Informal Leadership and Influence Examples Questions
Highlight specific instances where you've demonstrated leadership as an IC: mentoring junior engineers and their growth, leading technical design discussions, driving architectural decisions, taking on tech lead or project lead roles, organizing team initiatives or learning sessions, improving team processes, or successfully managing cross-functional projects. Even small examples (mentoring one person, leading one important decision) demonstrate you've already started thinking like a leader.
EasyTechnical
0 practiced
What is your informal leadership philosophy as an individual contributor? Describe the principles that guide how you mentor, run technical discussions, and influence team culture, with brief examples of each principle in action.
HardTechnical
0 practiced
You need executive approval and budget to improve critical system reliability. As an IC, outline how you would assemble the proposal: what metrics to include, ROI calculations, risk analysis, a prioritized roadmap, and the communication plan to get buy-in from engineering leadership and product executives.
HardTechnical
0 practiced
You're responsible for improving code review effectiveness across many teams. Outline cultural changes, tooling upgrades, SLA targets, automation, and measurement you would propose to scale better reviews across the organization and a pilot plan to validate them.
HardSystem Design
0 practiced
You want to introduce architectural guardrails (shared libraries, CI checks, runtime invariants) to improve reliability and maintainability. As an IC, propose how you'd design guardrails, minimize developer friction, win adoption across teams, and enforce compliance or remediation.
MediumTechnical
0 practiced
You propose adding a mandatory PR template and CI gate, but some senior engineers resist the change. As an IC championing this, how would you address objections, pilot the change, gather evidence to show impact, and scale the adoption while minimizing friction?
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