Communication, Influence & Collaboration Topics
Communication skills, stakeholder management, negotiation, and influence. Covers cross-functional collaboration, conflict resolution, and persuasion.
Managing Stakeholder Priorities
This topic covers how you identify, assess, and resolve competing priorities among stakeholders and teams. Interviewers expect examples showing how you gather stakeholder perspectives, surface and quantify trade offs, negotiate scope and timelines, and make decisions when resources or goals conflict. Include how you balance differing functional concerns such as product delivery versus documentation completeness, legal or compliance risk versus business growth, cost constraints versus quality, and operational urgency versus forensic rigor. Demonstrate communication strategies used to gain alignment and buy in, when and how you escalate, how you say no diplomatically, and how you document rationales so stakeholders understand trade offs. Show outcomes, metrics, and lessons learned so the interviewer can evaluate your judgement and stakeholder influence.
Managing Up and Expectations
This topic focuses on how you communicate with and manage expectations of senior leaders, sponsors, or managers. Provide concrete examples of proactively informing leadership about risks, delays, or trade offs; negotiating or pushing back on unrealistic requests; and keeping sponsors aligned without waiting for crises. Examples can range from product or project updates to situations where you had to escalate, seek decisions, or reframe trade offs for higher level stakeholders. For entry level candidates, academic or project sponsor examples are acceptable. Emphasize clarity, honesty, timing of communications, stakeholder sensitivity, and outcomes demonstrating maturity and influence.
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.
Cross Functional Influence and Leadership
This topic covers a candidate's ability to influence, align, and lead across organizational boundaries without formal authority. Candidates should demonstrate how they build and sustain credibility and trusted relationships with product, engineering, design, business, analytics, and executive partners to shape decisions, drive initiatives, and change culture. Assessment focuses on stakeholder mapping and prioritization, coalition building, negotiation and persuasion, tailoring communication and storytelling for different audiences, managing up and sideways, facilitating meetings and escalations, and aligning competing incentives. Evaluators will look for concrete tactics such as relationship building, data driven persuasion, compelling business cases, governance and accountability mechanisms, trade off negotiation, creation of scalable practices, and ways to measure and communicate organizational impact. The scope also includes executive presence, emotional intelligence, handling resistance and skepticism, recovering trust after setbacks, and sustaining cultural or operational changes across teams.
Influencing and Persuading Without Direct Authority
TPMs rarely have authority over other team leads or departments. Tell stories showing how you've influenced engineers, leaders, and stakeholders to align, change direction, or commit to plans. Discuss techniques: building trust, using data, understanding motivations, creating psychological safety, finding win-wins. Show you respect others' expertise and perspective—you persuade through logic and collaboration, not pressure or politics. Demonstrate how you've handled disagreement constructively.
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.
Adaptive Communication and Emotional Intelligence
Covers the ability to adjust communication style, tone, content, and level of detail to fit different audiences such as engineers, finance, customers, and senior leaders, while demonstrating clarity and purpose. Includes active listening, empathy, perspective taking, and the recognition of verbal and nonverbal cues to understand others emotional states and motivations. Encompasses responding to emotional needs with professional boundaries, building trust and psychological safety, managing difficult conversations, deescalation, and tailoring feedback or persuasion strategies to stakeholder preferences. Candidates may be asked to show examples of adapting messaging across roles, demonstrating compassion while maintaining business objectivity, and creating inclusive communication practices that foster collaboration and engagement.
Active Listening and Perspective Taking
Ability to listen attentively and empathetically to users, partners, and stakeholders in order to understand their needs, constraints, motivations, and success metrics. This includes listening to understand rather than to respond, asking open and clarifying questions, paraphrasing and summarizing to confirm understanding, recognizing implicit concerns and nonverbal cues, and incorporating feedback into decisions and plans. Candidates should demonstrate perspective taking by considering multiple viewpoints (for example end users, engineers, product managers, and business stakeholders), reconciling competing needs, and translating qualitative input into actionable requirements or trade offs. Interviewers assess behaviors such as curiosity, humility, balanced advocacy, and the ability to synthesize diverse inputs into clear problem definitions and next steps. Examples to draw on include user research and empathy work, stakeholder alignment conversations, requirements gathering, and moments when listening changed the direction of a project or resolved a conflict.