Finance & Business Operations Topics
Financial management, budgeting, ROI analysis, and business operations. Covers financial forecasting, valuation, and operational metrics.
Marketing Technology Metrics and ROI
Measuring the value of marketing technology investments and connecting platform work to business outcomes. Topics include defining key performance indicators that map platform capabilities to revenue, acquisition, retention, conversion, and customer lifetime value; estimating return on investment and total cost of ownership for tool selection and migration; building financial and adoption models to justify spend and track time to value; designing experiments and attribution approaches to isolate the incremental impact of technology changes; and communicating results and trade offs to leadership and finance. Candidates should be able to describe frameworks used to quantify benefits, how they tracked adoption metrics, and examples where measurement influenced investment decisions.
Vendor and Partner Relationship Management
Comprehensive end to end management of external vendors, suppliers, agencies, freelancers, and strategic partners. Candidates should be able to discuss vendor landscape assessment and segmentation, selection criteria, request for proposal processes, and total cost of ownership analysis. The topic covers procurement and contracting skills including contract negotiation, governance models, pricing and terms negotiation, escalation clauses, and establishing service level agreements and performance metrics. It includes operational practices for onboarding and integrating external providers, communication and governance cadences, expectation setting, supplier development and capability improvement, and ongoing performance monitoring, reviews, and dispute resolution. Candidates should also be able to evaluate tradeoffs between insourcing and external partnerships, approaches to consolidation versus diversification, criteria and processes for deepening, replacing, or offboarding vendors, and collaborating with vendors to drive innovation and align vendor relationships to strategic business and technology objectives.
Technology Investment and Vendor Management
Covers the end to end process of proposing, justifying, funding, and managing technology investments. Candidates should be able to build a compelling business case that articulates strategic alignment, expected benefits, costs, risks, timelines, and measurable success metrics. Topics include calculating return on investment and total cost of ownership, comparing build versus buy options, creating cost benefit analyses, prioritization frameworks, budgeting and forecasting, and procurement processes. Also includes vendor selection and relationship management practices such as request for proposals, vendor evaluation criteria, contract negotiation, service level agreements, vendor performance monitoring, and governance to ensure value delivery. At senior levels this may include profit and loss responsibility, capital allocation trade offs, stakeholder alignment, and post implementation measurement and optimization.
Vendor Evaluation and Selection
Comprehensive frameworks and practical practices for evaluating selecting and validating third party vendors tools and technology suppliers. Topics include requirement gathering and stakeholder alignment translating business needs into clear evaluation criteria capability assessment and gap analysis integration and data architecture fit and trade off analysis between features cost and implementation complexity. The topic covers vendor due diligence such as company stability and roadmap alignment support and service quality security and compliance posture and commercial factors including pricing models total cost of ownership and return on investment. It explains practical evaluation mechanisms including request for proposal design and management scoring matrices vendor demonstrations proof of concept pilots with success criteria reference checks and build versus buy analysis. Also included are negotiation preparation contract and service level agreement negotiation post implementation success metrics monitoring and ongoing vendor relationship and performance management. Interviewers assess the candidate ability to make defensible selection decisions balance technical and business priorities manage procurement and vendor relationships and measure outcomes after deployment across domains such as security technologies enterprise platforms and marketing technology.
Cost Benefit and Return on Investment
Building financial and value cases for marketing technology investments and measuring their outcomes. Expect discussions of how to estimate and justify total cost of ownership and ongoing operating costs, model benefits such as revenue uplift or efficiency savings, design measurement approaches and experiments to quantify incremental impact, compute return on investment and payback period, run sensitivity and scenario analyses, compare build versus buy options, and communicate business cases and measurement results to finance and executive stakeholders. Practical measurement topics include attribution approaches, lift testing, proxy metrics when experiments are constrained, and dashboards to track realized versus forecasted benefits.