Communication, Influence & Collaboration Topics
Communication skills, stakeholder management, negotiation, and influence. Covers cross-functional collaboration, conflict resolution, and persuasion.
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.
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.
Strategic Tradeoffs and Consensus Building
Focuses on recognizing and navigating strategic tradeoffs across product, design, and engineering constraints. Topics include balancing user needs and business goals, ideal user experience versus technical feasibility, speed to market versus completeness, and other constraint navigation. Emphasizes frameworks for making and documenting decisions, techniques for building consensus among stakeholders with differing priorities, communicating tradeoffs to leadership and customers, and negotiating pragmatic compromises that align with company objectives.
Technical Partnership and Communication
Ability to understand technical constraints and tradeoffs, assess technical feasibility, and partner effectively with engineering teams and engineering leadership. Evaluate how the candidate translates complex technical concepts into clear business language for non technical audiences, explains architecture and technical debt considerations, negotiates constraints with engineering partners, and balances business goals and engineering realities while avoiding unnecessary jargon.
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.
Cross Functional Communication and Collaboration
Demonstrate how you partner with engineers, product managers, operations, and other stakeholders to iterate and implement designs. Show examples of adapting designs based on technical feedback, writing clear specifications and acceptance criteria, translating design trade offs into implementation cost and complexity, and preserving design quality through development. Describe methods for presenting trade offs in business and operational terms, handling conflicting feedback constructively, navigating disagreement, advocating for users, and coordinating handoffs and validation with cross functional teams.
Strategic Questions About Role and Opportunity
Ask thoughtful questions about the team's strategy, design priorities, how success is measured, and how the design function evolves. Show curiosity and strategic thinking.
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.