Business Strategy & Performance Topics
Business strategy, competitive analysis, market opportunities, and strategic innovation. Includes market research, competitive positioning, and business planning.
Problem Structuring and Analytical Frameworks
The ability to convert ambiguous business problems into clear, testable, and actionable analytical questions and frameworks. Candidates should demonstrate how to clarify the decision to be informed and success metrics, break large problems into smaller components, and organize thinking using hypothesis driven approaches, issue trees, or mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive groupings. This includes generating hypotheses, identifying key drivers and uncertainties, specifying required data sources and any necessary transformations, choosing analytical methods, estimating effort and impact, sequencing and prioritizing analyses or experiments, and planning next steps that produce evidence to guide decisions. Interviewers also assess evaluation of trade offs, recommending a decision with a clear rationale, effective communication of structure and findings, and comfort operating with incomplete information. The scope includes applying general case structuring as well as specialized frameworks such as growth funnel analysis that maps acquisition, activation, revenue, retention, and referral, audience segmentation and competitive assessment frameworks, content and channel strategy, and operational step by step approaches. For more junior candidates the emphasis is on clear structure, systematic thinking, strong rationale, and prioritized next steps rather than exhaustive optimization.
DoorDash Business Model & Trade-offs
Analysis of DoorDash's business model within a platform-based marketplace context, including revenue streams (delivery fees, commissions, subscription), cost structure (logistics, driver incentives), partnerships, pricing strategies, market expansion decisions, and the strategic trade-offs between growth, profitability, and delivering value to customers.
Business Strategy and Alignment
Covers how projects, technical decisions, metrics, and operational governance are connected to an organization's strategic objectives. Candidates should demonstrate the ability to translate high level strategy into executable plans, prioritize initiatives that create measurable business value such as revenue, cost reduction, customer experience, or time to market, and recognize consequences of misalignment. Includes metric governance and dashboard ownership processes, defining metric definitions, assigning owners, managing technical debt in reporting systems, and evolving measurement as priorities change. Interviewers assess business literacy, use of business language when explaining technical trade offs, stakeholder communication, and examples where alignment succeeded or where misalignment created problems.
Market and Competitive Analysis
Assessment of market dynamics, customer segments, and the competitive landscape to inform product, go to market, and business strategy. Candidates should be able to identify and prioritize key competitors, compare strengths and weaknesses, map target customer segments and buyer personas, and perform market sizing and segmentation to quantify opportunity and risk. This topic includes evaluating market trends and adoption patterns, interpreting competitive moves, and using evidence and metrics such as market share trends, growth rates, customer acquisition cost, and unit economics to justify recommendations. It also covers developing defensible positioning and differentiation, translating competitive insights into go to market messaging, sales and marketing differentiation, pricing and channel choices, product roadmap decisions, and identifying product or content gaps. Candidates should be able to describe frameworks and methods for competitor and market assessment, outline how to monitor competitors and market signals over time, and explain how external insights drive prioritization and strategic tradeoffs across product, marketing, and sales.
Measurement Strategy and Frameworks
Covers how to create and apply structured measurement approaches that connect activities to business outcomes. Candidates should be able to define leading and lagging indicators, build measurement frameworks and dashboards, baseline current performance, set targets, choose appropriate KPIs, and design attribution and reporting approaches. Includes thinking about vanity versus meaningful metrics, frequency of measurement, sampling and data quality considerations, and how to use measurement to drive learning and course correction across programs or initiatives.
KPI Frameworks and Governance
Design and governance of metric hierarchies and key performance indicator frameworks that translate business goals into measurable outcomes. Topics include creating tiered frameworks and KPI trees that roll product and team level metrics up to company objectives, defining a north star metric and supporting metrics, aligning metrics with objectives and key results, setting targets thresholds and guardrails, and establishing metric standards ownership and governance to prevent gaming. Also covers mapping KPIs to functional outcomes such as awareness consideration conversion and retention, deciding cadence and visualization for reporting, building repeatable frameworks for scaling metrics across teams, and handling competing metric definitions.