaches, validating customer pain points, and prioritizing opportunities. Encompasses competitor mapping, market sizing, trend analysis, and turning market research into strategic recommendations.
Strategic Partnership and Business Alignment
Working with business leaders to translate strategic objectives into partnership, talent, or organizational solutions that drive business outcomes. Topics include diagnosing business problems through a people or operations lens, designing partnership models or talent strategies to address business drivers, evaluating P and L impact, improving operational efficiency through cross functional collaboration, stakeholder engagement and change enablement, and measuring the effectiveness of partnership and alignment initiatives. Candidates should show examples of influencing business decisions, structuring partnerships or talent interventions, and tracking outcomes.
Problem Structuring and Analytical Frameworks
The ability to convert ambiguous business problems into clear, testable, and actionable analytical questions and frameworks. Candidates should demonstrate how to clarify the decision to be informed and success metrics, break large problems into smaller components, and organize thinking using hypothesis driven approaches, issue trees, or mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive groupings. This includes generating hypotheses, identifying key drivers and uncertainties, specifying required data sources and any necessary transformations, choosing analytical methods, estimating effort and impact, sequencing and prioritizing analyses or experiments, and planning next steps that produce evidence to guide decisions. Interviewers also assess evaluation of trade offs, recommending a decision with a clear rationale, effective communication of structure and findings, and comfort operating with incomplete information. The scope includes applying general case structuring as well as specialized frameworks such as growth funnel analysis that maps acquisition, activation, revenue, retention, and referral, audience segmentation and competitive assessment frameworks, content and channel strategy, and operational step by step approaches. For more junior candidates the emphasis is on clear structure, systematic thinking, strong rationale, and prioritized next steps rather than exhaustive optimization.
Meta Business Model and Monetization
Deep knowledge of how Meta generates revenue across platforms and product lines and the economics behind different monetization approaches. Candidates should be able to explain advertising economics and pricing dynamics, commerce and transaction flows, creator monetization mechanics, subscription and device revenue where applicable, and partner revenue share arrangements. Interviewers will evaluate the candidate s ability to analyze key financial metrics, assess impacts from privacy and regulatory changes, design monetization experiments, and recommend partnership revenue structures that balance growth and profitability.
Meta Strategic Positioning and Growth
Ability to analyze Meta s strategic positioning in the competitive landscape and to propose realistic growth initiatives and defensive plays. Candidates should demonstrate awareness of major competitors and substitutes, the company s core advantages and vulnerabilities, and recent strategic pivots or investments. Interviewers evaluate the use of market sizing, competitive benchmarking, and strategic trade off analysis to prioritize opportunities and determine where partnerships or product moves will create the most leverage. The topic spans near term tactical growth initiatives and longer term strategic bets across advertising, commerce, creator economy, artificial intelligence, and immersive experiences.
Situation Analysis and Strategic Thinking
Analyzing complex business situations and applying strategic thought processes to identify drivers, risks, and opportunities. Includes structuring ambiguous problems, stakeholder mapping, diagnosing root causes, developing hypotheses, outlining options, assessing implementation risks, and recommending measurable actions. Candidates should demonstrate frameworks for situational assessment, logical reasoning, and how to surface key assumptions to inform strategic decisions.
Business Judgment and Risk Tradeoffs
Assess and communicate tradeoffs between business value, legal risk, operational cost, and security and compliance outcomes to enable informed decision making. This competency includes making sound decisions with incomplete information, exercising appropriate initiative, and judging when to escalate versus decide independently; providing advice that is proportionate to the business context and supporting calculated risk taking when business justification warrants it; quantifying investments and initiatives using business metrics such as return on investment, total cost of ownership, and risk reduction value; building business justification that balances cost effectiveness, operational efficiency, and risk mitigation; distinguishing between showstopper risks and manageable issues; avoiding overly conservative approaches that prevent action or innovation; and aligning recommendations with stakeholder priorities and organizational risk appetite.
Market and Trend Analysis
Techniques for researching markets, identifying trends, sizing opportunities, and translating market signals into strategic recommendations. Covers market research methodologies such as surveys, competitive analysis, secondary research, and social listening; time series and trend decomposition approaches; market sizing frameworks such as total addressable market and serviceable obtainable market; and presenting findings to influence product, marketing, or go to market decisions. Includes application to digital channels such as search opportunity identification when relevant.