Strategy question
How will you design a product roadmap without any current documentation or help from the business team?
- ViacomCBS
- Strategy
- Hard
Practice this question out loud. An AI interviewer asks it, follows up like a real interviewer would, and scores your answer. Type or speak.
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What this question tests
Whether you can build a product roadmap from first-hand research when formal documentation and business team support are unavailable, showing resourcefulness and prioritization skill.
How to approach it
- Start with direct user research: interview a cross-section of actual users and customer-facing teams like support and sales to understand pain points firsthand.
- Gather indirect data: review support tickets, app store reviews, and usage analytics to identify recurring themes without needing business team input.
- Talk to engineering and design leads directly, since they often carry informal institutional knowledge that fills documentation gaps.
- Synthesize findings into a small set of prioritized themes, ranked by frequency and estimated business impact based on available data.
- Draft a lightweight roadmap with clear assumptions stated explicitly, since you lack formal validation, and flag it as a living document.
- Socialize the draft roadmap broadly for feedback before finalizing, using the review process itself to surface any missing context from the business side.
What a strong answer includes
- Uses multiple independent data sources, support tickets, analytics, and interviews, rather than relying on any single weak signal.
- Explicitly states assumptions in the roadmap given the missing documentation, making gaps visible rather than hidden.
- Uses the socialization step itself as a research tool, turning the lack of business input into an opportunity to surface hidden context.
Common mistakes
- Waiting for documentation or business team availability instead of proactively gathering data from available sources.
- Presenting the roadmap as fully validated when it's actually built on assumptions that haven't been confirmed.
Likely follow-up questions
- How would you handle pushback if the business team later disagrees with your prioritization?
- What would you do if support tickets and user interviews pointed in different directions?
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More questions from ViacomCBS
Learn the skill behind it
Chapters of the AI PM course that teach what this question tests.
- Chapter 4: Discovery and strategy for AI products
- Chapter 9: Prove it paid off: outcomes, economics, and pricing
- Chapter 14: Get the job: the AI PM interview loop