Product Management Topics
Product leadership, vision articulation, roadmap development, and feature prioritization. Focuses on product strategy and business alignment.
Structured Problem Solving for Technical Products
Approaching complex technical product problems systematically: clarifying the problem statement and constraints, defining requirements and success metrics, identifying key technical and product challenges, evaluating alternative approaches, making reasoned tradeoff decisions, and planning validation. Decomposing ambiguous problems into manageable pieces. Showing thinking process rather than jumping to conclusions.
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.
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.
Customer and User Focus
Demonstrating user centric thinking and long term customer focus. Candidates should explain who the end user is for a given effort, what problem is being solved, which user segment matters most, and how decisions balance short term metrics against long term customer benefit. Answers should show empathy for users, describe how user needs translate into product or operational priorities, and provide examples or frameworks for aligning customer outcomes with business objectives.
Competitive and Performance Strategy
Approaches for handling competitive threats, meeting demanding performance and scalability requirements, and managing challenging customer expectations. This covers assessing competitive differentiation, honest evaluation of product limitations, proposing short term mitigations and long term architectural investments, balancing feature velocity with reliability and performance, defining metrics and service level objectives for decision making, benchmarking and validation plans, communicating trade offs to stakeholders and customers, prioritization frameworks, and risk mitigation including rollbacks, feature gating, and escalation paths. Candidates should demonstrate how they frame problems, choose pragmatic solutions, and align product, engineering, and business stakeholders around trade offs.
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.
Product and Market Strategy
Strategic understanding of market context, customer needs, and how those inputs shape product decisions and go to market choices. Candidates should be able to analyze the competitive landscape, segment target customers, create buyer personas, and articulate clear value propositions and product market fit hypotheses. The topic includes market entry and expansion considerations, competitive positioning, and the translation of customer problems into prioritized product and growth initiatives. Interviewers will assess methods for customer research such as interviews, surveys, usage and cohort analysis, user testing, and market sizing including total addressable market and serviceable obtainable market estimates, as well as techniques for competitive analysis and feature benchmarking. Candidates should be able to map customer journeys, identify key friction points and monetization levers, and connect product changes to acquisition, activation, retention, revenue and referral outcomes. Assessment also covers prioritization frameworks and trade off reasoning, aligning product roadmaps with go to market investments, and advising cross functional partners such as sales, sales engineering, marketing and product management to drive adoption and retention.
Product and Domain Knowledge
Comprehensive understanding of a target company product suite, including core features, target customer segments, and common industry use cases. Ability to describe the technical architecture at both a high level and in detail, covering major components, data flows, integration points, and deployment options such as cloud and on premise. Understanding of scalability and performance characteristics, capacity planning, resilience and recovery strategies, security controls, and relevant compliance certifications. Knowledge of how the product exposes capabilities through application programming interfaces, connectors, or plug in mechanisms and how it integrates with third party systems and enterprise platforms. Preparedness to discuss product positioning and roadmap themes, competitive differentiation, typical deployment and operational challenges customers face, and the success metrics or business outcomes the product enables. This topic assesses product knowledge, systems thinking, architecture reasoning, and the ability to evaluate trade offs in the context of an existing commercial offering.
Product Knowledge Foundation
Baseline understanding of the company and its primary product or service: what problem it solves, who the users or customers are, the product value proposition, key features and capabilities, major components and high level technical architecture, and how it competes in the market. Candidates are expected to have researched the product enough to clearly summarize its purpose, target users, core workflows, and business goals, and to explain at a basic level how the technology and integrations enable those outcomes. Interviewers use this to assess research preparation, domain comprehension, ability to synthesize product information, and clear communication of product value rather than deep technical expertise.