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.
Onboarding and Activation
Optimizing onboarding and activation addresses the first user experiences that convert new sign ups into engaged users who reach a key aha moment. Important concepts include defining the activation metric for your product, mapping the onboarding funnel, and measuring time to first action, day one activation, day seven retention, and completion rates for onboarding steps. Tactics include email and walkthrough sequences, in app guided tours, progressive disclosure, checklists, welcome content, product tours, contextual help, and first task optimization. Analytical skills include funnel analysis, cohorting, segmentation, instrumentation, event tracking, and A B testing to validate hypotheses. Candidates should demonstrate experience identifying high impact friction points, designing experiments, interpreting results, iterating on flows, and collaborating with product design and engineering to implement changes. Discussions may also cover personalization, internationalization, support integration, and how onboarding improvements map to downstream retention and monetization.
Business and Product Strategy Alignment
Demonstrate how product decisions and initiatives align to overarching business strategy and metrics. Explain how product priorities map to company objectives such as revenue growth, unit economics, customer acquisition and retention, market expansion, or cost efficiency. Discuss trade offs between short term growth and long term strategic health, how to influence and partner with product leadership, and how operational or design choices support business outcomes. Be ready to explain prioritization frameworks, stakeholder alignment approaches, and examples of aligning product or design work to measurable business goals.
Prioritization Frameworks and Sequencing
Covers structured approaches to deciding what to build and when across product roadmaps and initiatives. Candidates should be able to describe and apply common prioritization frameworks such as Reach Impact Confidence Effort scoring, Impact versus Effort matrices, Must Should Could Won t have categorization, Value versus Cost analysis, KANO modeling, weighted scoring, and other systematic methods. Assessment includes explaining decision logic and trade offs between quick wins and strategic bets, short term growth versus long term sustainability, user value versus unit economics, and how confidence and risk affect scores. Candidates should demonstrate sequencing and dependency thinking: identifying prerequisites, blockers, foundational initiatives, and logical ordering to unlock larger opportunities. For technical products and platform work, include considerations for technical debt reduction, platform reliability, developer experience, API surface improvements, and operational costs when comparing items. Interviewers look for ability to justify why one item ranks above another, what data or user insights would change the ranking, how to handle uncertainty, and how to translate prioritization into executable roadmap steps and milestones.
Product and Growth Problem Solving
Assessment of a candidate's ability to diagnose product and growth challenges and to design prioritized, measurable solutions using structured frameworks and hypothesis driven thinking. Candidates should demonstrate how they ask diagnostic questions, gather and interpret relevant data, form testable hypotheses, define success metrics and key performance indicators, prioritize experiments and interventions between low cost quick wins and longer term initiatives, and communicate trade offs and risks to stakeholders. Familiarity with common growth frameworks is expected, for example Acquisition Activation Retention Revenue and Referral, growth loops, funnel analysis, and customer lifecycle mapping, as well as product design approaches such as the CIRCLES framework which stands for Comprehend Identify Recognize Clarify List Evaluate and Summarize and the Ask Answer Recommend Move forward framework. Evaluation focuses on choosing or adapting an appropriate framework for the scenario, breaking problems into components, reasoning quantitatively about metrics and trade offs, generating multiple solution options, proposing prioritized implementation and measurement plans, and designing experiments for validation and iteration. At senior and staff levels candidates are expected to show cross functional collaboration, stakeholder alignment, iteration of proposals based on early data and feedback, and articulation of end to end rollout and measurement strategies.
Cross Functional Growth and Product Integration
Covers how growth goals and initiatives are integrated across product, engineering, marketing, support, and operations, and how tooling and system integrations enable that work. Topics include aligning product roadmaps with growth objectives, identifying which growth initiatives require product changes, and working with engineering to prioritize and deliver growth features while balancing technical velocity and long term roadmap health. Includes prioritization frameworks and trade off analysis for acquisition versus retention decisions, hypothesis driven experimentation, and using product analytics and instrumentation to inform roadmap and test decisions. Also covers ecosystem thinking for integrations between customer relationship management systems, analytics platforms, billing and payment systems, support tooling, and the product platform. Candidates should be able to evaluate new tools for fit with existing systems, design data and integration flows to give cross functional teams access to required signals, describe collaboration patterns between growth and product managers, and explain how to run rapid minimum viable product experiments and iterate based on metrics.
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.
Product Thinking and Feature Integration
Think beyond marketing to how growth can be embedded into product. Understand product strategy, user experience principles, and product roadmap. Design growth features that enhance rather than degrade user experience. Propose features that are additive to product value, not purely extractive for growth.
Product and Market Strategy
Strategic understanding of market context, customer needs, and how those inputs shape product decisions and go to market choices. Candidates should be able to analyze the competitive landscape, segment target customers, create buyer personas, and articulate clear value propositions and product market fit hypotheses. The topic includes market entry and expansion considerations, competitive positioning, and the translation of customer problems into prioritized product and growth initiatives. Interviewers will assess methods for customer research such as interviews, surveys, usage and cohort analysis, user testing, and market sizing including total addressable market and serviceable obtainable market estimates, as well as techniques for competitive analysis and feature benchmarking. Candidates should be able to map customer journeys, identify key friction points and monetization levers, and connect product changes to acquisition, activation, retention, revenue and referral outcomes. Assessment also covers prioritization frameworks and trade off reasoning, aligning product roadmaps with go to market investments, and advising cross functional partners such as sales, sales engineering, marketing and product management to drive adoption and retention.