Product Management Topics
Product leadership, vision articulation, roadmap development, and feature prioritization. Focuses on product strategy and business alignment.
Product and Business Impact
Assesses understanding of how technical decisions affect product experience and business metrics. Topics include marketplace dynamics, user needs and behavior, conversion and retention considerations, prioritizing work by impact, experiment and metric design, and connecting engineering trade offs to measurable product outcomes. Candidates should demonstrate curiosity about business drivers and the ability to incorporate product and metric thinking into technical planning.
Technology and Business Alignment
How technical decisions and investments enable product innovation and business outcomes. Candidates should be prepared to explain frameworks for aligning architecture and platform choices with customer value revenue and competitive differentiation, building business cases and return on investment analysis for technical work, prioritizing product features versus technical debt based on impact, and examples where infrastructure or platform changes unlocked new product capabilities or accelerated delivery. Also cover measurement strategies stakeholder communication and cross functional roadmapping that balance short term delivery and long term strategic goals.
Customer and User Focus & Ownership
Ability to think about end-user impact, taking ownership of problems, understanding business context, and going beyond requirements to deliver value. Examples of when you cared about user experience or business outcomes.
Managing Technical Investment vs. Feature Velocity
Specific examples of how you've balanced shipping new features with investing in infrastructure, refactoring, security, and reliability. How you build business case for technical work, communicate necessity to product teams, and negotiate balanced roadmap.
Technical Strategy and Roadmapping
Covers defining, communicating, and operationalizing multi quarter to multi year technical and engineering strategy that aligns engineering investments with product and business objectives. Candidates should be able to describe planning horizons, trade offs between near term delivery and long term investment, and how strategic direction maps to architecture and platform decisions. Topic coverage includes migration and modernization planning, assessing current state and technical debt, sequencing initiatives and milestones, prioritization frameworks and cost of delay thinking, capacity and resource planning including hiring and team structure, vendor evaluation and integration, compliance and data considerations, governance and operating model, and execution planning with timelines and review cadences. It also includes balancing feature delivery, reliability, platform evolution, developer experience, and maintenance; making the business case for infrastructure and platform investments; defining success metrics and objectives and key results and measuring outcomes; risk identification, mitigation and contingency planning; and communicating roadmaps and trade offs to engineers, product leaders, business stakeholders, and executives. Domain specific concerns such as cloud adoption, business intelligence roadmaps, and marketing technology integration are included as examples of how technical strategy varies by context.
Roadmap Planning and Multi Project Management
Planning and managing product or program level roadmaps that span quarters or years across multiple projects and teams. This includes prioritization and sequencing of features, infrastructure investments, technical debt work, and experiments while balancing limited resources and competing priorities. Candidates should demonstrate the ability to manage parallel projects, identify and surface cross team dependencies and bottlenecks, perform critical path thinking at a roadmap level, sequence work to maintain momentum, and handle partner or customer driven disruptions. Also includes stakeholder communication and alignment, communicating realistic timelines, negotiating trade offs across teams, and escalation strategies when shared resources or delayed dependencies require roadmap changes.
Emerging Technologies and Innovation Strategy
Frameworks and practices for scanning, evaluating, piloting, and adopting new technologies in a product and platform context. Candidates should describe how to assess technical maturity, business fit, implementation cost, operational implications, pilot design and success metrics, pathways from experiment to production, and how to balance innovation investments against core reliability and scalability needs. Examples may include machine learning for optimization, automation and autonomy, and real time system improvements.
Execution Discipline and Accountability
Assesses the ability to translate strategy into concrete execution and to own outcomes end to end. Expect to describe how you prioritize initiatives, create delivery plans, assign ownership, track progress with milestones and metrics, identify and remove blockers, make trade off decisions, and perform post mortems or retrospectives. Demonstrate how you hold yourself and teams accountable to commitments, course correct when needed, and drive initiatives to timely, measurable results rather than leaving success to planning alone.
Technology Vision and Strategic Roadmap
Covers how to formulate and communicate a three to five year technology vision and a prioritized strategic roadmap that supports business outcomes. Candidates should explain how to identify high impact strategic bets, define measurable success criteria and key performance indicators, sequence investments between platform and product work, allocate resources across innovation and maintenance, and plan for technical debt reduction. The topic includes stakeholder alignment and communication, risk assessment and mitigation plans, and how to operationalize the roadmap into quarterly and annual plans while retaining adaptability.