Business Strategy & Performance Topics
Business strategy, competitive analysis, market opportunities, and strategic innovation. Includes market research, competitive positioning, and business planning.
Strategic Frameworks and Business Models
Familiarity with strategic frameworks (Porter's Five Forces, Blue Ocean, Jobs to be Done, Platform strategies) and ability to evaluate business models (subscription, marketplace, freemium, etc.) for fit with market dynamics and company capabilities.
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 Sources
Covers methods and information sources for researching a market opportunity or industry. Candidates should demonstrate how to define the market and relevant questions to answer, identify and use secondary sources such as industry analyst reports, government statistics, company filings, trade publications, subscription databases, and public financial data, and conduct primary research such as customer interviews, surveys, and expert calls. Key skills include market sizing and growth estimation using top down and bottom up approaches, competitor mapping and positioning, segmentation and customer need analysis, identifying barriers to entry and regulatory constraints, estimating addressable market and serviceable market, validating assumptions, triangulating multiple data sources, and recognizing data quality and bias. Interviewers may probe frameworks for structuring market research, how to prioritize information needs, how to convert findings into market opportunity estimates and go to market implications, and how to document sources and assumptions.
Market and Competitive Analysis
Assessment of market dynamics, customer segments, and the competitive landscape to inform product, go to market, and business strategy. Candidates should be able to identify and prioritize key competitors, compare strengths and weaknesses, map target customer segments and buyer personas, and perform market sizing and segmentation to quantify opportunity and risk. This topic includes evaluating market trends and adoption patterns, interpreting competitive moves, and using evidence and metrics such as market share trends, growth rates, customer acquisition cost, and unit economics to justify recommendations. It also covers developing defensible positioning and differentiation, translating competitive insights into go to market messaging, sales and marketing differentiation, pricing and channel choices, product roadmap decisions, and identifying product or content gaps. Candidates should be able to describe frameworks and methods for competitor and market assessment, outline how to monitor competitors and market signals over time, and explain how external insights drive prioritization and strategic tradeoffs across product, marketing, and sales.
Market Sizing and Opportunity Assessment
Frameworks and methods for evaluating and quantifying the size and attractiveness of market opportunities and converting those estimates into strategic priorities. Candidates should be able to define and calculate total addressable market, serviceable addressable market, and serviceable obtainable market using top down and bottom up approaches, perform back of the envelope estimates and formal builds, and clearly explain assumptions and data sources. The topic covers meaningful customer segmentation, estimation of adoption and growth rates, revenue and profitability modeling, analysis of competitive landscape and white space, identification of barriers to entry and unmet needs, scenario and sensitivity analysis to capture uncertainty, and prioritization based on competitive intensity and ability to win. Interviewers will assess quantitative rigor, defensible assumptions, use of primary and secondary research, clarity of calculation steps, trade offs in prioritization, and how sizing outcomes inform product strategy, go to market planning, and revenue forecasting.
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.
Netflix Business Model, Revenue & Cost Structure
In-depth analysis of Netflix's business model, revenue streams, pricing strategy, content costs, operating expenses, and profitability drivers, along with competitive positioning and platform economics within the streaming industry.
Business Metrics Definition and Strategy
Emphasizes defining meaningful metrics and measurement frameworks that answer business questions and drive decisions. Candidates should be able to distinguish between count metrics, ratio metrics, and rate metrics; select appropriate observation windows and time alignment for retention, churn, and conversion analyses; account for multiple user touch points and events when attributing actions; and identify leading versus lagging indicators. This topic covers designing metric definitions that avoid double counting, selecting denominators and numerators that match the business question, segmenting users for insight, and documenting business logic to ensure consistency. At senior levels expect discussion of trade offs between simplicity and fidelity, governance of metric definitions, and how to prioritize which metrics matter for different stakeholders.