Communication, Influence & Collaboration Topics
Communication skills, stakeholder management, negotiation, and influence. Covers cross-functional collaboration, conflict resolution, and persuasion.
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.
Technical Communication and Explanation
The ability to explain technical concepts, architectures, designs, and implementation details clearly and accurately while preserving necessary technical correctness. Key skills include choosing and defining precise terminology, selecting the appropriate level of detail for the audience, structuring explanations into sequential steps, using concrete examples, analogies, diagrams, and demonstrations, and producing high quality documentation or tutorials. Candidates should demonstrate how they simplify complexity without introducing incorrect statements, scaffold learning with progressive disclosure, document application programming interface behavior and workflows, walk through code or system designs, and defend technical choices with clear rationale and concise language.
Negotiation and Stakeholder Influence
Covers the skills and approaches for persuading and negotiating with internal and external stakeholders who may have competing priorities. Candidates should be able to map stakeholders and their motivations, differentiate negotiable from non negotiable items, prepare objectives and fallback positions including the best alternative to a negotiated agreement, and design negotiation strategies that balance trade offs while protecting business constraints and preserving relationships. Topics include preparing options that create win win outcomes, sequencing concessions, using data and trade off analysis to support positions, identifying decision makers and blockers, and influencing without formal authority. Also includes cross functional consensus building and alignment before external negotiation across functions such as product sales legal finance and procurement, handling pricing and contract discussions, escalating appropriately when agreements conflict with policy or unacceptable risk, documenting limits and agreements, and closing and enforcing agreements. Interviewers assess communication style during difficult conversations, ability to synthesize competing requirements into a recommended solution, stakeholder prioritization and engagement plans, and measurable outcomes such as agreement terms reduced cycle time or preserved relationships.
Influencing Without Authority
This topic covers the behavioral competency of persuading teams, peers, and leaders when you do not have formal decision making power. Candidates should be prepared to describe concrete examples from their experience where they influenced engineering teams, product teams, business leaders, or cross functional stakeholders to change priorities, adopt approaches, improve deliverables, or reach a decision. Assessors will look for how the candidate built credibility, mapped stakeholders, understood constraints and motivations, used data and evidence, framed proposals in terms of business and technical trade offs, created psychological safety for dissent, and found win win outcomes. Good answers show specific actions such as gathering and presenting data, prototyping or providing examples, facilitating consensus building sessions, negotiating trade offs, escalating appropriately when needed, and following through to measure impact. Candidates should also explain how they handled disagreement, preserved relationships, and adapted their approach for engineers, product managers, or executives.
Communication and Interpersonal Style
Focuses on observable communication skills and interpersonal approaches used while collaborating. This includes clarity of verbal and written communication, active listening, tailoring technical explanations for non technical stakeholders, preferences for synchronous versus asynchronous communication, how a candidate gives and receives feedback, handling disagreements constructively, and emotional intelligence. Interviewers assess professionalism, approachability, tone, and whether the candidate's interaction style will support effective cross functional work and stakeholder management.
Communication and Transparency
Covers a leader or individual contributor communication philosophy and practices focused on transparency, proactive risk communication, and tailoring messages to different audiences. Topics include how to communicate decisions and their rationale, how to balance openness with necessary discretion, best practices for delivering bad news, and how to share risks and limitations early. Also includes choice of communication channels and formats such as one on ones, team meetings, written updates, and escalation paths; timing and information granularity; stakeholder expectations management; and examples of effective and ineffective transparency in past experience.
Relationship Building and Empathy
Covers the interpersonal skills and practices used to create and sustain strong long term relationships with customers and colleagues. Topics include demonstrating genuine empathy, active listening, building rapport through follow up and personal attention, remembering conversational details, and responding to concerns in a human centered way. Also includes cross functional partnership building with other teams, sharing learnings, maintaining trust through disagreements, and turning strong relationships into durable partnerships that enable collaboration and future opportunities. Interviewers assess communication style, emotional intelligence, conflict navigation, and concrete examples of relationship maintenance and growth.