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.
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.
Active Listening and Communication
Covers a candidate's ability to listen actively and communicate clearly across stakeholders and contexts. Includes listening without interrupting, observing verbal and nonverbal cues, asking clarifying and probing questions, paraphrasing and summarizing to confirm understanding, and adjusting the level of technical detail to the audience. Encompasses empathy, building rapport, showing engagement through tone and pacing, handling feedback and difficult conversations, managing interpersonal dynamics, and resolving misunderstandings through constructive dialogue. Interviewers use this topic to assess listening techniques, question framing, concise explanation skills, emotional intelligence, trust building, and the ability to adapt communication style to different stakeholders.
Stakeholder Management and Business Context
This topic evaluates a candidate's ability to identify, weigh, and reconcile the needs, priorities, and constraints of multiple stakeholders while accounting for the broader business context and operational realities. Candidates should be able to map stakeholders, surface and explain hidden trade offs, and perform structured trade off decision making and risk and impact assessment across areas such as legal and regulatory requirements, financial constraints, technical feasibility, human resources, sales, and customer experience. Interviewers assess negotiation and influencing techniques, diplomatic communication tailored to different audiences, escalation and governance approaches, documentation and signoff practices, and methods for aligning incentives and reaching acceptable compromises. Strong responses demonstrate practical mitigations and adoption plans that consider return on investment, supportability, maintainability, change management, training, and downstream consequences. Candidates should provide concrete examples such as advocating for realistic delivery timelines with clients or sales, negotiating scope to preserve quality, reconciling compliance needs with business strategy, or prioritizing hiring and budget decisions. Good answers include measurable decision criteria, follow up and monitoring plans, and an ability to maintain relationships across stakeholder groups while protecting project and business outcomes.
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.