The bank is organised by subject, which is the wrong order to study in. Say what you are interviewing for and how long you have, and this builds the order instead.
The same role interviews differently depending on who is hiring, and the difference is not difficulty - it is which round decides the outcome. These are archetypes rather than named companies, because a claim about how calibrated product-company loops weight design stays true, and a claim about what one company asked last month does not.
Also called: FAANG, MAANG, Big Tech, product company, hyperscaler
Large product companies running a standardised, centrally calibrated loop: an algorithmic screen, one or two design rounds scaled to level, and a behavioural round scored against published principles.
Also called: GCC, global capability centre, global capability center, captive, captive unit, GIC, offshore development centre
The offshore engineering arm of a global bank, insurer, retailer, telco, or product company, hiring to own a product area rather than to staff a project.
Also called: consulting, system integrator, SI, IT services, outsourcing, vendor, staffing
Firms that sell delivery capacity and advisory work to clients, where the interview is partly technical assessment and partly a rehearsal of how you will sound in front of the client paying for you.
Also called: startup, scale-up, seed, series A, early stage
Small product teams hiring for end-to-end ownership, where the loop is short, idiosyncratic, and usually anchored on a take-home or a paired session in the actual codebase.
Triage, not preparation. With one day the goal is to stop the avoidable losses - the vocabulary you cannot recall, the two questions this loop always asks, and the three stories you will otherwise invent on the spot. Learning something new today is a worse use of the hours than making what you already know retrievable under pressure.
Enough to fix one real weakness and rehearse the rest. Three days is the shortest span where a full mock loop is worth the time it costs, because you can still act on what it exposes before the interview.
The most common real window, and the one where sequencing matters most. A week is enough to cover every round in the loop once and the two heaviest rounds twice, provided you decide the order up front rather than following whatever feels urgent each evening.
Long enough to build something rather than revise it. A month is the first window where you can genuinely raise a level - close a real gap in fundamentals, do repeated design practice, and accumulate stories with outcomes attached - instead of arranging what you already know.