Product Management Topics
Product leadership, vision articulation, roadmap development, and feature prioritization. Focuses on product strategy and business alignment.
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.
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 Strategy and Roadmapping
Covers defining, communicating, and operationalizing multi quarter to multi year technical and engineering strategy that aligns engineering investments with product and business objectives. Candidates should be able to describe planning horizons, trade offs between near term delivery and long term investment, and how strategic direction maps to architecture and platform decisions. Topic coverage includes migration and modernization planning, assessing current state and technical debt, sequencing initiatives and milestones, prioritization frameworks and cost of delay thinking, capacity and resource planning including hiring and team structure, vendor evaluation and integration, compliance and data considerations, governance and operating model, and execution planning with timelines and review cadences. It also includes balancing feature delivery, reliability, platform evolution, developer experience, and maintenance; making the business case for infrastructure and platform investments; defining success metrics and objectives and key results and measuring outcomes; risk identification, mitigation and contingency planning; and communicating roadmaps and trade offs to engineers, product leaders, business stakeholders, and executives. Domain specific concerns such as cloud adoption, business intelligence roadmaps, and marketing technology integration are included as examples of how technical strategy varies by context.
Competitive Positioning Analysis
Assess the candidate s ability to analyze and articulate a company s competitive advantages and strategic positioning in a specific market. For a Netflix example, candidates should evaluate differences between advertising and subscription models, the role of original content and catalog breadth, user engagement metrics and time spent, audience scale and demographics, first party data and targeting capabilities, quality of ad inventory in connected television, available ad formats and measurement limitations, pricing and bundling trade offs, churn and retention dynamics, content licensing economics, distribution and partner strategies, and regulatory or brand safety considerations. Candidates should be able to compare Netflix to competitors such as Amazon Prime Video, YouTube, and traditional television, explain the advertiser value proposition, identify risks and gaps, and propose concrete strategic recommendations for product features, monetization experiments, measurement partnerships, or go to market moves to defend or expand market position. Interviewers are assessing market analysis, product and monetization sense, trade off evaluation, and strategic recommendation skills.
Customer Obsession
Prioritizing customer needs and working backward from customer experiences to shape decisions and roadmaps. Includes gathering and using customer feedback, balancing internal convenience against customer value, and making trade offs that demonstrably improve the user experience or customer outcomes.
Problem Definition & Customer Empathy
Ability to deeply understand customer problems, segment customers by needs, identify root causes of friction, and resist jumping to solutions before fully understanding the problem landscape.
Strategic Decision Making
Making high level product operations or account related decisions when resources or time are limited and priorities conflict. Candidates should show the ability to gather stakeholder perspectives identify and generate creative options evaluate trade offs explicitly across cost timeline risk and strategic value and recommend a clear path forward with rationale. The topic includes prioritization frameworks decision gates escalation policies negotiation with cross functional teams trade off communication building alignment and buy in contingency planning and assessing long term consequences. Candidates should be able to demonstrate balancing customer needs business objectives and engineering capacity while avoiding unnecessary escalation.
Product and Analytics Expertise
Show deep knowledge of product capabilities, typical use cases, and the analytics that drive measurement and insight. Describe the product architecture at a high level, which metrics matter for different customer segments, how to interpret usage patterns and adoption signals, and how to translate technical capabilities into business outcomes. Explain how you stay current with the product roadmap, partner with product and engineering, and act as a subject matter expert who can influence both technical and business stakeholders. Interviewers assess technical fluency, domain knowledge, and the ability to surface data driven recommendations.