Communication, Influence & Collaboration Topics
Communication skills, stakeholder management, negotiation, and influence. Covers cross-functional collaboration, conflict resolution, and persuasion.
Subject Matter Expert Interviews and Knowledge Extraction
Discuss techniques for conducting effective SME interviews: asking clarifying questions that go deep, active listening, capturing context and edge cases, validating understanding, knowing when you have sufficient information, building rapport with technical experts. Address challenges: SME availability, communication style differences, balancing depth with time constraints, handling incomplete or conflicting information. For Staff level, discuss how you teach others effective interviewing techniques.
Collaboration with Other Teams and Leadership
Focuses on cross functional collaboration beyond the immediate team, including working with sales, human resources, executive leadership, and peer leadership. Topics include understanding the partner team's goals, adapting communication to different stakeholders, building credibility with sales and business partners, influencing without formal authority at the executive level, and operating as a bridge between technical and business functions. Candidates should provide examples of successful cross functional work and explain how they would prioritize and coordinate with stakeholder teams.
Cross Functional Influence and Leadership
This topic covers a candidate's ability to influence, align, and lead across organizational boundaries without formal authority. Candidates should demonstrate how they build and sustain credibility and trusted relationships with product, engineering, design, business, analytics, and executive partners to shape decisions, drive initiatives, and change culture. Assessment focuses on stakeholder mapping and prioritization, coalition building, negotiation and persuasion, tailoring communication and storytelling for different audiences, managing up and sideways, facilitating meetings and escalations, and aligning competing incentives. Evaluators will look for concrete tactics such as relationship building, data driven persuasion, compelling business cases, governance and accountability mechanisms, trade off negotiation, creation of scalable practices, and ways to measure and communicate organizational impact. The scope also includes executive presence, emotional intelligence, handling resistance and skepticism, recovering trust after setbacks, and sustaining cultural or operational changes across teams.
Communicating Learning Value to Stakeholders
Covers the ability to translate learning goals and outcomes into business language and to tailor the message for different audiences. Candidates should demonstrate how they build business cases, quantify expected impact, present learning metrics to senior leaders, create actionable guidance for managers, and articulate learner value to ensure adoption. Examples should show use of data storytelling, alignment to key performance indicators, and stakeholder segmentation to maximize buy in.
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.
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.
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.
Stakeholder Engagement and Management
Techniques and practices for identifying, prioritizing, and engaging stakeholders to secure alignment and adoption. Topics include stakeholder mapping and segmentation by interest and influence, designing sponsor and champion roadmaps, building coalitions and advisory forums, negotiating trade offs and requirements, co creating solutions with affected groups, operationalizing engagement through workshops and working sessions, establishing governance and accountability, and monitoring stakeholder sentiment and readiness. Candidates should be able to explain how they gathered diverse inputs, balanced competing priorities, maintained credibility when compromises were needed, and sustained engagement during planning and implementation.