Technical Fluency

Question 1

What are the two primary reasons that PM employers care about technical fluency?

Answer 1

• Your ability to communicate effectively with engineering teams
• Your ability to understand the technical implications of product decisions

Question 2

What is the primary tradeoff to consider when comparing established technologies to newer technologies?

Answer 2

Newer technologies will have cutting-edge capabilities but it will be more difficult to find qualified engineers to work with them.

Question 3

Give a simple analogy for an API.

Answer 3

A menu at a restaurant (standardized definitions of what the restaurant can give you in exchange for some input (money)).

Question 4

What are the three high level components of an API?

Answer 4

• Resources (what information is accessible available via the API)
• Actions (what can you do with that information)
• Responses (how will the API respond to the actions)

Question 5

Why do API providers limit access to their APIs?

Answer 5

• To keep track of who is using the API, and potentially upsell them
• To make sure their own infrastructure is not overwhelmed

Question 6

Which is generally more flexible, relational or non-relational (e.g. document-based) databases?

Answer 6

Non-relational / document-based databases (e.g. MongoDB)

Question 7

What are the scalability advantages of non-relational databases?

Answer 7

They can more easily be scaled horizontally (data split across multiple instances/machines).

Question 8

Which type of database has stronger consistency, relational or non-relational?

Answer 8

Relational—in particular complex transactions can be performed without breaking referential integrity.

Question 9

Why are relational databases often better for analytics?

Answer 9

Because they can be queried with SQL, which many people know how to use and many analytics tools depend on.