Product Management Topics
Product leadership, vision articulation, roadmap development, and feature prioritization. Focuses on product strategy and business alignment.
Metrics and Success Measurement
Defining meaningful program and product metrics, translating business objectives into measurable outcomes, selecting and tracking key performance indicators such as adoption, quality, and stakeholder satisfaction, and establishing measurement plans and reporting cadence. Assess the candidate's ability to choose actionable metrics, set targets, instrument and interpret data, and use metrics to drive decisions and transparency.
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.
Program Planning and Roadmapping
Focuses on translating business objectives into a program or product roadmap and a pragmatic execution plan. Core topics include defining program themes and epics, sequencing work into milestones with clear entry and exit criteria, creating realistic timelines that account for team capacity and buffers for uncertainty, and prioritizing across competing goals such as new customer acquisition, retention, monetization, technical debt, and competitive responses. Candidates should be able to articulate the strategic rationale for roadmap items including hypotheses and success metrics, involve and align stakeholders, adjust plans as conditions change, and show planning horizons of roughly two to three quarters while remaining grounded in near term delivery details.
Product Planning and Requirements
Foundational practices for scoping, decomposing, and planning product work from concept to launch. This includes breaking major features into architecture and implementation components, identifying dependencies, asking clarifying questions to surface goals and constraints, defining measurable roadmap milestones, estimating timelines, and managing scope through phases. It also covers the core responsibilities expected of an entry level project manager such as planning, coordinating execution, communicating with teams and partners, and ensuring alignment on acceptance criteria and success signals.
Roadmap and Feature Planning
Processes for taking a feature from concept to launch by decomposing work into deliverable components, defining phases, and sequencing work across teams. Covers defining meaningful milestones and success criteria, mapping dependencies and critical path items, sequencing releases to reduce risk, and adjusting plans to reflect team capacity and technical constraints. Includes how to track progress against milestones and evolve the roadmap in response to new information.
Scope Management and Prioritization
Covers how candidates make pragmatic trade offs between impact, effort, risk, and time when defining scope and setting priorities for projects and products. Topics include defining a minimum viable product, negotiating minimum viable scope, detecting and handling scope creep, and making go no go or defer decisions. Interviewers will probe prioritization frameworks and criteria, estimation approaches, metrics for evaluating impact and cost, change control processes, phased delivery and release planning, risk identification and mitigation strategies, and stakeholder alignment and communication. Candidates should be able to describe concrete processes, artifacts, and techniques such as roadmaps, release plans, backlog prioritization, trade off matrices, cost of delay analysis, risk registers, and examples where they protected schedules, restructured scope, or balanced quality, schedule, and team capacity to achieve outcomes.
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.
Customer and User Focus
Demonstrating user centric thinking and long term customer focus. Candidates should explain who the end user is for a given effort, what problem is being solved, which user segment matters most, and how decisions balance short term metrics against long term customer benefit. Answers should show empathy for users, describe how user needs translate into product or operational priorities, and provide examples or frameworks for aligning customer outcomes with business objectives.
Metrics and Success Criteria
Selecting and justifying success metrics and measurement approaches for products and features, including situations where the candidate did not build the original product. Topics include choosing primary and leading indicators that map to business outcomes, designing measurement and instrumentation, setting guard rails, and explaining how proposed metrics will inform decision making. Good answers tie metrics to user behavior, product goals, and clear actions teams can take based on signal.