Building your 'system' of preparation for behavioral interviews
A system that will help you breeze past product management interviews
In case you are new here at Pragmatism or missed reading the last edition of my newsletter, I wrote 👇
I highly recommend that you read the above edition first before continuing to read this one.
In one of the sections I wrote about how when I used to practice answers to behavioral questions, each time I would forget one element of the story or the other. For a behavioral answer to be perfect, you have to nail the content and the delivery. It used to be really frustrating 😣 I later started writing down the bullet points for these stories in the STAR format on an excel sheet. Doing this ensured that I did not miss on any elements of the story and could internalize it better. Over a period of time I was able to refine and put together a system of preparation that worked really well for me. My stories became really crisp and more impactful. This eventually helped me get better with interviews and breeze through them.
In this edition, I'll be sharing my secret sauce a.k.a. my system of preparation for behavioral interviews. By opening up this, I hope to make this process seamless and help you systematically get better with behavioral interviews and storytelling.
Let’s jump right in!
Step 1: Pick a tool of your choice 🛠️
You could either pick Excel, Notion, or any other tool which easily helps you create and edit tables.
I personally prefer Notion tables/databases due to the flexibility and versatility it offers with different views, data types, filters, dynamic interlinking between pages, etc.
Step 2: Create the following columns 🗓️
Question Title❓
You'll use this to note down the questions that you have practiced so far or will practice in the future.
Status 📶
Use this column to mark the status of each question. For example, I had 3 values for this column i.e. To Practice, Practiced but not Mastered, and Mastered. This helped me keep track of my progress and prioritize questions for practice accordingly. You can use any values that you'd like to update your progress but consider using only 3-4 values for this column.
Last Date of Practice 📅
While preparing for behavioral interviews, you'll have to revisit questions over a period of time. With over 100 questions to practice, it is hard to keep track of when you last practiced a particular question. On the day you practice a particular question, just add the date and you can easily review if you need to practice a question again soon.
Zoom Link 📽️
While practicing these questions with your peers and friends, make sure to record your practice sessions and then add the Zoom link here. Review the Zoom sessions to identify areas of improvement and things to focus on before practicing the question second (Nth) time. This helps you get better with delivery, fluency, hand and eye movements, and facial expressions.
Nugget 🍩
This is where you'll write the summary of your story in 1 or 2 lines. Start narrating your story with this nugget so that the interviewer knows what to expect and can intervene if that is something that the interviewer is not expecting.
Situation 🥲
Describe your situation in bullet points here. Your goal here is to paint a clear picture of the situation you were in and emphasize its complexities, so that the result you touch on later seems that much more profound. Keep things concise and focus on what’s undeniably relevant to your story.
Task/Responsibility 👔
Write down the specifics of what your responsibilities were in the particular situation, as well as any objective that was set for you, before you dive into what you actually did.
Action 🏃
Write down the details and specifics of your contribution to the situation in bullet points.
Impact/Result 💪
This portion of your response should share the results of the actions you took. Do not skimp over this as this is one of the most important aspects of your story.
Learnings 📚
Finally, your learnings is something that the interviewer is looking forward to. They want to know if you can re-apply your learnings in a similar situation in the future and drive similar outcomes if you were successful or learn from your failures to not repeat the same mistakes again.
Follow up questions ❓
During each practice session make a note of follow-up questions asked. This will help you fill the gaps in your stories and polish them. Your goal should be to reduce these over time.
Notes and comments 🗒️
Use this column to note down any other comments or feedback.
Step 3: Write down your stories ✏️
Start writing down your stories and fill up the matrix based on the column descriptions above. Once you have written down your stories, you are all set to start practicing the questions with your friends and peers!
Wait.. But where do I get the questions from?
You could look up different sources like this or this but it is hard to know if you have covered everything or not. There's always a feeling that you might have missed something and not feel 100% confident about your preparation, if you know what I mean 😅
AND SO.. 🥁 I've got you covered with my Ultimate Questions Bank and Preparation Matrix ✅ on Notion. I've spent hours curating this template with 110+ questions that are most-asked during the interviews and based on my personal experience. I am not saying that this template contains each and every question that you'll ever be asked but you'll have all your bases covered. There will be no question that you’ll be taken aback by and you'd have seen at least seen some variation of that question 😄
I've also created different views to support different phases and methods of your preparation.
Table view 🗓️
You can use this while you are still in the process of writing down your stories and polishing them.
Progress View 📈
Once you are ready to start practicing on your own, you can switch to this Kanban board style view to see your progress based on the status of the questions.
Calendar View 📅
You can use this view to see if you have been practicing questions regularly or not based on the Last date of Practice. Your goal should should be to practice at least 3 - 4 questions every day.
With all the information above, you could absolutely create your own template OR save yourself from hours of work by downloading the template that I have already spent hours on creating for you. I want to help you focus on what really matters to you i.e. write, polish, and practice your stories.
The template is available for download at 6.99 USD. BUT I am offering a 30% discount to all the readers and subscribers of pragmatism for the first 100 downloads of the template 🎉 So you can effectively get the template for 4.89 USD, which is almost the price of a Starbucks coffee but is capable of helping you land your dream job 😉
Use the discount code pragmatism-30 on the checkout page to avail the discount!
Questions? Just reply to this email and ask! Or let me know about a topic that you’d like to read about next :)
How did you like this week’s newsletter? Please share your feedback 🙏🏼
Sincerely,
Tanay 👋