Product Management Topics
Product leadership, vision articulation, roadmap development, and feature prioritization. Focuses on product strategy and business alignment.
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.
Company Product Strategy and Roadmap
Research and clearly articulate the company product strategy, business model, and the broader organizational and market context in which products operate. Explain core products and product lines, target customer segments, value propositions, monetization models, key performance metrics, recent initiatives and launches, and relevant industry and financial context. Understand how the product area fits into the company wide multi year vision and strategic priorities, and be ready to discuss the product roadmap, trade offs, resource allocation decisions, team structure and growth plans, and competitive dynamics. Be prepared to demonstrate how the role you are interviewing for contributes to strategic objectives and product priorities, including expected deliverables, stakeholder relationships, and the support and constraints you would face. Prepare thoughtful questions for hiring managers about strategic direction, organizational priorities, and roadmap trade offs.
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 and User Obsession
Demonstrating a deep commitment to understanding and advocating for customers and end users. Candidates should show how they prioritize user needs in decision making, even when it conflicts with other priorities, and provide concrete examples of advocating for users internally. Topics include using qualitative and quantitative research to surface user pain points, validating assumptions with user evidence, designing or improving experiences to solve real problems, maintaining ongoing connection to users through feedback loops, and influencing stakeholders to keep the organization user focused. Examples may range from entry level empathy and direct customer learning to strategic changes driven by user insight.
Domain and Product Technical Knowledge
Evaluation of deep, domain specific technical knowledge relevant to the team, product, or role. Candidates should demonstrate subject matter expertise in the relevant problem space and be able to explain core concepts, architectures, algorithms, and practical engineering trade offs. Example domains include recommendation systems, data platform engineering, security, and analytics, as well as platform areas such as application programming interface platform management, developer experience, deployment orchestration, infrastructure and reliability, and observability. Expect questions on domain specific algorithms, data pipelines, real time versus batch trade offs, feature stores, data governance, versioning strategies, integration patterns, common customer use cases, and typical product pain points. For product focused roles, be prepared to explain core product features, typical customer workflows, integration points, and how domain constraints influence product decisions. For role or platform focused discussions, describe how the domain shapes responsibilities, challenges, and priorities and outline approaches to initial discovery, diagnosis, and early improvements. This topic tests both conceptual depth and the ability to map domain knowledge to concrete product and engineering decisions.
Core Product Metrics and KPIs
Deep understanding of key product metrics (DAU, MAU, retention, churn rate, engagement, NPS, ARPU, conversion funnels) and how they relate to business objectives. Ability to define appropriate success metrics for different product initiatives and tie them to business goals. Understanding of leading vs. lagging indicators.