Communication, Influence & Collaboration Topics
Communication skills, stakeholder management, negotiation, and influence. Covers cross-functional collaboration, conflict resolution, and persuasion.
Communication and Feedback Reception
Ability to communicate effectively, listen actively, and receive feedback constructively. At entry level, this means you can articulate your thinking clearly, listen to understand others' perspectives, ask clarifying questions when you don't understand, and genuinely incorporate feedback into your work. When you get critical feedback, do you get defensive or do you listen, reflect, and adjust? Show examples of feedback you've received and how you've incorporated it.
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 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.
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.
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 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.
Handling Ambiguity and Complexity
Covers how a candidate reasons and acts when information is incomplete, requirements are unclear, situations are complex, or interviewers pose unconventional open ended questions. Interviewers assess both thought process and execution: how you clarify ambiguous goals, surface and validate assumptions, ask the right stakeholders the right questions, and balance moving forward with minimizing risk. Demonstrate problem decomposition, hypothesis driven thinking, trade off analysis, and how you document decisions or fallbacks. For behavioral stories describe the context, the specific uncertainty or unusual prompt, the actions you took to gather information or make decisions, and the measurable outcome or learning. Also include how you handle pressure and maintain stakeholder alignment when requirements change, how you prototype or iterate to reduce uncertainty, and when you escalate or pause to avoid costly mistakes. For unconventional interview prompts explain your reasoning out loud, state assumptions, break the question into parts, show intellectual curiosity, and describe next steps you would take in a real situation.
Presentation and Storytelling
Covers the ability to prepare, structure, and deliver clear and persuasive presentations and public speaking engagements. Candidates are evaluated on crafting a concise opening and summary, organizing content for efficient comprehension, and tailoring messages to technical and nontechnical stakeholders and different time constraints. Emphasis is placed on narrative and storytelling techniques, the use of examples and anecdotes to make points memorable, and structuring information to highlight key insights. Also includes effective use of visuals and data visualizations to support messages, slide and visual design principles, pacing, vocal presence, body language, and techniques for maintaining audience engagement. Candidates should demonstrate skill in handling questions and answers, managing interruptions, adapting on the fly when challenged or when information or time changes, and communicating complex technical work succinctly. Interviewers assess clarity, audience awareness, persuasiveness, confidence, and the ability to tell a coherent story about projects, analyses, or personal experience.