Finance & Business Operations Topics
Financial management, budgeting, ROI analysis, and business operations. Covers financial forecasting, valuation, and operational metrics.
IT Vendor Management and Negotiations
Understand vendor selection, contract negotiation, SLA definition, and ongoing vendor management. Practice assessing vendor stability, competitive positioning, and roadmap alignment with organizational strategy. Learn to identify hidden costs and negotiate favorable terms.
IT Financial Management and ROI Assessment
Discuss IT budgeting, financial planning at scale (typically $10M-100M+), cost-benefit analysis for major initiatives, ROI measurement, and cost optimization strategies. Show understanding of capital vs. operational spending, CapEx to OpEx transitions, and financial governance.
Vendor and Partner Relationship Management
Comprehensive end to end management of external vendors, suppliers, agencies, freelancers, and strategic partners. Candidates should be able to discuss vendor landscape assessment and segmentation, selection criteria, request for proposal processes, and total cost of ownership analysis. The topic covers procurement and contracting skills including contract negotiation, governance models, pricing and terms negotiation, escalation clauses, and establishing service level agreements and performance metrics. It includes operational practices for onboarding and integrating external providers, communication and governance cadences, expectation setting, supplier development and capability improvement, and ongoing performance monitoring, reviews, and dispute resolution. Candidates should also be able to evaluate tradeoffs between insourcing and external partnerships, approaches to consolidation versus diversification, criteria and processes for deepening, replacing, or offboarding vendors, and collaborating with vendors to drive innovation and align vendor relationships to strategic business and technology objectives.
Business Case Development and Financial Analysis
Skills and practices for building persuasive business cases and performing financial analysis to justify investments and prioritization. Topics include enumerating and estimating cost categories such as implementation, licensing, development, infrastructure, deployment and ongoing support; quantifying tangible benefits such as cost savings, revenue uplift, productivity improvements and efficiency gains; and accounting for intangible benefits such as risk reduction, flexibility and employee satisfaction. Financial techniques include total cost of ownership, simple return on investment, payback period, net present value using discounted cash flows, internal rate of return, lifecycle cost analysis and build versus buy comparisons. Candidates should be able to construct cash flow timelines, separate capital and operating expenses, perform sensitivity and scenario analysis, estimate ranges and confidence, model procurement and vendor tradeoffs, and state assumptions clearly. Practical communication skills include tailoring the financial narrative and level of detail for finance leaders, procurement partners, technical stakeholders and executive sponsors, showing break even and sensitivity charts, defining success metrics and timelines, and describing how to track and report realized outcomes after implementation.
Financial Impact Quantification and Business Modeling
Ability to translate business decisions and strategies into quantitative financial outcomes and business cases. Involves estimating total addressable opportunity and expansion revenue, breaking down assumptions about reach conversion rates retention and adoption, calculating revenue lift and customer acquisition, and modeling costs implementation resource needs and payback periods. Includes building simple to moderate financial models that show effects on revenue costs profitability cash flow and balance sheet metrics, performing sensitivity analysis to identify which assumptions matter most, using benchmarks to justify assumptions, acknowledging uncertainty and risk, and describing commercial considerations such as sales cycles contract terms pricing structures and customer budget timing. At senior levels this also includes structuring deals, modeling multi year or consumption based pricing, and projecting customer lifetime value and payback.
Technology Investment and Vendor Management
Covers the end to end process of proposing, justifying, funding, and managing technology investments. Candidates should be able to build a compelling business case that articulates strategic alignment, expected benefits, costs, risks, timelines, and measurable success metrics. Topics include calculating return on investment and total cost of ownership, comparing build versus buy options, creating cost benefit analyses, prioritization frameworks, budgeting and forecasting, and procurement processes. Also includes vendor selection and relationship management practices such as request for proposals, vendor evaluation criteria, contract negotiation, service level agreements, vendor performance monitoring, and governance to ensure value delivery. At senior levels this may include profit and loss responsibility, capital allocation trade offs, stakeholder alignment, and post implementation measurement and optimization.
Vendor Evaluation and Selection
Comprehensive frameworks and practical practices for evaluating selecting and validating third party vendors tools and technology suppliers. Topics include requirement gathering and stakeholder alignment translating business needs into clear evaluation criteria capability assessment and gap analysis integration and data architecture fit and trade off analysis between features cost and implementation complexity. The topic covers vendor due diligence such as company stability and roadmap alignment support and service quality security and compliance posture and commercial factors including pricing models total cost of ownership and return on investment. It explains practical evaluation mechanisms including request for proposal design and management scoring matrices vendor demonstrations proof of concept pilots with success criteria reference checks and build versus buy analysis. Also included are negotiation preparation contract and service level agreement negotiation post implementation success metrics monitoring and ongoing vendor relationship and performance management. Interviewers assess the candidate ability to make defensible selection decisions balance technical and business priorities manage procurement and vendor relationships and measure outcomes after deployment across domains such as security technologies enterprise platforms and marketing technology.
IT Budgeting and Financial Management
Cover development and governance of information technology budgets, financial planning and ongoing cost optimization. Topics include building budgets tied to business priorities, understanding cost drivers and total cost of ownership, operating cloud spend and cloud cost governance, chargeback and cost allocation models, capital versus operating spend considerations, vendor and contract negotiation, and showing return on investment and cost effectiveness. Discuss metrics and reporting that demonstrate financial stewardship, techniques for cost reduction that preserve service quality, and practices such as financial operations to continually optimize spend.
Business and Financial Acumen
This topic assesses the candidate ability to link commercial decisions to company financial outcomes and to use financial metrics to drive recommendations. Core skills include understanding and calculating return on investment, modeling revenue scenarios, assessing account profitability and customer lifetime value, and estimating payback periods. Candidates should be comfortable discussing pricing strategy, discounting approaches, contract economics, partnership revenue splits, and vendor negotiations. It also covers practical budget management skills such as allocating spend across headcount and programs, defending budget requests, and prioritizing investments based on financial impact. At a strategic level, candidates must demonstrate the ability to interpret business metrics to diagnose root causes of performance changes, evaluate trade offs between growth and profitability, and recommend actions that align operational choices with overall company strategy.