Product Management Topics
Product leadership, vision articulation, roadmap development, and feature prioritization. Focuses on product strategy and business alignment.
Prioritization and Trade-Off Decisions
Making and defending a ranked decision about what to work on among competing options under conflicting goals, incomplete data, and time pressure. Covers explicit prioritization frameworks (RICE, ICE, MoSCoW, Kano, weighted scoring, impact vs effort, cost of delay, WSJF) and how to make their inputs honest: handling low-confidence estimates, testing whether a ranking is stable, and guarding against gaming, sponsor seniority and recency bias. Also covers backlog and request triage, feature and scope trade-offs, technical debt, reliability, security, compliance and accessibility work versus new features, large-customer and sales-driven requests versus the roadmap, sequencing a limited set of options, urgent interruptions and incidents versus planned work, deciding whether a single initiative on the list should continue or stop, saying no or not now and communicating a deprioritization, documenting a call and later checking whether it was right, and the governance and escalation used to settle prioritization disputes. Assesses whether a candidate can make and stand behind a defensible call rather than treating everything as equally important. Excludes architecture and technology-selection trade-offs, supplier and sourcing decisions, experiment and metric design, portfolio budget and headcount allocation, and delivery trade-offs inside an already committed project.
Customer and User Obsession
Reasoning from the customer or end user inward when making decisions in any role: building empathy for users, including buyers who are not the people who use the product; identifying and prioritizing customer pain points and workarounds; collecting and acting on customer feedback, including how representative it is, how it compares with usage data or satisfaction scores, and how it reaches the people who can act; bringing the voice of the customer into roadmap and technical trade-offs; advocating for users against internal or deadline pressure; and balancing customer needs against business goals and engineering constraints, such as a large account's bespoke request, power users versus everyday users, or retiring a feature. Includes stories of changing course because of customers or recovering after letting one down. Assesses whether a candidate starts from the customer's problem rather than from features or technology. Study design and fieldwork, research synthesis, personas and journey maps, analytics and experimentation mechanics, reliability engineering, customer-success operations, market and competitive research methods, and live handling of angry customers are covered elsewhere.