Communication, Influence & Collaboration Topics
Communication skills, stakeholder management, negotiation, and influence. Covers cross-functional collaboration, conflict resolution, and persuasion.
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.
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 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.
Communication Style and Approach
Covers your preferred communication methods, how you tailor communication to different audiences, and your approach to collaborating with stakeholders. Interviewers evaluate whether you can describe how you document work, hand off tasks, advocate for ideas respectfully, and adapt your style for peers, managers, product partners, and non technical stakeholders. Provide concrete examples of tools, cadences, documentation practices, and philosophies for balancing persuasion and openness to other viewpoints.
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.
Team Fit and Working Style
Evaluates a candidate's preferred ways of working and how those preferences align with a prospective team and manager. Core areas include autonomy versus structured workflows, individual contribution versus paired and cross functional work, preference for frequent touch bases versus independent execution, communication channels and cadence, feedback giving and receiving style and cadence, decision making and ownership boundaries, meeting cadence and structure, collaboration tools and handoffs, code review and onboarding practices, remote versus onsite expectations and availability, adaptability to different team norms, and approaches to conflict resolution. Interviewers will probe for concrete examples that demonstrate successful integration into new teams, alignment with a manager's style, adaptation to differing expectations, and the ability to articulate negotiation points for effective collaboration. Candidates should be ready to state their working preferences honestly, show flexibility, describe specific past scenarios and outcomes, ask clarifying questions about team norms and manager expectations, and propose concrete practices to ensure productive alignment.
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.
Business Partnerships and Influence
Focuses on the skills needed to establish and sustain trust based partnerships with business stakeholders, senior leaders, and cross functional teams, and to influence decisions without formal authority. Candidates should demonstrate how they discover stakeholder goals, constraints, and priorities by asking effective questions and actively listening; how they surface trade offs and negotiate competing priorities; and how they translate priorities between business and technical audiences. Interviewers probe for examples of setting shared goals, establishing collaboration norms, persuading and building consensus, maintaining credibility, and managing long term partner relationships. Candidates should provide concrete examples showing how partnerships influenced product or project roadmaps, produced joint outcomes, and improved measurable business outcomes or key performance indicators. At more senior levels emphasize strategic alignment, long term partnership management, and examples where the partnership shaped strategy or delivered sustained business impact.