Prioritization and Stakeholder Alignment Questions

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.

MediumBehavioral

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Scenario/behavioral: Tell me about a time (or describe how you would) when you had to deprioritize a customer-requested feature that was important to a vocal customer segment. Walk through the steps you took to make the decision, how you communicated it, and how you preserved the customer relationship.

EasyTechnical

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Explain a weighted scoring model for prioritization. Provide a short example: define four criteria (e.g., revenue potential, strategic fit, user value, implementation complexity), assign reasonable weights that sum to 100, score three sample features against those criteria, compute weighted totals, and explain how you'd pick the winner.

MediumTechnical

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Design a prioritization rubric for a two-sided marketplace product. The rubric should weigh strategic fit, revenue potential, user experience impact for both sides, engineering complexity, and regulatory risk. Explain how you'd choose weights, operationalize scoring across PMs, and propose a calibration process to ensure consistency.

HardSystem Design

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Design exercise: Propose a lightweight decision log (a.k.a. prioritization audit trail) that records prioritization decisions, owners, assumptions, supporting data, and outcomes. Specify fields, ownership, retention policy, access controls, and how the PM team would enforce its use during quarterly planning.

EasyBehavioral

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Scenario (behavioral): You must inform sales, marketing, and a sponsoring business unit that a highly requested feature will be deprioritized for the next two quarters due to capacity constraints. Draft the communication approach and the talking points you would use (email/meeting), explain which stakeholders you would speak to first, and outline how you'd handle immediate pushback from sales.

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