Product Management Topics
Product leadership, vision articulation, roadmap development, and feature prioritization. Focuses on product strategy and business alignment.
Customer and Market Analysis
Covers the full range of activities for understanding customers, markets, and how those insights map to business opportunities. Candidates should be able to describe systematic market research methodologies including quantitative sources such as market reports and analytics, and qualitative methods such as customer interviews and user research. Demonstrate ability to analyze competitive landscape, buying criteria, total addressable market sizing, and trends that influence customer decision making. Include skills for gathering and synthesizing customer feedback and support data, distinguishing between isolated complaints and systemic pain points, identifying patterns and themes, and turning insights into prioritized product or service opportunities. Also assess business acumen by showing how technical or product decisions impact customer value, cost, and adoption, and by prioritizing work based on measurable customer and business impact.
Cross Functional Growth and Product Integration
Covers how growth goals and initiatives are integrated across product, engineering, marketing, support, and operations, and how tooling and system integrations enable that work. Topics include aligning product roadmaps with growth objectives, identifying which growth initiatives require product changes, and working with engineering to prioritize and deliver growth features while balancing technical velocity and long term roadmap health. Includes prioritization frameworks and trade off analysis for acquisition versus retention decisions, hypothesis driven experimentation, and using product analytics and instrumentation to inform roadmap and test decisions. Also covers ecosystem thinking for integrations between customer relationship management systems, analytics platforms, billing and payment systems, support tooling, and the product platform. Candidates should be able to evaluate new tools for fit with existing systems, design data and integration flows to give cross functional teams access to required signals, describe collaboration patterns between growth and product managers, and explain how to run rapid minimum viable product experiments and iterate based on metrics.
Prioritization and Stakeholder Alignment
Covers frameworks and practices for prioritizing work, aligning stakeholders, and allocating limited resources across features projects and operational needs. Topics include impact versus effort and weighted scoring models, RICE and similar frameworks, sequencing dependent work, handling competing or conflicting priorities, negotiating trade offs with business and engineering partners, creating governance and escalation paths, communicating deprioritization decisions, and measuring outcomes to validate prioritization. Senior assessments include strategic resource allocation across teams and portfolios and techniques for building cross functional consensus.
Product and Engineering Collaboration and Prioritization
Practices and skills for partnering with product management, engineering teams, and senior leadership to align priorities, make trade offs, and deliver customer and business value. Interviews evaluate how a candidate builds cross functional relationships, establishes collaborative planning and roadmapping processes, and translates strategic goals into prioritized work. Key aspects include balancing engineering vision and technical quality with product needs and time to market, advocating for engineering concerns such as scalability and reliability in leadership forums, ensuring engineers understand the why behind work, negotiating and resolving disagreements with product partners, and using prioritization frameworks and impact metrics to drive decisions. Expect to describe concrete examples of stakeholder communication, decision making frameworks, trade off negotiation, and how you represented engineering interests while keeping product outcomes central.
Customer Obsession
Prioritizing customer needs and working backward from customer experiences to shape decisions and roadmaps. Includes gathering and using customer feedback, balancing internal convenience against customer value, and making trade offs that demonstrably improve the user experience or customer outcomes.
Product Advocacy & Feedback Synthesis
Demonstrate how you gather customer insights, synthesize patterns across your book of business, and advocate to product teams for features or improvements. Show data-driven approach to prioritization and ability to influence product roadmap.
Customer Needs and Pain Point Analysis
Demonstrate your ability to identify and deeply understand customer pain points. Discuss how you'd conduct customer research, gather feedback, and translate insights into product requirements. Show how customer needs inform your strategic vision.
Customer Obsession and Business Impact
Covers how candidates balance deep customer empathy with measurable business outcomes. Interviewers assess understanding of customer needs, use cases, and the quantifiable value the product delivers such as cost savings, revenue impact, efficiency gains, and risk reduction. Candidates should demonstrate business acumen including unit economics, revenue model awareness, competitive context, and how engineering or operational decisions map to business metrics. Expect examples of prioritization and trade offs where customer satisfaction and business constraints conflict, and explanations of how decisions were aligned to maximize customer value while preserving return on investment.
Product Advocacy and Policy Trade Offs
Focuses on representing the voice of customers and support teams in product and policy decisions. Interviewers probe how candidates identify trade offs between user experience, support volume, compliance, and platform trust; how they use quantitative and qualitative data to recommend policy changes; and how they build influence with product, engineering, legal, and operations stakeholders. Topics include designing experiments to measure policy impact, planning rollouts and communication, defining rollback and mitigation plans, and translating support insights into product roadmaps while balancing operational constraints.