Product Management Topics
Product leadership, vision articulation, roadmap development, and feature prioritization. Focuses on product strategy and business alignment.
Problem Definition and Framing
Covers the skills and practices used to clarify, diagnose, and scope ambiguous business or product problems into actionable problem statements before proposing solutions. Candidates should demonstrate structured and insightful clarifying questions to understand business context, current and desired states, target users and user needs, success metrics and desired outcomes, constraints such as budget, timeline, technical dependencies, and compliance, stakeholder perspectives, and existing performance baselines. Includes separating symptoms from root causes, surfacing and testing hypotheses, identifying data to collect and analyze, performing root cause analysis, breaking complex problems into prioritized subproblems, and defining acceptance criteria and next steps or experiments to reduce uncertainty. Encompasses discovery techniques and basic user research to surface user pain points and opportunities, requirements scoping including scope boundaries, risks and trade offs, and the ability to write a concise problem statement in your own words. At senior levels also assess strategic framing, avoiding premature solutions, aligning stakeholders, and presenting an executive narrative that links diagnosis to measurable outcomes and implementation trade offs; for junior candidates emphasize curiosity, systematic thinking, and the ability to prioritize information needs rather than jumping to implementation.
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.
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.
Client Needs Assessment and Strategic Translation
Evaluate the ability to surface underlying client problems, frame them as solvable business questions, and translate findings into a clear project scope and solution roadmap. This includes stakeholder discovery techniques, root cause analysis and hypothesis generation, defining success metrics and acceptance criteria, prioritizing work by value and effort, and articulating how recommended deliverables map to client business objectives. Interviewers will look for examples of converting ambiguous requests into testable experiments or implementation plans and for balancing short term pilot work with longer term strategic 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.
Feasibility and Cross Functional Awareness
Assessment of a candidate's ability to recognize and account for the constraints, priorities, and expertise of multiple disciplines when proposing or scoping features. Topics include asking informed questions about technical feasibility, estimating effort and complexity, understanding design and user experience trade offs, considering marketing and go to market implications, and acknowledging operational and support requirements. Interviewers evaluate whether the candidate can identify stakeholders, surface necessary trade offs, propose minimally viable approaches, and communicate clearly across engineering, design, product, marketing, and operations while maintaining user value and delivery realism. At entry level, emphasize collaborative mindset, willingness to ask questions, and recognition that product work requires cross functional negotiation.
Requirements Elicitation and Scoping
This topic covers the end to end practice of clarifying ambiguous problem statements, eliciting and defining functional and non functional requirements, and scoping solutions before design and implementation. Candidates should demonstrate the ability to identify target users and user journeys, conduct stakeholder interviews, ask targeted and probing clarifying questions, surface hidden assumptions and root causes, and convert vague business language into measurable technical and business requirements. They should capture acceptance criteria and success metrics, define key performance indicators, and translate requirements into testable statements and test strategies that map unit, integration, and system tests to requirement risk and priority. The topic includes assessing technical constraints and operational context such as expected scale, throughput and latency requirements, data volume and read write ratios, consistency expectations, real time versus batch processing trade offs, geographic distribution, uptime and availability expectations, security and compliance obligations, and existing system state or migration considerations. It also requires evaluation of non technical constraints including timelines, team capacity, budget, regulatory and operational concerns, and stakeholder priorities. Candidates are expected to synthesize inputs into clear artifacts such as product requirement documents, user stories, prioritized backlogs, acceptance criteria, and concise requirement checklists to guide architecture, estimation, and implementation. Emphasis is placed on scoping and prioritization techniques, distinguishing must have from nice to have features, conducting trade off analysis, proposing incremental or phased approaches, identifying risks and mitigations, and aligning cross functional teams on scope and success measures. Expectations vary by seniority: entry level candidates should reliably ask core clarifying questions and avoid solving the wrong problem, while senior and staff candidates should rapidly prioritize requirements, anticipate critical non functional needs, align solutions to business impact, and communicate trade offs and timelines to stakeholders.
Long Term Engagement Strategy Development
Approaches for designing multi year engagement strategies that build sustainable relationships and competitive positioning. Topics include account segmentation and prioritization creating long term objectives and measurable success criteria building phased roadmaps and pilots aligning cross functional partners to strategic plans designing partnership or commercial models for creators scaling from pilot to program and monitoring adaptation through metrics. Interviewers will assess strategic thinking stakeholder alignment and the ability to translate vision into short term executable plans.
Balancing Technical Constraints with Product Goals
Recognizing that technical constraints (infrastructure limitations, scalability, technical debt, architectural decisions) meaningfully impact product possibilities. Understanding when to ask engineers about feasibility without delegating all technical decisions to them. Demonstrating respect for engineering realities while advocating for users/business.