Communication, Influence & Collaboration Topics
Communication skills, stakeholder management, negotiation, and influence. Covers cross-functional collaboration, conflict resolution, and persuasion.
Accountability & Specific Commitments
Being specific and concrete about next steps, timelines, and ownership. Taking notes during the interaction. Following up in writing with what you committed to and expected timeline. Showing the client you're reliable and take ownership.
General Communication and Soft Skills
Covers broad communication fundamentals and general interpersonal skills such as active listening, engaging conversation, explaining ideas, asking thoughtful questions, professionalism, reliability, and eagerness to learn. Includes assessment style feedback on how a candidate presents themselves during interviews and general soft skill behaviors that support effective teamwork and stakeholder interactions.
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.
Transparent Communication During Setbacks
Ability to communicate openly and constructively when projects experience delays, missed milestones, budget overruns, or other setbacks. Emphasizes framing the issue with clear context, acknowledging impact on timelines and stakeholders, taking ownership rather than shifting blame, presenting root causes, proposing realistic recovery and mitigation plans with revised timelines and trade offs, escalating appropriately, maintaining regular status updates, and documenting lessons learned to rebuild trust and improve future performance.
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.
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.
Collaboration Across Teams
Cross functional collaboration skills for working with backend engineers, designers, product managers, quality engineers, and other stakeholders. Topics include negotiating API contracts and boundaries, translating product requirements into feasible designs, communicating trade offs and impact, influencing roadmaps through evidence and partnership, resolving cross functional disagreements, and creating processes that enable reliable handoffs and shared ownership.
Stakeholder Management and Influence
Managing stakeholders and driving cross functional alignment by identifying stakeholders, mapping priorities, building consensus, and negotiating trade offs between competing needs. Includes tailoring communication to different audiences, running alignment and escalation processes, maintaining transparent documentation such as plans, status updates, decision records, and issue logs, and influencing without formal authority to keep projects moving.
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.