Product Manager

The work is a negotiation between what customers want, what the systems can do, what risk will accept and what the economics need, and the output is usually a document rather than a deal. Pricing and product terms live here, which means so does a great deal of conduct exposure.

From the front line, from strategy or consulting, from technology and increasingly from data; it is one of the more common landing spots for people moving out of a client-facing seat.

These are the shapes the round takes, not a question bank — banks phrase them differently and the wording is never the point.

What the panel is listening for. Whether you reason from the customer's outcome and the bank's economics at the same time — and whether you can be specific about the trade-off rather than claiming there is not one.

A lending product is a credit policy written in advance for thousands of borrowers at once; understanding what the policy will let through is the difference between designing one and decorating one.

That is the general case as well as this one. A bank's technology is not ordinary technology and its finance is not ordinary finance, and the second and third lines of defence — risk, compliance, financial crime, model validation and internal audit — recruit heavily out of the functions, taking the people who can already read a business. The case drills are free and are the cheapest way to build that, whichever column you sit in.