Product Management Topics
Product leadership, vision articulation, roadmap development, and feature prioritization. Focuses on product strategy and business alignment.
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.
Decision Making and Trade Offs
Covers how candidates make difficult decisions when facing competing priorities, limited resources, ambiguous information, or stakeholder disagreement. Interviewers expect a clear recounting of a real situation, the options considered, the criteria and frameworks used to evaluate trade offs, how risks and benefits were weighed, who was consulted, and how the decision was communicated and executed. Candidates should describe measurable outcomes, lessons learned, and what they would do differently. This topic assesses judgment, prioritization, structured thinking, stakeholder management, and the ability to reflect on trade off outcomes.
Business and Product Strategy Alignment
Demonstrate how product decisions and initiatives align to overarching business strategy and metrics. Explain how product priorities map to company objectives such as revenue growth, unit economics, customer acquisition and retention, market expansion, or cost efficiency. Discuss trade offs between short term growth and long term strategic health, how to influence and partner with product leadership, and how operational or design choices support business outcomes. Be ready to explain prioritization frameworks, stakeholder alignment approaches, and examples of aligning product or design work to measurable business goals.
Product and Business Impact
Assesses understanding of how technical decisions affect product experience and business metrics. Topics include marketplace dynamics, user needs and behavior, conversion and retention considerations, prioritizing work by impact, experiment and metric design, and connecting engineering trade offs to measurable product outcomes. Candidates should demonstrate curiosity about business drivers and the ability to incorporate product and metric thinking into technical planning.
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.
Customer and User Centricity
This topic assesses the mindset, practices, and decision making that prioritize end users and customers when designing, building, and operating products and services. It includes developing empathy through user research, discovery interviews, empathetic listening, usability testing, journey mapping, and personas; engaging customers and stakeholders to surface pain points and constraints such as budget and timelines; translating insights into clear product requirements, hypotheses, prototypes, and experiments; using customer feedback loops and metrics to validate solutions and measure impact; and applying user centered design methods to inform prioritization and trade offs. It also covers advocating for customer outcomes across teams, challenging internal assumptions, balancing short term satisfaction with long term product integrity and strategy, practicing quality oriented thinking such as testing and defect prevention to protect the user experience, and handling disagreements when customers request suboptimal solutions. Interviewers will expect concrete examples showing discovery conversations, evidence driven prioritization, specification of trade offs, measurable outcomes, and examples where technical or product decisions delivered customer value.
Product and Design Collaboration
Focuses on how design and product teams align, prioritize, and make trade offs to deliver user value and meet business goals. Topics include working with product managers on roadmaps and prioritization, balancing design quality against timelines and scope, advocating for user needs within product constraints, defining success metrics, negotiating trade offs across stakeholders, using prioritization frameworks, and communicating design decisions to product and engineering. Includes examples of pragmatic decision making, cross functional alignment processes, and methods for resolving prioritization conflicts.
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.
Customer Obsession
Prioritizing customer needs and working backward from customer experiences to shape decisions and roadmaps. Includes gathering and using customer feedback, balancing internal convenience against customer value, and making trade offs that demonstrably improve the user experience or customer outcomes.