How to Approach Interviewing for Technical Leadership and Influence?

Hint - Its about communicating and driving big goals with a cross-functional team!

Technical leadership and Influence (TLI) questions assesses how you adapt to challenges and drive a cross-functional team towards lofty, higher level goals. These goals could be business or technical. Operative words are - cross-functional, big goals, your ability to communicate and drive them.

One way to think about TLI in interview is to think of it as a collection of skills that are glued by communication frameworks. In an interview, at least one interviewer is assigned TLI as a focus area. Others are assigned parts of TLI, like how you make technical decisions, how you communicate and advocate that decision, or how you adapt as you drive and execute.

During the interview, the interviewer will be using known rubrics like scope, impact, and complexity to assess your TLI. They also pay close attention to whether your techniques are fungible across organizational structure (for instance, Amazon has a matrixed structure with single threaded leaders (STL)). They also check how you communicate about communication.

Selecting the right example makes a difference. Some tips:

1 - Before the interview, understand the organizational design and prevalent communication patterns at the company (or team). Once you know how communication flows, reflect how it compares with your current communication style. Ask yourself - with some tweaking, will my style of influencing work in the new company? During the interview, share examples that are unique to you and your current organization. But also share examples that are somewhat similar to your future organization. After talking to you, the interviewer should conclude that your techniques can work in their organization.

2 - Select 2-3 examples with scope, complexity, and impact that are comparable to the level you are interviewing for. Pick goals that had significant impact on your department (beyond team) or your organization / company. Communicate the complexity of the problem. At senior levels, trade-offs are about velocity and cost of innovation, customer trust, organization capability, sustainability, and streamlined OPEX. Then there are deep technical challenges! Shift your narrative from just stating the "complexity of the technical decision" to "how you educated your team and leadership" about complexities and trade-offs of the decision. This is key.

3 - Select examples that tested you (pushed you to learn and adapt) or that involved communication friction. The interviewer wants to see how your communication framework fared in demanding situations.

4 - Balancing scope with influence - You understand complexity of work that's in your scope. You own that scope with your immediate team. Candidates tend to focus on their scope during interview. In addition, talk about examples where you worked on higher level goals that impacted adjacent scopes and priorities. That’s where interviewer sees your “influence quotient”

Common Scenarios:

Q - Candidate - My example was about launching a critical feature. It did not resonate with my interviewer. Why?

A - Technical leadership and influence combines technical decision making with techniques to get buy-in and communicating tough decisions to team, sponsors, and partner teams. After understanding scope, complexity of the goal, interviewer wants to know how you drove it (they want to fly in the wall). They want to know whether you had to seek diverse perspective and convince stakeholders beyond your direct team leaders. They want to know how you got the buy-in? Faced with hold-outs, what techniques you employed to earn support? Did you have to escalate? If so, when and why? What's your escalation management framework? How did you modify your communication when interacting with a cross-functional partners?

FUQ - Candidate - I covered all the points above...but still...

A - Technical leadership and influence is about human relationships! People like helping each other. Your reputation and position helps with influence! Candidates often share examples where old relations and their reputation enabled a decision. That's OK. We all depend on relationships! But interviewers also want to know how you would communicate to influence stakeholders who don't know you or don't agree with you.

Q - Candidate - I work on deep tech, often with a small team of SMEs...

A - High density intra-team communication is critical when a small team is owning complex work. After prototyping, as the tech lead, you will tirelessly educate, advocate, market, occasionally butt-head with teams beyond your team to apply the tech broadly. Some of the best examples of TLI come from such scenarios! Focus on telling how you advocated.

Q - Candidate - Tell me about scope and complexity...

A - Scope of work is what you own. You are the single threaded lead your scope. Depending on your tenure, your organizations structure, your products architecture, your scope may span components, service, or the product itself. Large companies and companies working on bleeding edge tech operate sophisticated services. S3 (Amazon's object storage service) provides 99.999999999% durability. Meta leverages 350,000 NVIDIA H100 GPUs for their AI initiatives. Groq and its Llama 2 Chat (70B) API achieved throughput of 241 tokens per second, more than double the speed of other hosting providers. Depending on the job level, organization, definition of scope and complexity will vary. Good news - as long as your fundamentals are solid, and techniques to deal with challenges to influence and drive teams towards lofty targets are decent, all will be well!

Q - Candidate - The word "communicate" is mentioned a lot. What communication techniques work?

A - Effectively communicating your big idea, earning the trust of your team, sponsors, and partners during the decision and execution process is the essence of TLI. Documentation, policies, processes, proof-of concepts, metrics, customer anecdotes, top-down, bottom-up, escalation - these are all communication tools! A powerful communication tool happens to be cup of coffee (or tea / Diet Coke) for your stakeholder! And so does understanding human /team incentives and psychology. At Amazon, working backward from customers is a common incentive. The Principal Engineers at Amazon even codified in their operating manual a powerful communication technique - practicing empathy!

Conclusion

To do well in TLI, select a big goal beyond your immediate scope that tested your communication mechanisms and that pushed your technical decision making capabilities. Discuss how you brought along your team and stakeholders as you drove that goal.