Product Management Topics
Product leadership, vision articulation, roadmap development, and feature prioritization. Focuses on product strategy and business alignment.
Structured Problem Solving for Technical Products
Approaching complex technical product problems systematically: clarifying the problem statement and constraints, defining requirements and success metrics, identifying key technical and product challenges, evaluating alternative approaches, making reasoned tradeoff decisions, and planning validation. Decomposing ambiguous problems into manageable pieces. Showing thinking process rather than jumping to conclusions.
Requirements Elicitation and Scoping
This topic covers the end to end practice of clarifying ambiguous problem statements, eliciting and defining functional and non functional requirements, and scoping solutions before design and implementation. Candidates should demonstrate the ability to identify target users and user journeys, conduct stakeholder interviews, ask targeted and probing clarifying questions, surface hidden assumptions and root causes, and convert vague business language into measurable technical and business requirements. They should capture acceptance criteria and success metrics, define key performance indicators, and translate requirements into testable statements and test strategies that map unit, integration, and system tests to requirement risk and priority. The topic includes assessing technical constraints and operational context such as expected scale, throughput and latency requirements, data volume and read write ratios, consistency expectations, real time versus batch processing trade offs, geographic distribution, uptime and availability expectations, security and compliance obligations, and existing system state or migration considerations. It also requires evaluation of non technical constraints including timelines, team capacity, budget, regulatory and operational concerns, and stakeholder priorities. Candidates are expected to synthesize inputs into clear artifacts such as product requirement documents, user stories, prioritized backlogs, acceptance criteria, and concise requirement checklists to guide architecture, estimation, and implementation. Emphasis is placed on scoping and prioritization techniques, distinguishing must have from nice to have features, conducting trade off analysis, proposing incremental or phased approaches, identifying risks and mitigations, and aligning cross functional teams on scope and success measures. Expectations vary by seniority: entry level candidates should reliably ask core clarifying questions and avoid solving the wrong problem, while senior and staff candidates should rapidly prioritize requirements, anticipate critical non functional needs, align solutions to business impact, and communicate trade offs and timelines to stakeholders.
User and Developer Needs
Assess how product and architecture decisions balance user and developer requirements with technical feasibility. Topics include gathering and prioritizing requirements, negotiating trade offs between desired user experience and implementation complexity, designing alternative solutions to work within constraints, and communicating architectural implications to product and engineering stakeholders. Interviewers may probe how candidates translate user journeys into technical requirements, how they evaluate feasibility and effort, how they propose product level workarounds for platform limitations, and how they ensure the architecture enables desired user and developer workflows without causing undue technical debt.
Customer and User Obsession
Demonstrating a deep commitment to understanding and advocating for customers and end users. Candidates should show how they prioritize user needs in decision making, even when it conflicts with other priorities, and provide concrete examples of advocating for users internally. Topics include using qualitative and quantitative research to surface user pain points, validating assumptions with user evidence, designing or improving experiences to solve real problems, maintaining ongoing connection to users through feedback loops, and influencing stakeholders to keep the organization user focused. Examples may range from entry level empathy and direct customer learning to strategic changes driven by user insight.
Technical Requirements and Specifications
Covers the end to end practice of translating product vision and business goals into clear, actionable technical requirements and specifications that engineering teams can implement. Includes writing product requirement documents and technical specifications with problem statements, success metrics, user and developer personas, API contracts and interfaces, data and schema considerations, functional requirements, and non functional requirements such as performance targets, latency and throughput expectations, scalability goals, reliability targets and service level objectives, security and privacy constraints, backward compatibility, and rollout and migration strategies. Encompasses requirements gathering techniques such as stakeholder identification, discovery conversations, clarifying questions, scoping, constraint identification for budget and timeline, defining measurable acceptance criteria, traceability to business objectives, and documenting assumptions and open questions. Also covers communicating requirements effectively to engineering and cross functional partners, knowing how to be specific without over constraining implementation, iterating requirements as learning emerges, and involving engineers early so they provide technical input and ownership.
Product Knowledge Foundation
Baseline understanding of the company and its primary product or service: what problem it solves, who the users or customers are, the product value proposition, key features and capabilities, major components and high level technical architecture, and how it competes in the market. Candidates are expected to have researched the product enough to clearly summarize its purpose, target users, core workflows, and business goals, and to explain at a basic level how the technology and integrations enable those outcomes. Interviewers use this to assess research preparation, domain comprehension, ability to synthesize product information, and clear communication of product value rather than deep technical expertise.
Domain and Product Technical Knowledge
Evaluation of deep, domain specific technical knowledge relevant to the team, product, or role. Candidates should demonstrate subject matter expertise in the relevant problem space and be able to explain core concepts, architectures, algorithms, and practical engineering trade offs. Example domains include recommendation systems, data platform engineering, security, and analytics, as well as platform areas such as application programming interface platform management, developer experience, deployment orchestration, infrastructure and reliability, and observability. Expect questions on domain specific algorithms, data pipelines, real time versus batch trade offs, feature stores, data governance, versioning strategies, integration patterns, common customer use cases, and typical product pain points. For product focused roles, be prepared to explain core product features, typical customer workflows, integration points, and how domain constraints influence product decisions. For role or platform focused discussions, describe how the domain shapes responsibilities, challenges, and priorities and outline approaches to initial discovery, diagnosis, and early improvements. This topic tests both conceptual depth and the ability to map domain knowledge to concrete product and engineering decisions.
Product and Domain Knowledge
Comprehensive understanding of a target company product suite, including core features, target customer segments, and common industry use cases. Ability to describe the technical architecture at both a high level and in detail, covering major components, data flows, integration points, and deployment options such as cloud and on premise. Understanding of scalability and performance characteristics, capacity planning, resilience and recovery strategies, security controls, and relevant compliance certifications. Knowledge of how the product exposes capabilities through application programming interfaces, connectors, or plug in mechanisms and how it integrates with third party systems and enterprise platforms. Preparedness to discuss product positioning and roadmap themes, competitive differentiation, typical deployment and operational challenges customers face, and the success metrics or business outcomes the product enables. This topic assesses product knowledge, systems thinking, architecture reasoning, and the ability to evaluate trade offs in the context of an existing commercial offering.
Problem Definition and Framing
Covers the skills and practices used to clarify, diagnose, and scope ambiguous business or product problems into actionable problem statements before proposing solutions. Candidates should demonstrate structured and insightful clarifying questions to understand business context, current and desired states, target users and user needs, success metrics and desired outcomes, constraints such as budget, timeline, technical dependencies, and compliance, stakeholder perspectives, and existing performance baselines. Includes separating symptoms from root causes, surfacing and testing hypotheses, identifying data to collect and analyze, performing root cause analysis, breaking complex problems into prioritized subproblems, and defining acceptance criteria and next steps or experiments to reduce uncertainty. Encompasses discovery techniques and basic user research to surface user pain points and opportunities, requirements scoping including scope boundaries, risks and trade offs, and the ability to write a concise problem statement in your own words. At senior levels also assess strategic framing, avoiding premature solutions, aligning stakeholders, and presenting an executive narrative that links diagnosis to measurable outcomes and implementation trade offs; for junior candidates emphasize curiosity, systematic thinking, and the ability to prioritize information needs rather than jumping to implementation.