Research Translation and Impact Questions

Covers how research is chosen, structured, and staged to produce measurable product or business outcomes. Candidates should demonstrate frameworks for deciding when to pursue exploratory or foundational research versus incremental or applied work, including evaluation of expected time to impact, likelihood of technical success, resource requirements, and strategic alignment with product goals. Topics include prioritization and staging strategies, prototype and proof of concept approaches, cost benefit and risk trade off analyses, defining instrumentation and success metrics to measure downstream impact, stakeholder alignment and communication, and pathways for operationalizing research outputs into production systems. Interviewers may probe examples of trade off decisions, methods for integrating research roadmaps with product roadmaps, and approaches to balance long term innovation with near term improvements.