Communication, Influence & Collaboration Topics
Communication skills, stakeholder management, negotiation, and influence. Covers cross-functional collaboration, conflict resolution, and persuasion.
Advocacy and Constructive Disagreement
Share examples of times you disagreed with leadership, colleagues, or customer requests and advocated for your perspective. Demonstrate healthy disagreement: listening to others' views, building evidence for your position, expressing concern diplomatically, accepting decisions even when you disagree. Show that you can influence outcomes through persuasion rather than authority. At mid-level, demonstrate both advocating for your views and respecting final decisions by others.
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.
Handling Disagreement and Conflict
This topic covers how a candidate identifies, manages, and resolves disagreements and organizational conflicts while navigating complex stakeholder landscapes and competing priorities. Interviewers assess the ability to tell a clear behavioral story that shows professional conduct when disagreeing with peers, managers, or stakeholders, including how the candidate validated different perspectives, advocated for a position, and remained open to changing their view. It includes skills such as active listening, empathy, negotiating trade offs, influencing without authority, de escalation and escalation judgment, and building alignment through data driven reasoning and decision frameworks. Candidates should also demonstrate how they balanced competing needs, surfaced root causes, proposed options, implemented resolutions, measured outcomes, and reflected on lessons learned to improve future interactions.
Data and Analytics Partnership
Skills for collaborating effectively with analytics and data science teams. Topics include aligning on metric definitions, scoping and prioritizing analytics requests, understanding data team capacity and constraints, fostering trust and constructive skepticism of analyses, coordinating early during product planning, and handling conflicts when analysis contradicts intuition. Candidates should be able to describe prioritization frameworks, communication strategies, and examples of cross functional workflows that produce reliable, actionable insights while respecting data team bandwidth.
Collaboration and Communication Skills
Covers the interpersonal and team oriented abilities required to work effectively with peers and cross functional partners. Topics include clear verbal and written communication, active listening, structuring and tailoring explanations of technical concepts for non technical audiences, asking clarifying questions, giving and receiving constructive feedback, mentoring and knowledge sharing, participating in pair programming and peer review, balancing independent problem solving with seeking help, contributing to shared goals, building consensus, and resolving disagreements respectfully and constructively. Interviewers will probe for behavioral and situational examples such as code reviews, paired work, cross functional projects, times when a candidate translated technical tradeoffs for non technical stakeholders, situations where feedback was given or received, and instances of facilitating alignment across a team. Candidates should demonstrate clarity, professionalism, responsiveness to feedback, collaborative problem solving in real time, and respect for diverse perspectives.
Stakeholder Management and Alignment
Practices for building and maintaining relationships with stakeholders, achieving alignment on goals scope timelines and success criteria, and managing expectations across functions and levels. Topics include tailoring communication and metrics to different audiences, negotiating trade offs and realistic timelines, coaching partners on prioritization, documenting decisions and governance, handling scope creep and midstream changes, maintaining transparency with roadmaps status reports and decision logs, and establishing escalation protocols. Candidates should show tactics for earning buy in without formal authority, coordinating operational handoffs, protecting teams from unnecessary friction, and measuring the health and effectiveness of stakeholder relationships and long term alignment.
Organizational Decision Making and Influence
Covers how candidates make and influence decisions and sustain execution inside complex organizations characterized by ambiguity, competing priorities, multiple stakeholder perspectives, political dynamics, and large scale. Core areas include frameworks for making decisions with incomplete information, tradeoff analysis and pragmatic acceptance of imperfect choices; mapping reporting lines and decision rights, governance models and escalation patterns; stakeholder mapping and alignment across teams, functions, and geographies; prioritization techniques for balancing technical work against product and business needs; evaluation of organizational factors such as team skills, leadership styles, company values, and politics; choosing pragmatic solutions aligned with organizational readiness; influencing senior leadership and building coalitions; interpersonal skills for navigating dissent, communicating tradeoffs clearly, managing risk and uncertainty, delegating and empowering teams; and establishing metrics and feedback loops to monitor outcomes and preserve momentum on multi department and multi country initiatives. Interviewers assess judgment, clarity in articulating tradeoffs, ability to set direction and rally stakeholders, and methods for maintaining focus and execution at scale while balancing governance and autonomy.
Trust With Nontechnical Stakeholders
Techniques and behaviors for establishing and maintaining trust and credibility with nonengineering partners such as product, design, finance, legal, and business leaders. Covers how to act as a trusted advisor: demonstrating domain empathy for their goals and constraints, speaking their language, delivering on commitments, aligning advice to business outcomes, being responsive and transparent, and converting perceived blockers into enablers. Includes examples of repairing damaged relationships, negotiating tradeoffs, setting expectations, and building long term partnership through reliability and shared success metrics.
Influence and Thought Leadership
Communicating to influence decision making, build consensus, and establish domain credibility. This covers explaining complex concepts to technical and non technical audiences, using data and structured reasoning to persuade, practicing active listening and adaptive communication, mentoring or publishing ideas that demonstrate thought leadership, and creating buy in for approaches across teams and stakeholders. Evaluation focuses on examples of influencing without authority, presenting a point of view, and contributing knowledge or perspectives that advance the organization.