Business Strategy & Performance Topics
Business strategy, competitive analysis, market opportunities, and strategic innovation. Includes market research, competitive positioning, and business planning.
Comparative Analysis and Decision Frameworks
Systematically comparing multiple options or scenarios using explicit criteria, quantitative and qualitative evaluation methods, and structured decision frameworks. This includes building and using comparison matrices, weighted scoring models, cost benefit analyses, sensitivity analyses, and trade off recognition to surface advantages, disadvantages, risks, and limitations of each option. Candidates should be able to explain how they select evaluation criteria, justify weights, perform scenario analysis, evaluate uncertainty and constraints, and make clear recommendations supported by evidence. Common contexts include vendor selection, make versus buy decisions, capital allocation, financing choices such as debt versus equity, and implementation pacing decisions.
Strategic Business Reasoning and Prioritization
Demonstrate structured business reasoning that goes beyond raw financial metrics to include competitive positioning, customer impact, operational feasibility, and organizational capabilities. Explain prioritization frameworks and how you would set and defend priorities given limited resources, including trade offs and opportunity costs. Interviewers look for balanced judgment that integrates quantitative analysis with strategic context and practical constraints.
Market Research and Competitive Landscape
Broad market analysis capabilities including identifying major competitors, assessing market dynamics and pricing strategies, sizing markets using top down and bottom up approaches, validating customer pain points, and prioritizing opportunities. Encompasses competitor mapping, market sizing, trend analysis, and turning market research into strategic recommendations.
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.
Meta Business Model and Monetization
Deep knowledge of how Meta generates revenue across platforms and product lines and the economics behind different monetization approaches. Candidates should be able to explain advertising economics and pricing dynamics, commerce and transaction flows, creator monetization mechanics, subscription and device revenue where applicable, and partner revenue share arrangements. Interviewers will evaluate the candidate s ability to analyze key financial metrics, assess impacts from privacy and regulatory changes, design monetization experiments, and recommend partnership revenue structures that balance growth and profitability.
Market and Trend Analysis
Techniques for researching markets, identifying trends, sizing opportunities, and translating market signals into strategic recommendations. Covers market research methodologies such as surveys, competitive analysis, secondary research, and social listening; time series and trend decomposition approaches; market sizing frameworks such as total addressable market and serviceable obtainable market; and presenting findings to influence product, marketing, or go to market decisions. Includes application to digital channels such as search opportunity identification when relevant.
Competitive Analysis and Positioning
Comprehensive skills and frameworks for researching competitors, assessing market landscapes, and defining defensible positioning and differentiation strategies. Candidates should be able to identify direct and indirect competitors, map competitor strengths and weaknesses, benchmark product features, pricing, messaging, distribution and go to market approaches, and evaluate moats and vulnerabilities. Expect techniques such as competitor profiling, perceptual mapping, feature comparison matrices, win loss analysis, market segmentation, customer and persona development, jobs to be done analysis, hypothesis driven opportunity sizing, and white space identification. Strong answers translate analysis into actionable recommendations for product direction, pricing, messaging and go to market alignment, including prioritization of where to compete or avoid and anticipation of competitive responses. Candidates should also be able to recommend partnership and ecosystem strategies, create battle cards and executive summaries, and communicate competitive insights effectively to product, marketing, sales, partnerships and leadership to influence strategy and execution.
Company Research and Knowledge
Demonstrates that a candidate has researched the specific employer and can discuss its mission, products or services, business model, market position, competitive landscape, recent announcements, and any relevant technical or regulatory considerations. Interviewers look for concrete references such as product features, strategic initiatives, engineering signals, or public communications and expect candidates to tie that research to how they would add value in the target role. Preparation includes building informed questions, understanding target customers and metrics of success, and knowing role specific context such as likely projects, typical deliverables, or relevant parts of the technology stack.
Business Problem Solving and Recommendations
Frameworks and skills for taking ambiguous business questions through analysis to clear, actionable recommendations. Includes decomposing complex problems into analyzable components, identifying key drivers, selecting focused analyses, synthesizing data backed findings, and articulating specific next steps and implementation considerations. Emphasizes communicating recommendations in business terms, estimating potential impact when possible, acknowledging trade offs and limitations, prioritizing among multiple actions, and tailoring communication to different stakeholders. Covers translating research or analytic results into feasible product or operational changes and defending choices with evidence.