Leadership & Team Development Topics
Leadership practices, team coaching, mentorship, and professional development. Covers coaching skills, leadership philosophy, and continuous learning.
Mentoring and Developing Others
Comprehensive topic covering the philosophy and practice of coaching mentoring and developing individuals and teams across levels and functions. Interviewers assess how candidates identify skill gaps and high potential employees select and adapt coaching frameworks such as situational leadership and servant leadership set clear development goals and milestones conduct effective one on one coaching conversations and deliver constructive feedback that produces measurable improvement. It covers hands on technical mentorship activities such as pair programming code review design review testing and automation coaching as well as career planning succession planning delegation stretch assignments and performance management. It also includes designing and scaling mentorship systems and skill development programs such as onboarding curricula rotation plans peer mentoring and documentation that raise team capability. Candidates should be prepared to describe how they foster psychological safety and continuous learning measure impact using outcomes such as promotions increased ownership improved code quality productivity retention and morale and provide concrete resume based examples that show the approach taken timelines and measurable results.
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.
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.
Team Leadership and Mentorship
Covers leading teams and using mentoring and coaching as tools to raise team performance and build long term capability. Interviewers probe experience leading small teams or projects, designing development plans and succession strategies, delegating and creating stretch assignments, conducting performance management and career conversations, hiring and onboarding, and building a culture of psychological safety and continuous learning. This topic also includes facilitation of team growth sessions, peer review and critique practices, establishing playbooks and processes that scale coaching, influencing without authority, and measuring team level outcomes such as promotion rates, ownership shifts, quality or velocity improvements, and retention. Candidates should demonstrate frameworks they use to develop others, examples of measurable impact achieved through developing people rather than only personal contributions, and how they amplified their influence by enabling others.
Knowledge Sharing and Transfer
Focuses on creating systems, practices, and materials that spread expertise across teams and make knowledge durable. Topics include running knowledge transfer sessions and shadowing, pair programming and collaborative reviews, brown bag talks, training workshops, office hours, documentation and playbooks, onboarding runbooks, and structured mentoring relationships. Interviewers assess how candidates identify capability gaps, tailor learning to different audiences and levels, embed knowledge sharing into team routines, document teachable practices, and measure the impact of knowledge transfer on team capability and onboarding time. Candidates should be able to describe concrete programs or techniques they have used, how they diagnose learning needs, how they scaled or institutionalized knowledge sharing, and metrics or observable outcomes that demonstrate improved team capability.
Leadership and Influence Track Record
A broad record of leadership, influence, and change delivery across people, teams, and stakeholders. Candidates should present examples of building and scaling high performing teams, mentoring and developing engineers, resolving complex conflicts, and maintaining credibility with senior leaders. Describe measurable outcomes such as hiring and retention improvements, delivery of cross team initiatives, adoption of organizational practices, and how you built trust to drive decisions. Cover interpersonal skills like communication, negotiation, stakeholder management, and sustaining influence over time.
Collaboration and Mentoring
Demonstrate interpersonal effectiveness within engineering teams and across functions. Candidates should be able to provide examples of mentoring and growing junior engineers, conducting constructive code reviews, resolving technical disagreements, writing clear design documents and proposals, facilitating cross functional trade offs, giving and receiving feedback, and contributing to team decision making and culture. Interviewers assess evidence of influence without authority, clarity of communication, and approaches to scaling knowledge through documentation and teaching.
Leadership Principles Alignment
Evaluates a candidate's ability to understand and demonstrate alignment with an employer's stated leadership principles or behavioral frameworks. Candidates should be able to name the relevant principles, explain what they mean in practice, and present concise examples that map actions and outcomes to each principle. Preparation includes selecting stories that show ownership, customer focus, bias for action or other company specific behaviors, discussing trade offs and measurable impact, and tailoring language to the company's framework rather than reciting slogans. For major technology companies expect explicit practice mapping examples to their published principles and to discuss level appropriate scope.
Mentorship and Development of Next Generation Leaders
Provide specific examples of mentoring aspiring or emerging PM leaders. Discuss your philosophy on developing others, how you identify high-potential candidates, your approach to coaching and feedback, and outcomes of your mentorship (promotions, increased responsibilities, improved capabilities). Show commitment to building organizational leadership bench strength.