Communication, Influence & Collaboration Topics
Communication skills, stakeholder management, negotiation, and influence. Covers cross-functional collaboration, conflict resolution, and persuasion.
Accountability & Specific Commitments
Being specific and concrete about next steps, timelines, and ownership. Taking notes during the interaction. Following up in writing with what you committed to and expected timeline. Showing the client you're reliable and take ownership.
Emotional Intelligence and Empathy
Focuses on recognizing and managing emotions in oneself and others, demonstrating empathy, navigating difficult conversations, and adapting communication to emotional cues. Includes conflict sensitivity, patience, perspective taking, and showing emotional awareness through both words and listening behaviors.
Consultative Discovery and Needs Analysis
Skills and practices for conducting structured, consultative discovery conversations with customers or stakeholders across sales, product, and project contexts. Candidates should demonstrate active listening, empathy, rapport building, and the ability to ask strategic open and probing questions that uncover business objectives, pain points, technical requirements, decision criteria, constraints, timelines, budgets, and success metrics. The scope includes preparing for conversations, stakeholder mapping, identifying decision makers and constraints, qualifying needs, handling ambiguous or conflicting information, validating and summarizing assumptions, and documenting and synthesizing findings. Interviewers may assess use of structured questioning techniques, effective note taking and synthesis, prioritization of requirements, methods for surfacing root causes, and how discovery outcomes are translated into measurable acceptance criteria, proposals, opportunity qualification, and clear next steps. Candidates should also show how they tailor discovery cadence and artifacts to different contexts and how they communicate findings to align solutions with business outcomes.
Problem Solving & Finding Win Win Solutions
Work collaboratively toward solutions that address both operations needs and other function's constraints. Be creative and flexible.
Perspective Taking and Empathy for Different Functions
Demonstrate understanding of how different functions operate and what they care about. Sales cares about deals closed and revenue. Support cares about customer satisfaction and issue resolution. Product cares about feature adoption and roadmap impact. Operations cares about process efficiency. Show empathy for each perspective and discuss how you'd build relationships and find common ground.
Cross Functional Collaboration and Coordination
Comprehensive competency covering how individuals plan, communicate, negotiate, and execute work across organizational boundaries to deliver shared outcomes. This topic includes building and maintaining relationships with product managers, engineers, designers, researchers, operations, sales, finance, legal, compliance, human resources, and people operations; translating priorities and terminology between technical and nontechnical audiences; surfacing and resolving dependencies and handoffs; negotiating trade offs and aligning incentives and timelines; establishing decision rights, meeting cadences, and clear communication channels; designing inclusive processes for cross functional decision making; influencing without formal authority and building coalitions; resolving conflicts constructively and giving and receiving feedback; and measuring shared success and program outcomes. At more senior levels this also includes stakeholder mapping, executive collaboration and sponsorship, navigating organizational politics, managing multi functional programs that involve complex regulatory or compliance constraints, and sustaining long term trust across teams. Interviewers will probe for concrete examples, frameworks and tactics used to align stakeholders, the measurable outcomes delivered through collaboration, and how the candidate balanced competing metrics and priorities while maintaining momentum.
Influence and Persuasion
Skills and tactics for persuading and influencing decisions and behaviors when you do not have formal authority, and for scaling influence across teams and organizations. Candidates should demonstrate how to build credibility and trust tailor messages to stakeholder priorities, use data and customer insight to make the business case, tell compelling stories that connect to outcomes, recruit allies and champions, negotiate and compromise, and create operational changes such as standards processes or tooling to lock in gains. Interviewers will probe for examples of influencing technical and non technical stakeholders resolving disagreements building consensus and measuring the impact of influence on adoption quality speed or other business outcomes. For senior levels include examples of cross organizational influence and governance for sustained change.
Stakeholder Management and Influence
Managing stakeholders and driving cross functional alignment by identifying stakeholders, mapping priorities, building consensus, and negotiating trade offs between competing needs. Includes tailoring communication to different audiences, running alignment and escalation processes, maintaining transparent documentation such as plans, status updates, decision records, and issue logs, and influencing without formal authority to keep projects moving.
Cross Functional Leadership and Influence
Covers leading and influencing across organizational boundaries without formal authority. Topics include building coalitions, stakeholder management, negotiating trade offs, aligning diverse teams around shared objectives, advocating for customer needs inside product and engineering discussions, and shaping strategic decisions. Candidates should be able to describe how they build credibility, navigate competing priorities, secure resources, and persuade partners across finance, operations, human resources, and business units. Emphasis is on interpersonal influence, stakeholder mapping, communication strategies, and examples that demonstrate measurable impact from cross functional initiatives.