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.
Presentation and Storytelling
Covers the ability to prepare, structure, and deliver clear and persuasive presentations and public speaking engagements. Candidates are evaluated on crafting a concise opening and summary, organizing content for efficient comprehension, and tailoring messages to technical and nontechnical stakeholders and different time constraints. Emphasis is placed on narrative and storytelling techniques, the use of examples and anecdotes to make points memorable, and structuring information to highlight key insights. Also includes effective use of visuals and data visualizations to support messages, slide and visual design principles, pacing, vocal presence, body language, and techniques for maintaining audience engagement. Candidates should demonstrate skill in handling questions and answers, managing interruptions, adapting on the fly when challenged or when information or time changes, and communicating complex technical work succinctly. Interviewers assess clarity, audience awareness, persuasiveness, confidence, and the ability to tell a coherent story about projects, analyses, or personal experience.
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.
Cross Functional Collaboration and Partnership
How to form and operationalize partnerships across adjacent functions to deliver cross functional objectives. Covers identifying key partners such as engineering design product research operations and marketing, understanding their goals constraints and decision rights, involving technical and design partners early, balancing product vision with feasibility, and aligning priorities across teams. Includes governance and coordination mechanisms like steering committees working groups and clear escalation paths, planning cross functional rollouts and handoffs, tailoring messages and metrics to different audiences, and measuring cross functional outcomes while managing resistance during change.
Collaboration and Business Impact
Emphasis on how cross functional work produces measurable outcomes for teams and the organization. Topics include defining success metrics, describing how collaboration influenced product or business outcomes, driving adoption of solutions across teams, and demonstrating impact at team and organizational levels. Candidates should be able to articulate how collaborative efforts changed roadmaps, improved metrics, saved costs, increased revenue, or accelerated delivery.
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.
Influence and Stakeholder Management
The ability to persuade and align peers, leaders, and cross functional teams when you do not have direct authority, while managing stakeholder expectations and trade offs. This includes stakeholder mapping and analysis, building coalition support, framing recommendations to address different stakeholder priorities, and adapting messaging for technical, operational, or executive audiences. Candidates should be able to describe concrete approaches such as listening to constraints, using data and evidence to support proposals, negotiating trade offs, sequencing outreach before decision meetings, resolving disagreement and conflict, and demonstrating vulnerability and learning when plans change. Assessment covers influencing across teams, securing prioritization and resources, achieving stakeholder alignment on product or platform decisions, presenting to executives, and measuring follow through and outcomes.