Communication, Influence & Collaboration Topics
Communication skills, stakeholder management, negotiation, and influence. Covers cross-functional collaboration, conflict resolution, and persuasion.
General Communication and Soft Skills
Covers broad communication fundamentals and general interpersonal skills such as active listening, engaging conversation, explaining ideas, asking thoughtful questions, professionalism, reliability, and eagerness to learn. Includes assessment style feedback on how a candidate presents themselves during interviews and general soft skill behaviors that support effective teamwork and stakeholder interactions.
Conflict Resolution in Ambiguous Situations
Focuses on resolving interpersonal or stakeholder conflicts that arise when goals, requirements, or information are unclear. Interviewers look for approaches to surface differing assumptions, align priorities, negotiate trade offs, use data or experiments to break deadlocks, and maintain relationships while driving a decision. Includes techniques for mediating disagreements, escalating when appropriate, and documenting decisions and accountability.
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.
Technical Communication and Explanation
The ability to explain technical concepts, architectures, designs, and implementation details clearly and accurately while preserving necessary technical correctness. Key skills include choosing and defining precise terminology, selecting the appropriate level of detail for the audience, structuring explanations into sequential steps, using concrete examples, analogies, diagrams, and demonstrations, and producing high quality documentation or tutorials. Candidates should demonstrate how they simplify complexity without introducing incorrect statements, scaffold learning with progressive disclosure, document application programming interface behavior and workflows, walk through code or system designs, and defend technical choices with clear rationale and concise language.
Handling Ambiguity and Complexity
Covers how a candidate reasons and acts when information is incomplete, requirements are unclear, situations are complex, or interviewers pose unconventional open ended questions. Interviewers assess both thought process and execution: how you clarify ambiguous goals, surface and validate assumptions, ask the right stakeholders the right questions, and balance moving forward with minimizing risk. Demonstrate problem decomposition, hypothesis driven thinking, trade off analysis, and how you document decisions or fallbacks. For behavioral stories describe the context, the specific uncertainty or unusual prompt, the actions you took to gather information or make decisions, and the measurable outcome or learning. Also include how you handle pressure and maintain stakeholder alignment when requirements change, how you prototype or iterate to reduce uncertainty, and when you escalate or pause to avoid costly mistakes. For unconventional interview prompts explain your reasoning out loud, state assumptions, break the question into parts, show intellectual curiosity, and describe next steps you would take in a real situation.
Technical Communication and Decision Making
Focuses on the ability to explain technical solutions, justify trade offs, and collaborate effectively across engineering and non engineering stakeholders. Topics include articulating design decisions and their impact on reliability performance and maintenance, walking through solutions step by step, explaining algorithmic complexity and trade offs, asking clarifying questions about requirements, writing clear comments documentation bug reports and tickets, conducting and communicating root cause analysis, participating constructively in code reviews, and negotiating quality versus delivery trade offs with product and operations partners. Interviewers evaluate clarity of expression, reasoning behind decisions, and the ability to make choices that balance short term needs and long term quality.
Collaboration With Engineering and Product Teams
Covers the skills and practices for partnering across engineering, product, and other technical functions to plan, build, and deliver reliable software. Candidates should be prepared to explain how they translate user needs and business priorities into clear acceptance criteria, communicate technical constraints and system architecture considerations to nontechnical stakeholders, negotiate priorities and release schedules, and balance feature delivery with technical debt and quality. Includes preparing and handing off design artifacts, specifications, interaction details, edge case handling, and component documentation; communicating test findings and bug investigation results; participating in design and code reviews; pairing on implementation and prototyping; and influencing engineering priorities without dictating implementation. Interviewers will probe technical fluency, pragmatic decision making, estimation and timeline alignment, scope management, escalation practices, and the quality of written and verbal communication. Assessment also examines cross functional rituals and processes such as joint planning, backlog grooming, post release retrospectives, aligning on measurable success metrics, and coordination with infrastructure, security, and operations teams, as well as behaviors that build trust, shared ownership, and effective long term partnership.
Clear Written and Verbal Communication
Fundamental spoken and written communication skills used to convey ideas clearly, concisely, and professionally. This includes structuring messages logically; using plain, audience appropriate language; pacing, tone, and avoidance of filler words; practicing active listening; asking and answering clarifying questions; summarizing and confirming next steps; and producing clear status updates, emails, and short documents. Interview assessment covers both real time articulation and edited written expression, evaluating organization of thought, persuasiveness, professional demeanor, and the ability to make complex ideas accessible without sacrificing necessary detail.