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.
Navigating Conflict & Different Perspectives
Describe a situation where you disagreed with a colleague or manager. How did you understand their perspective? How did you express your viewpoint? How was it resolved? What did you learn? Discuss how you create psychological safety where people can disagree respectfully and bring their full selves to work.
Collaboration with Other Teams and Leadership
Focuses on cross functional collaboration beyond the immediate team, including working with sales, human resources, executive leadership, and peer leadership. Topics include understanding the partner team's goals, adapting communication to different stakeholders, building credibility with sales and business partners, influencing without formal authority at the executive level, and operating as a bridge between technical and business functions. Candidates should provide examples of successful cross functional work and explain how they would prioritize and coordinate with stakeholder teams.
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.
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.
Handling Questions and Intellectual Humility
Assesses how a candidate responds to tough questions, alternative perspectives, and data that contradicts their thesis while maintaining professionalism and openness. Topics include active listening, clarifying questions, acknowledging uncertainty, and demonstrating a concrete process for finding answers. Interviewers may look for techniques to avoid defensiveness, how candidates incorporate feedback, how they reframe or update hypotheses in light of new information, and how they communicate uncertainty and next steps to stakeholders.
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.