Product Management Topics
Product leadership, vision articulation, roadmap development, and feature prioritization. Focuses on product strategy and business alignment.
Defining and Using Success Metrics
Learn to propose metrics that directly tie to business or product goals. Understand primary metrics (direct measure of success, like feature adoption rate or API call volume) versus secondary metrics (supporting indicators like latency, error rates, or user satisfaction). Practice proposing 2-3 realistic metrics for different scenarios. At entry-level, you don't need statistical sophistication, but you should understand how to measure whether something worked and why certain metrics matter.
Ambiguous Product Scenario Navigation
Develop your approach to product scenarios with incomplete information. Practice asking targeted clarifying questions (user context, business goals, constraints, success metrics), sizing the problem, and building a logical approach step-by-step. At Staff level, also articulate how you'd establish decision-making frameworks for the future so similar questions are resolved faster.
Company Product Strategy and Roadmap
Research and clearly articulate the company product strategy, business model, and the broader organizational and market context in which products operate. Explain core products and product lines, target customer segments, value propositions, monetization models, key performance metrics, recent initiatives and launches, and relevant industry and financial context. Understand how the product area fits into the company wide multi year vision and strategic priorities, and be ready to discuss the product roadmap, trade offs, resource allocation decisions, team structure and growth plans, and competitive dynamics. Be prepared to demonstrate how the role you are interviewing for contributes to strategic objectives and product priorities, including expected deliverables, stakeholder relationships, and the support and constraints you would face. Prepare thoughtful questions for hiring managers about strategic direction, organizational priorities, and roadmap trade offs.
Product Metrics and Strategy
Emphasizes connecting metric design to product strategy and business outcomes. Covers metric taxonomy such as north star metric, outcome metrics, driver metrics, and leading versus lagging indicators, governance and ownership of metrics, and preventing metric gaming. Includes thinking about long term versus short term trade offs, how to influence product direction through metric design, attribution challenges, prioritizing instrumentation and data science investment, and communicating metric driven insights to stakeholders. Appropriate for senior level discussions where metrics inform strategy, roadmap decisions, and organizational alignment.
Lyft-Specific Product Problems & Analytical Approaches
Lyft-specific product challenges, problem framing, hypothesis generation, and data-driven decision making, focusing on experimentation design, metrics, and feature prioritization within the ride-hailing and on-demand transportation context. Includes product discovery, A/B testing, funnel analysis, and stakeholder alignment to improve rider and driver experiences and marketplace efficiency.
Metric Selection & Product Instrumentation
Techniques for turning vague business questions into measurable, actionable product metrics. Includes identifying leading vs. lagging indicators, upstream vs. downstream metrics, aligning metrics with company strategy, balancing multiple stakeholders (user satisfaction, business growth, content value), and recognizing when metrics can be misleading or require multiple signals to capture impact.
Product and Engineering Collaboration and Prioritization
Practices and skills for partnering with product management, engineering teams, and senior leadership to align priorities, make trade offs, and deliver customer and business value. Interviews evaluate how a candidate builds cross functional relationships, establishes collaborative planning and roadmapping processes, and translates strategic goals into prioritized work. Key aspects include balancing engineering vision and technical quality with product needs and time to market, advocating for engineering concerns such as scalability and reliability in leadership forums, ensuring engineers understand the why behind work, negotiating and resolving disagreements with product partners, and using prioritization frameworks and impact metrics to drive decisions. Expect to describe concrete examples of stakeholder communication, decision making frameworks, trade off negotiation, and how you represented engineering interests while keeping product outcomes central.
Product Metrics and Health
Designing and using product specific metrics to measure user experience product health and business impact. Topics include identifying a north star metric and supporting metrics at company product and feature levels, measuring activation adoption engagement retention daily active users and monthly active users feature adoption rates and time to value, using product telemetry experimentation and funnel analysis to measure feature impact, and connecting product metrics to monetization and strategic objectives. Candidates should be able to propose metrics for new features justify trade offs instrument tracking and explain how product metrics inform prioritization roadmap and stakeholder alignment.
Feature Analysis and Launch Evaluation
Designing and applying evaluation frameworks to measure feature success and inform launch decisions. Topics include defining success metrics, experimentation design and basic A over B testing concepts, setting evaluation timeframes, identifying confounding factors, cohort and funnel analysis, instrumentation requirements, and how to iterate based on results. Candidates should be able to propose metrics, describe trade offs in evaluation design, and explain how launch evaluation influences product prioritization.