Product Management Topics
Product leadership, vision articulation, roadmap development, and feature prioritization. Focuses on product strategy and business alignment.
Impact Beyond Direct Team
Describe how you've influenced product strategy or direction beyond your immediate team. Examples: you shaped the company's approach to a new market, established cross-product standards, elevated the bar for product execution company-wide, or influenced executive strategy. Quantify impact when possible: 'By establishing a shared prioritization framework, the org went from 40 initiatives to 12 strategic ones, increasing focus.' Discuss how you balance your team's needs with company-wide contributions.
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.
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.
Business and Product Strategy Alignment
Demonstrate how product decisions and initiatives align to overarching business strategy and metrics. Explain how product priorities map to company objectives such as revenue growth, unit economics, customer acquisition and retention, market expansion, or cost efficiency. Discuss trade offs between short term growth and long term strategic health, how to influence and partner with product leadership, and how operational or design choices support business outcomes. Be ready to explain prioritization frameworks, stakeholder alignment approaches, and examples of aligning product or design work to measurable business goals.
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.
Technical Product Analysis
Demonstrate the ability to analyze technical product capabilities, identify core differentiators and meaningful benefits, and distinguish those from incremental improvements. Discuss approaches for feature benchmarking, mapping features to customer use cases and buyer outcomes, prioritizing messaging and content based on value, and collaborating with product to influence roadmap 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.
Competitive Technical Analysis
Analyse competing products and technical approaches to identify strengths, gaps, and market implications. Topics include feature parity matrices, architecture and integration comparisons, performance and scalability benchmarking, security and compliance assessments, developer experience evaluation including application programming interfaces and software development kits, and pricing and licensing analysis. Methods include reading product documentation, running hands on prototypes or benchmarks, reviewing third party reports, and conducting win loss interviews. Candidates should be able to synthesize findings into competitive matrices, technical teardown reports, and battlecards, prioritize gaps and risks, and recommend concrete actions for product, engineering, sales, and marketing. Emphasis is placed on validating claims, avoiding overstated conclusions, and translating technical findings into messaging and enablement materials.
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.