Design & User Experience Topics
User experience design, frontend architecture, and design systems. Includes UX principles, accessibility, and design documentation.
Research Objectives and Hypothesis Formation
Understanding how to translate business or product questions into clear research objectives. Being able to discuss the difference between open-ended research (exploratory) versus hypothesis-driven research. Understanding how to frame research questions that are specific enough to answer but broad enough to uncover insights.
Taking and Implementing Feedback
Responding positively to interviewer suggestions, implementing changes gracefully, and building on feedback rather than getting defensive. Asking clarifying questions about feedback.
Research Methodology Selection and Tradeoffs
Covers how to choose, justify, and execute research and analysis methods given research questions, stakeholder needs, and real world constraints such as limited time, budget, or access to users. Candidates should be able to compare qualitative methods such as interviews, usability testing, ethnography, and diary studies with quantitative methods such as surveys, analytics, split testing, and controlled experiments, and explain when and how to combine them into mixed methods designs. The topic includes core decision criteria and trade offs including generative versus evaluative goals, depth versus breadth, speed versus rigor, sample size and power considerations, cost versus validity, internal validity versus external generalizability, and short term versus longitudinal designs. Practical skills include aligning methodology to success metrics and business objectives, scoping minimal viable research designs, selecting sampling strategies and proxies, recruitment and instrumentation choices, pilot testing, estimation of sample size for quantitative work, mitigation of bias and threats to validity, documenting limitations and uncertainty, communicating and defending methodological choices to nonresearch stakeholders, and ensuring ethical and privacy safeguards and data quality in constrained or iterative studies.
Research Problem Solving
Evaluate how the candidate identifies, frames, and iteratively resolves research or investigation challenges. Expect examples of encountering recruitment difficulties, unexpected findings, stakeholder disagreements, resource or technical constraints, and how the candidate adapted methods in response. Key skills include iterative hypothesis refinement, questioning and testing assumptions, balancing methodological rigor with flexibility, documenting decision making, synthesizing findings, and communicating trade offs to stakeholders. Emphasis is on demonstrating learning from preliminary results and showing a structured approach to refining research questions, methods, and analyses.
Balancing Research Speed and Rigor
Concerns choosing appropriate research approaches based on decision urgency and confidence needs. Candidates should explain methods for rapid lightweight research to inform fast decisions, and more rigorous studies to build confidence for major investments. Topics include sampling and bias trade offs, triangulating data sources, communicating uncertainty and confidence levels to stakeholders, scaling research velocity through templates and reusable assets, and deciding when a fast answer is sufficient versus when deeper evidence is required.
Team Research Priorities
Understand and articulate the research focus areas, hypotheses, and product questions that the team is investigating, as well as the research roadmap and timelines. Candidates should explain how their research interests, methods, and prior projects align with the team needs, including proposed approaches, metrics for success, collaboration with product and engineering partners, and how research outcomes would inform product decisions. Be prepared to cite relevant studies or experiments you have run and to describe how you would prioritize and scope research in the role.
Findings Presentation and Impact
Ability to clearly present research findings, articulate key insights, and discuss how findings influenced product decisions. Understanding of how to communicate research results to different audiences. Demonstrated ability to translate findings into actionable recommendations.
Research Hypothesis Development and Testing
Learn to develop clear research hypotheses and design studies to test them. Practice distinguishing between open-ended exploratory research and hypothesis-driven research. Discuss how you develop hypotheses from prior knowledge, design documentation, or preliminary research. Explain how you structure research to test hypotheses rigorously.
Learning from Feedback and Iteration
Evaluate how the candidate solicits, interprets, and incorporates feedback from users, teammates, and stakeholders to improve a product, design, or process. Areas include examples of iterative cycles driven by user testing or stakeholder input, specific pivots informed by feedback, changes to documentation or deliverables based on review, techniques for gathering and prioritizing feedback, and evidence of continuous improvement and valuing diverse perspectives.