Product Management Topics
Product leadership, vision articulation, roadmap development, and feature prioritization. Focuses on product strategy and business alignment.
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.
Technical Strategy and Roadmapping
Covers defining, communicating, and operationalizing multi quarter to multi year technical and engineering strategy that aligns engineering investments with product and business objectives. Candidates should be able to describe planning horizons, trade offs between near term delivery and long term investment, and how strategic direction maps to architecture and platform decisions. Topic coverage includes migration and modernization planning, assessing current state and technical debt, sequencing initiatives and milestones, prioritization frameworks and cost of delay thinking, capacity and resource planning including hiring and team structure, vendor evaluation and integration, compliance and data considerations, governance and operating model, and execution planning with timelines and review cadences. It also includes balancing feature delivery, reliability, platform evolution, developer experience, and maintenance; making the business case for infrastructure and platform investments; defining success metrics and objectives and key results and measuring outcomes; risk identification, mitigation and contingency planning; and communicating roadmaps and trade offs to engineers, product leaders, business stakeholders, and executives. Domain specific concerns such as cloud adoption, business intelligence roadmaps, and marketing technology integration are included as examples of how technical strategy varies by context.
Strategic Solution Design
Covers the end to end process of diagnosing a business or customer problem and developing one or more viable solutions. Expect to generate multiple approaches with different risk and reward profiles, assess feasibility, implementation timeline, resource requirements, costs, trade offs, and alignment with business objectives. Include planning for execution details such as milestones, dependencies, and risk mitigation. Emphasize clear stakeholder communication and recommendation framing, customer focus, anticipation of implementation challenges, and creation of a coherent proposal that justifies the chosen approach and explains why other options were rejected.
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.
Constraint and Risk Management
Covers identifying and managing execution constraints and related risks that affect plans and roadmaps. Topics include resource constraints such as capacity, budget, and talent, prioritization tradeoffs, technical debt versus feature investment decisions, contingency and mitigation planning, risk registers, scenario planning, and communication strategies for stakeholders when constraints cause scope or timeline changes. Candidates should be able to demonstrate how they surface constraints early, quantify risk impacts, and negotiate tradeoffs to meet business objectives.
Business Requirements and Technical Alignment
Focuses on the candidate ability to translate business requirements into technical architecture and product decisions. Expect discussion of how market timing, customer needs, competitive positioning, cost and resource constraints influence technical trade offs. Candidates should demonstrate how to balance ideal technical designs with pragmatic business driven solutions, how to prioritize engineering work based on impact, and how to communicate trade offs to technical and non technical stakeholders.
Translating Business Problems to Computational Solutions
Techniques and practices for analyzing business problems, defining success criteria, and translating them into concrete computational requirements, features, user stories, and architectural decisions. Aligns business goals with product strategy, roadmap, and delivery plans; emphasizes stakeholder collaboration, scoping, prioritization, and value-driven thinking.
Customer Obsession and Business Impact
Covers how candidates balance deep customer empathy with measurable business outcomes. Interviewers assess understanding of customer needs, use cases, and the quantifiable value the product delivers such as cost savings, revenue impact, efficiency gains, and risk reduction. Candidates should demonstrate business acumen including unit economics, revenue model awareness, competitive context, and how engineering or operational decisions map to business metrics. Expect examples of prioritization and trade offs where customer satisfaction and business constraints conflict, and explanations of how decisions were aligned to maximize customer value while preserving return on investment.