Business Strategy & Performance Topics
Business strategy, competitive analysis, market opportunities, and strategic innovation. Includes market research, competitive positioning, and business planning.
Industry Trends and Domain Knowledge
Show awareness of current trends, technical developments, and evolving best practices in a specific domain or industry vertical. For domain specialists this means being conversant with recent industry developments, major technology or methodology changes, competitive feature trends, metrics and measurement approaches, and the implications these trends have for product strategy and execution. For example, in search engine optimization candidates should know about major algorithm updates, the growing role of artificial intelligence in search, changes to ranking signals, content quality and E A T concepts, tooling and measurement techniques, and how SEO decisions affect product architecture and content strategy. Be ready to discuss how trends create opportunities and risks for companies and how you would adapt.
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.
Market and Trend Analysis
Techniques for researching markets, identifying trends, sizing opportunities, and translating market signals into strategic recommendations. Covers market research methodologies such as surveys, competitive analysis, secondary research, and social listening; time series and trend decomposition approaches; market sizing frameworks such as total addressable market and serviceable obtainable market; and presenting findings to influence product, marketing, or go to market decisions. Includes application to digital channels such as search opportunity identification when relevant.
Situational Case and Contextual Diagnosis
Ability to rapidly assess situational problem prompts or case style scenarios and identify plausible root causes and next steps. Emphasis on asking clarifying questions, understanding the competitive and resource context, scoping the problem, and proposing a prioritized investigative approach tailored to the scenario. Useful for role specific case interviews such as SEO issues, go to market problems, or product trade off analyses.
Competitive Analysis and Positioning
Comprehensive skills and frameworks for researching competitors, assessing market landscapes, and defining defensible positioning and differentiation strategies. Candidates should be able to identify direct and indirect competitors, map competitor strengths and weaknesses, benchmark product features, pricing, messaging, distribution and go to market approaches, and evaluate moats and vulnerabilities. Expect techniques such as competitor profiling, perceptual mapping, feature comparison matrices, win loss analysis, market segmentation, customer and persona development, jobs to be done analysis, hypothesis driven opportunity sizing, and white space identification. Strong answers translate analysis into actionable recommendations for product direction, pricing, messaging and go to market alignment, including prioritization of where to compete or avoid and anticipation of competitive responses. Candidates should also be able to recommend partnership and ecosystem strategies, create battle cards and executive summaries, and communicate competitive insights effectively to product, marketing, sales, partnerships and leadership to influence strategy and execution.
Company Business Model and Product Market Understanding
Demonstrate understanding of how the company creates and captures value through its business model and product offering. This includes knowledge of the product portfolio, value proposition, target customer segments, use cases, pricing model, and how products map to market needs. Candidates should be able to explain how the company makes money, the primary revenue streams, product positioning, and how product decisions affect customer value and strategic direction.
Priority Setting and Business Alignment
Understanding how to prioritize SEO opportunities based on business goals, impact potential, resource requirements, and timeline. Recognizing that not all optimizations are equally valuable. Understanding how to communicate trade-offs (perfect solution vs pragmatic solution, quick wins vs long-term investment). Ability to think about SEO strategy in terms of business outcomes, not just rankings.
Industry Trends and Future Outlook
Assessing industry perspective and future outlook evaluates a candidate's ability to identify and analyze emerging trends, technologies, and structural shifts within a domain and to translate that understanding into strategic implications and actionable recommendations. Questions probe knowledge of drivers such as artificial intelligence, personalization, changing user behavior, platform and search engine evolution, the future of work and skills, and shifts in organizational practices. Candidates should demonstrate awareness of credible signals and sources, be able to compare short term versus long term impacts, propose how a company or team should prepare and adapt, and discuss risks, metrics for success, and trade offs. This topic covers both domain specific futures such as search engine optimization trajectories and broader field level futures such as the direction of learning and development, testing for thought leadership, situational analysis, and pragmatic next steps.