Product Management Topics
Product leadership, vision articulation, roadmap development, and feature prioritization. Focuses on product strategy and business alignment.
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.
Company Specific Documentation Strategy
Articulate a tailored vision for documentation excellence at the company, grounded in research of the company context and challenges. Describe first year priorities including audience analysis, content audit, documentation architecture, tooling and platform decisions, contributor and review workflows, style and governance, and measurements of success. Explain how you would scale documentation across products and teams, integrate documentation into development and onboarding processes, handle localization and versioning, and align documentation strategy with business goals such as reducing support load, improving time to value, or increasing developer adoption. Include stakeholder engagement plans, quick wins, long term roadmap items, and relevant trade offs between depth, discoverability, and maintenance cost.
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.
Scope Management and Prioritization
Covers how candidates make pragmatic trade offs between impact, effort, risk, and time when defining scope and setting priorities for projects and products. Topics include defining a minimum viable product, negotiating minimum viable scope, detecting and handling scope creep, and making go no go or defer decisions. Interviewers will probe prioritization frameworks and criteria, estimation approaches, metrics for evaluating impact and cost, change control processes, phased delivery and release planning, risk identification and mitigation strategies, and stakeholder alignment and communication. Candidates should be able to describe concrete processes, artifacts, and techniques such as roadmaps, release plans, backlog prioritization, trade off matrices, cost of delay analysis, risk registers, and examples where they protected schedules, restructured scope, or balanced quality, schedule, and team capacity to achieve outcomes.
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.
Technical Product Examples & Impact
Be prepared to briefly describe 2-3 technical products or features you've managed. Mention the technical complexity, the engineering collaboration involved, and the business/user impact achieved. This could include developer-focused products, APIs, platforms, or infrastructure-level features. Focus on outcomes: adoption metrics, developer satisfaction, or business value generated.
Strategic Documentation Leadership
Explain how documentation and developer or product content influence product adoption, user success, and product quality. Topics include documentation strategy, measuring documentation impact, integrating docs into product development, and building processes and tooling to scale documentation as the product grows.
Product Thinking for Two-Sided Platforms
Product thinking and strategy for multi-sided marketplaces (two-sided platforms) that connect distinct user groups (e.g., buyers and sellers). Covers platform value proposition for both sides, network effects, pricing and monetization, onboarding, governance, partner management, marketplace matchmaking, API/access strategies, trust and risk management, data-driven experimentation, metrics (e.g., take rate, engagement, cross-side conversion), and ecosystem design. Focuses on designing and scaling platforms with balanced incentives and sustainable network growth.