Business Strategy & Performance Topics
Business strategy, competitive analysis, market opportunities, and strategic innovation. Includes market research, competitive positioning, and business planning.
Business Acumen and Organizational Impact
Covers the candidate ability to understand a company business model, market dynamics, competitive landscape, and organizational structure, and to translate that understanding into strategic actions that align talent and operational initiatives with organizational priorities. Candidates should be able to explain how they learn the business context, identify strategic priorities and talent gaps, and design programs or processes that support growth stage objectives and competitive positioning. Equally important is demonstrating measurable outcomes: prepare two to three concrete examples that show business impact such as improved retention, reduced time to hire, cost savings, increased revenue contribution, productivity gains, or successful cross functional change initiatives. At senior levels, examples should span multiple functions or business units and include the business problem, the strategic approach, stakeholder engagement, trade offs, metrics used, and quantifiable results.
Business Acumen and Alignment
Understanding how organizational priorities, business drivers, and financial constraints influence technical and operational decisions. This includes speaking the language of finance and product, linking engineering or infrastructure work to business outcomes such as revenue, user experience, cost, security priorities, procurement and vendor strategy, and assessing trade offs. Candidates should demonstrate the ability to translate technical choices into business impact and align team priorities with organizational goals.
Technology & Operations Strategy Decisions
Prepare to work through technology/operations strategy scenarios. Example: Should we migrate to a new CRM and what's the implementation plan; We need to consolidate from 5 sales tech tools down to 3—how do you approach this; We're expanding internationally—how do you adapt our operations model. For each, consider business drivers, tradeoffs, stakeholder impact, and implementation complexity.
DoorDash Business Model & Trade-offs
Analysis of DoorDash's business model within a platform-based marketplace context, including revenue streams (delivery fees, commissions, subscription), cost structure (logistics, driver incentives), partnerships, pricing strategies, market expansion decisions, and the strategic trade-offs between growth, profitability, and delivering value to customers.
Cross Functional Business Thinking
Ability to analyze business problems by synthesizing perspectives, metrics, and constraints across multiple functions such as finance, marketing, sales, operations, product, and engineering. Candidates should demonstrate how financial assumptions affect operational decisions and vice versa, estimate and compare revenues, costs, capacity and opportunity cost, and surface trade offs between speed, quality, and investment. This includes anticipating interdependencies, balancing stakeholder priorities, creating integrated recommendations that reflect both quantitative analysis and qualitative considerations, and communicating clear rationale for decisions. Interviewers may probe scenario modeling, framework use for prioritization, handling conflicting inputs from different teams, and approaches for aligning cross functional stakeholders to a single course of action.
Case and Business Frameworks
Techniques for structuring analytical and persuasive responses to business problems in interviews and real world settings. Covers the end to end approach: clarifying the situation and objectives, scoping and prioritizing issues, forming a hypothesis, and building a logical, mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive breakdown or issue tree. Includes common case interview frameworks such as profitability analysis, market entry, pricing, growth and operations, as well as business case components like problem statement, proposed solutions, cost benefit analysis, financial metrics such as return on investment and payback period, implementation plan, risk identification and mitigation, stakeholder impact, and success metrics. Emphasizes quantitative estimation and back of the envelope calculations, qualitative considerations such as competitive positioning and customer impact, synthesis into a clear recommendation, and communication techniques for telling a compelling business story under time pressure.
Company Business Model and Product Market Understanding
Demonstrate understanding of how the company creates and captures value through its business model and product offering. This includes knowledge of the product portfolio, value proposition, target customer segments, use cases, pricing model, and how products map to market needs. Candidates should be able to explain how the company makes money, the primary revenue streams, product positioning, and how product decisions affect customer value and strategic direction.