Leadership & Team Development Topics
Leadership practices, team coaching, mentorship, and professional development. Covers coaching skills, leadership philosophy, and continuous learning.
Mentoring, Developing Others, and Ownership of Team Growth
At mid-level, you're expected to mentor junior team members. Prepare a story: someone who reported to you or worked closely with you whom you developed. What was their initial gap? What did you do to help them grow? How did they improve? Example: 'A junior TPM on my team struggled with executive communication. I gave her feedback on her status presentations, coached her through a few runs, and eventually had her lead one. She's now confident presenting to VPs.' Show that you invest in people and take pride in their growth.
Coaching and Team Development
Approaches to coaching individuals and teams to raise capability, autonomy, and accountability. Cover identifying skill and behavior gaps, tailoring coaching style to personality and experience, mentoring and career coaching, enabling ownership and psychological safety, and measuring coaching outcomes. Include examples of coaching engineers, product managers, and other Scrum Masters, how you built trust and autonomy, and how coaching interventions led to observable improvements in performance or team health.
Leading Through Ambiguity and Change
This topic evaluates a candidates ability to lead teams and organizations when direction, information, or outcomes are uncertain. Key areas include making timely decisions with incomplete data, balancing short term needs with long term strategy, and adapting plans as conditions evolve. Interviewers will look for examples of guiding teams through organizational change or industry disruption, communicating clearly under uncertainty, aligning stakeholders, and prioritizing actions when requirements shift. Candidates should demonstrate how they create psychological safety, maintain team focus during stress, and foster a learning oriented culture that embraces experimentation and continuous improvement. The topic also covers managing high pressure situations and conflicting priorities, maintaining resilience and composure, and practical techniques for gathering information quickly, assessing risk, implementing iterative adjustments based on feedback, measuring impact, and debriefing to capture lessons learned. Where relevant, candidates may describe how they stay current with industry trends, incorporate new information into strategy, and coach others to develop a growth mindset toward change.
Conflict Resolution and Difficult Conversations
This topic evaluates a candidate's ability to prevent, surface, and resolve disagreements and to conduct difficult conversations with clarity, empathy, and decisiveness across interpersonal, technical, vendor, and cross functional contexts. Core skills include preparation and framing, active listening, diagnosing root causes, separating people from problems, deescalation techniques, boundary setting, negotiation of trade offs, advocating with structured evidence, and documenting and following up so outcomes are durable. Candidates should be prepared to describe handling peer to peer disputes, performance or behavior conversations with direct reports, manager or stakeholder escalations, technical debates about architecture or prioritization, and alignment work across functions. Interviewers will probe decision making under ambiguity including when to escalate, when to accept compromise, which decision criteria or frameworks were used, and how the candidate balanced empathy and accountability while preserving relationships. The scope also covers facilitation and consensus building techniques such as structured discussions and workshops, preventative practices such as norms for feedback and one on ones, and systemic changes or governance that reduce recurring conflict. Expectations vary by level: junior candidates should show emotional maturity, clear communication habits, and learning from examples, while senior candidates should demonstrate mediating among many stakeholders, influencing without authority, and designing processes and escalation paths to manage conflict at scale. Strong answers include concrete examples, the actions taken, trade offs considered, measurable outcomes, follow up steps, and lessons learned.
Ownership
Taking full responsibility for outcomes, acting with long term perspective, and driving results on behalf of the company. Demonstrates personal accountability, follow through on commitments, solving problems even when work falls outside formal scope, and using failures as learning opportunities.
Individual Mentoring and Coaching
Covers mentoring, coaching, and developing individual contributors across career stages from entry level to senior. Interviewers evaluate one on one coaching skills and structured mentoring approaches, including diagnosing mentee needs, setting growth goals, designing tailored learning and career plans, giving constructive feedback, running effective reviews or critiques, delegating progressively challenging work, scaffolding learning, and creating psychological safety. This topic also encompasses supporting promotions and transitions, balancing technical skill coaching with leadership and career coaching, measuring mentee progress and development outcomes such as promotions, increased ownership, retention or improved performance metrics, and contributing to succession planning. Candidates should be prepared to give concrete examples of mentees, the actions taken to teach or correct behavior, how they documented or institutionalized learnings, and how they adapted style for different learners while preserving individual development.
Leadership and Conflict Resolution
Core leadership behaviors for managing teams through uncertainty and interpersonal challenge. This includes setting direction when requirements are unclear, involving the team in decisions, using data to guide choices, adapting when priorities shift, running difficult conversations with empathy, resolving interpersonal conflicts, and establishing ownership and accountability. Interviewers will evaluate frameworks for decision making, approaches to coaching and escalation, and the ability to maintain team morale and focus under stress.
Team Dynamics and Psychological Safety
Recognizing and resolving team friction and building inclusive environments where people feel safe to speak up. Topics include detecting early signs of dysfunction, conducting difficult conversations, mediation techniques, restorative practices, designing effective retrospectives and one on ones, establishing team norms, measuring psychological safety and trust, and interventions to champion underrepresented perspectives and repair recurring breakdowns in collaboration.
Invent and Simplify
Leadership principle focusing on creating innovative solutions and simplifying complex processes; covers ideation, experimentation, proactive problem-solving, and delivering streamlined, value-driven outcomes across teams and products; commonly assessed in behavioral interviews to gauge inventiveness and efficiency.