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.
Defining and Using Success Metrics
Learn to propose metrics that directly tie to business or product goals. Understand primary metrics (direct measure of success, like feature adoption rate or API call volume) versus secondary metrics (supporting indicators like latency, error rates, or user satisfaction). Practice proposing 2-3 realistic metrics for different scenarios. At entry-level, you don't need statistical sophistication, but you should understand how to measure whether something worked and why certain metrics matter.
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.
Onboarding and Activation
Optimizing onboarding and activation addresses the first user experiences that convert new sign ups into engaged users who reach a key aha moment. Important concepts include defining the activation metric for your product, mapping the onboarding funnel, and measuring time to first action, day one activation, day seven retention, and completion rates for onboarding steps. Tactics include email and walkthrough sequences, in app guided tours, progressive disclosure, checklists, welcome content, product tours, contextual help, and first task optimization. Analytical skills include funnel analysis, cohorting, segmentation, instrumentation, event tracking, and A B testing to validate hypotheses. Candidates should demonstrate experience identifying high impact friction points, designing experiments, interpreting results, iterating on flows, and collaborating with product design and engineering to implement changes. Discussions may also cover personalization, internationalization, support integration, and how onboarding improvements map to downstream retention and monetization.
Metrics and Success Measurement
Defining meaningful program and product metrics, translating business objectives into measurable outcomes, selecting and tracking key performance indicators such as adoption, quality, and stakeholder satisfaction, and establishing measurement plans and reporting cadence. Assess the candidate's ability to choose actionable metrics, set targets, instrument and interpret data, and use metrics to drive decisions and transparency.
Launch Planning and Sequencing
Structured planning for product or feature launches, including defining launch tiers and timelines, aligning internal stakeholders, and sequencing activities across markets, personas, and channels. Candidates should show comfort with launch tiering such as soft launches, beta programs, and general availability; readiness assessments for customers and internal teams; sales enablement and support readiness; pre launch validation and beta feedback incorporation; ramp and scaling strategies; go to market sequencing across regions and segments; success criteria and measurement by launch tier; contingency and rollback planning; and cross functional coordination with product, engineering, marketing, sales, and operations.
Product and Growth Problem Solving
Assessment of a candidate's ability to diagnose product and growth challenges and to design prioritized, measurable solutions using structured frameworks and hypothesis driven thinking. Candidates should demonstrate how they ask diagnostic questions, gather and interpret relevant data, form testable hypotheses, define success metrics and key performance indicators, prioritize experiments and interventions between low cost quick wins and longer term initiatives, and communicate trade offs and risks to stakeholders. Familiarity with common growth frameworks is expected, for example Acquisition Activation Retention Revenue and Referral, growth loops, funnel analysis, and customer lifecycle mapping, as well as product design approaches such as the CIRCLES framework which stands for Comprehend Identify Recognize Clarify List Evaluate and Summarize and the Ask Answer Recommend Move forward framework. Evaluation focuses on choosing or adapting an appropriate framework for the scenario, breaking problems into components, reasoning quantitatively about metrics and trade offs, generating multiple solution options, proposing prioritized implementation and measurement plans, and designing experiments for validation and iteration. At senior and staff levels candidates are expected to show cross functional collaboration, stakeholder alignment, iteration of proposals based on early data and feedback, and articulation of end to end rollout and measurement strategies.
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.