Communication, Influence & Collaboration Topics
Communication skills, stakeholder management, negotiation, and influence. Covers cross-functional collaboration, conflict resolution, and persuasion.
Communication and Explanation
Evaluate the candidate's ability to think aloud and communicate clearly while solving problems. Candidates should explain assumptions and steps justify choice of data structures and algorithms articulate trade offs ask clarifying questions when requirements are ambiguous and summarize conclusions and next steps. Interviewers look for clarity of thought ability to tailor explanations to different audiences and evidence of collaborative communication during technical problem solving.
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.
Background Communication and Storytelling
Skills in succinctly communicating background, projects, learnings, and technical or research work in a clear narrative form. Candidates should practice a two to three minute story that highlights the problem, their role, actions taken, and the impact. This topic covers tailoring messages to different audiences and succinctly describing technical work for non technical stakeholders.
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.
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.
Collaboration and Conflict Resolution
Covers how candidates work effectively with others, build and maintain professional relationships, and manage disagreements constructively. Topics include collaborating on shared goals, coordinating handoffs, asking for and giving feedback, and supporting teammates. It also covers approaches to professional disagreement and conflict resolution such as active listening, empathy, using data or research to support positions, negotiating trade offs, and knowing when to compromise or stand firm. Candidates should be able to describe specific behaviors for deescalating tension, correcting course on missed commitments, addressing underperformance or recurring issues, and preserving trust after conflict. Interviewers assess clarity of communication, respect for different perspectives, ability to reach consensus or escalate appropriately, and demonstration of team first mindset while protecting user and product outcomes.
Technical Communication and Decision Making
Focuses on the ability to explain technical solutions, justify trade offs, and collaborate effectively across engineering and non engineering stakeholders. Topics include articulating design decisions and their impact on reliability performance and maintenance, walking through solutions step by step, explaining algorithmic complexity and trade offs, asking clarifying questions about requirements, writing clear comments documentation bug reports and tickets, conducting and communicating root cause analysis, participating constructively in code reviews, and negotiating quality versus delivery trade offs with product and operations partners. Interviewers evaluate clarity of expression, reasoning behind decisions, and the ability to make choices that balance short term needs and long term quality.
Collaborative Problem Solving
Evaluate how candidates engage others during problem solving: asking and responding to clarifying questions, soliciting feedback, incorporating suggestions, explaining decisions to collaborators, and guiding a shared solution. Includes behaviors for pair programming or whiteboard interviews, listening actively, accepting critique, proposing alternatives, and showing leadership or facilitation when appropriate. Focus is on two way communication and treating the interview as a collaborative conversation rather than a solo performance.
Problem Solving and Communication
Assess a candidate's structured approach to solving technical problems and their ability to communicate thinking clearly. Topics include clarifying requirements, stating assumptions, breaking down complex problems into components, proposing multiple approaches, explaining trade offs, thinking aloud while coding, verifying and testing solutions, and adapting when new information appears. Emphasis is on logical rigor, clarity of explanation at varying levels of detail, and continual communication so interviewers understand the candidate's reasoning and decisions.