Leadership & Team Development Topics
Leadership practices, team coaching, mentorship, and professional development. Covers coaching skills, leadership philosophy, and continuous learning.
Mentoring and Developing Others
Comprehensive topic covering the philosophy and practice of coaching mentoring and developing individuals and teams across levels and functions. Interviewers assess how candidates identify skill gaps and high potential employees select and adapt coaching frameworks such as situational leadership and servant leadership set clear development goals and milestones conduct effective one on one coaching conversations and deliver constructive feedback that produces measurable improvement. It covers hands on technical mentorship activities such as pair programming code review design review testing and automation coaching as well as career planning succession planning delegation stretch assignments and performance management. It also includes designing and scaling mentorship systems and skill development programs such as onboarding curricula rotation plans peer mentoring and documentation that raise team capability. Candidates should be prepared to describe how they foster psychological safety and continuous learning measure impact using outcomes such as promotions increased ownership improved code quality productivity retention and morale and provide concrete resume based examples that show the approach taken timelines and measurable results.
Mentoring, Developing Others, and Ownership of Team Growth
At mid-level, you're expected to mentor junior team members. Prepare a story: someone who reported to you or worked closely with you whom you developed. What was their initial gap? What did you do to help them grow? How did they improve? Example: 'A junior TPM on my team struggled with executive communication. I gave her feedback on her status presentations, coached her through a few runs, and eventually had her lead one. She's now confident presenting to VPs.' Show that you invest in people and take pride in their growth.
Individual Mentoring and Coaching
Covers mentoring, coaching, and developing individual contributors across career stages from entry level to senior. Interviewers evaluate one on one coaching skills and structured mentoring approaches, including diagnosing mentee needs, setting growth goals, designing tailored learning and career plans, giving constructive feedback, running effective reviews or critiques, delegating progressively challenging work, scaffolding learning, and creating psychological safety. This topic also encompasses supporting promotions and transitions, balancing technical skill coaching with leadership and career coaching, measuring mentee progress and development outcomes such as promotions, increased ownership, retention or improved performance metrics, and contributing to succession planning. Candidates should be prepared to give concrete examples of mentees, the actions taken to teach or correct behavior, how they documented or institutionalized learnings, and how they adapted style for different learners while preserving individual development.
Team Composition and Hiring
Assess how a candidate would design a growth organization, plan hires, and build capability. Key areas include recommended roles and skill sets across analytics, experimentation, paid acquisition, content and creative, partnerships, and growth engineering; seniority mix and hiring roadmap; interview and evaluation criteria tied to measurable competencies; onboarding and knowledge transfer approaches; and metrics for measuring team effectiveness and capacity planning.
Team Structure and Collaboration
Describe the composition and organization of the teams you have worked within, including team size, reporting lines, centralized versus distributed models, and formal collaboration practices. Explain your role in cross functional workflows between design, product, and engineering, how decisions were made, and any tooling or rituals used to coordinate work. For mid level and senior candidates, emphasize mentoring and leadership contributions such as onboarding juniors, running design reviews, delegating tasks, and driving cross functional alignment. Interviewers assess your ability to operate within and influence team structures, communicate effectively across functions, and grow others.
Staff Level Growth Leadership
Evaluates understanding of what it means to operate at the staff growth level rather than as an individual contributor. Candidates should explain how they set strategy and vision for growth areas, build and mentor teams, create repeatable processes, and institutionalize an experimentation culture. Topics include defining team goals and success metrics, hiring and developing growth talent, delegating and prioritizing across multiple squads, influencing product and engineering roadmaps, stakeholder management across functions, governance and decision frameworks, and measuring team level impact. Interviewers will look for the ability to move from running individual experiments to owning long term growth direction, coaching others, and aligning growth initiatives to business and product objectives.
Strategic Vision and 90 Day/1 Year Planning
Ability to articulate a clear vision for what success looks like in the role and develop a realistic plan for the first 90 days and first year. Should demonstrate understanding of immediate priorities vs. longer-term initiatives and ability to balance execution with strategic development.
Bias for Action
Taking initiative and moving forward decisively even when information is incomplete. Emphasizes speed and learning through experimentation, preferring to make progress and iterate rather than delay, and demonstrating judgment about when to act quickly versus when to gather more information.
Technical Mentoring and Team Development
Covers approaches to growing engineering capability through mentorship, coaching, and structured development. Includes identifying high potential talent, running one on ones, providing actionable feedback, designing personalized development plans, and using coaching techniques such as pair programming, shadowing, and graduated responsibility. Discusses differences in developing junior, mid level, and senior engineers, setting career ladders and promotion criteria, creating knowledge transfer practices and documentation, enabling technical leadership, and fostering an environment where teams can solve complex problems autonomously. Also covers metrics of success for development programs, mentoring program scalability, and strategies for retaining and promoting internal talent.