Let’s pragmatically get better at behavioral interviews (and storytelling)!
It's all about your content and delivery..
Behavioral questions are scenarios that are thrown at you during an interview and the interviewer is looking to understand how you would deal with them hypothetically or how you have dealt with a similar situation in the past. About 60-70% of a product management interview is made up of behavioral questions, which is a lot 🤯
Behavioral questions might seem easy as you are dealing with hypothetical situations or narrating your stories from the past while highlighting your hard skills and soft skills. It is all about your ability to tell a story and convince the interviewer that:
You have really done what you are saying or have mentioned in your resume.
You have created impact and worked on meaningful initiatives.
You have the right skills and attributes for the job.
You are a culture-fit and will thrive in the company.
Storytelling as a skill is seldom acquired easily unless you have practiced a lot and stories themselves are well-polished. Let’s pragmatically get better at behavioral interviews and storytelling!
Step 1: Write down your stories ✏️
When I had started practicing answers to behavioral questions, each time I would forget one element of the story or the other. For a story to be crisp and impactful, you have to nail both the content and the delivery. It used to be really frustrating! I later started writing down the key elements of these stories in the STAR format on an excel sheet. This helped me internalize the stories and then deliver them well!
I recommend writing down at least 1 story from each your previous experiences such that they map to the following PM attributes:
Leadership 🏔️
Execution ⚙️
Strategy 💼
Impact/Success 📈
Customer centricity 🎁
Teamwork/Collaboration 🤝
Challenges 🔥
Mistakes/Failures 😔
Pick up the most impactful stories from your career, where you were able to meaningfully move the needle for the business and the product. Ensure that your stories have a meaty situation, action, and a result.
Step 2: Narrate your stories aloud to polish them 🗣️
Start with a summary
Before you start narrating a story, summarize your entire story in 1 or 2 lines, often known as a nugget. Narrate this nugget first so that the interviewer knows what to expect and can intervene if that is something that the interviewer is not expecting.
Give context
Your stories can be from different past experiences. If you are about to narrate a story which belongs to an experience that you have not discussed with your interviewer so far, give context to the interviewer about the company and its product. It helps put things into perspective. You do not want to finish narrating a story later to realize that the interview had no clue on what you were talking about. It your responsibility to ensure that you and the interviewer are on the same page.
The stories should be about “you“
Product management is all about working with a team, collaborating, and sharing the credit. But while narrating stories if you constantly find yourself saying “we“ instead of “I“, you might want to tweak the wording a bit so that the stories focus on the actions that you took to navigate a situation.
I particularly had a hard time fixing this issue with my stories. The worst part is you do not even realize that you are doing this unless someone points it out. You really have to practice out aloud quite a few times to overcome this, if this is something that you are struggling with.
Focus on impact and learnings
I have been interviewing for product management roles at my company and I often notice that candidates skimp over their learnings. The interviewer is looking for signals if the candidate can reapply their learnings in a similar situation in the future and drive similar outcomes if they were successful or learn from their failures to not repeat the same mistake again. Your learnings are the most important aspect of your answer!
Highlight the skills
While walking through the actions part of your story, highlight the skills that you leveraged that enabled your decision making process and the actions that you took. For e.g. your engineering background or technical skills might have helped you troubleshoot a technical situation quicker and resolve a problem for the customers.
Time distribution is key
A good rule of thumb is to not talk for more than 3-4 minutes at a stretch and you should try wrapping up the story within that time frame. Maximize the time focussing on your actions, skills that you leveraged, outcomes, and the learning after dealing with a particular situation. Spend about 1.5 minutes laying down the context, situation, and your task/responsibilities. And then spend about 2.5 minutes on the actions you took, outcomes, and learnings.
Step 3: Practice with your peers ⏩
Practice on Zoom
Schedule time with your peers over Zoom, and practice at least 3-4 questions in each sitting. Be sure to record these Zoom sessions to review them later in your own time. Reviewing your own videos can help you get better with delivery, fluency, hand and eye movements, facial expressions and whether you were sounding confident yet humble or not.
Take pauses and check-in
Build a habit to take pauses in between to check-in with the peer interviewer and ensure that they are following your story. If not, clarify their questions right away. Facial expressions is a great cue to take a pause and check-in. For example, if they look confused, check-in right away. This is important for the impact to land on the interviewer in the intended way during an actual interview.
Speak in bullet points
When you are going to talk for 3-4 minutes, it is easy for anyone to lose track of the story and not follow you. Speaking in bullet points helps you and the peer interviewer keep track of the story and not get lost in the details. For example, while talking about your actions, you could say something like: “I did 4 things. First, I did… Second, I implemented… Third, I spoke with… and Fourth, I analyzed…“
Get your peer interviewer to repeat back
Ask your peer interviewer to repeat back the gist of the story. It helps you understand whether you were able to communicate well enough what you had in mind and whether the peer interviewer picked up the right elements from the story or not.
Reduce follow-up questions
If your peer interviewer asked too many follow-up questions towards the end, it means that there were gaps in your stories. Work on your story to iron out the ambiguities and reducing the follow-up questions moving forward. For each question, make a note of follow-up questions and refine your stories accordingly.
And finally, some miscellaneous things to practice, applicable to all interview types:
Sit up straight ⬆️
Make eye contact 👁️
Bring a notebook & pen 📓
Smile 😊
Show passion & energy 💪🏼
Front lighting for online interviews 💡
Setting up a quiet and disturbance free environment 🤫
Do not get stuck with just mock interviews until you find perfection. Start appearing in actual interviews. You learn the most only when the stakes are high!
Featured Product Internships 🌸
P.S. - All the roles below are for students based out of the US for the summer of 2022.
Upcoming Edition 🧁
The upcoming edition of my newsletter next week will be an extension of this one where I will be publishing a questions bank of 100+ behavioral questions. This will be your ultimate guide for preparation. The question bank on Notion has been built in a way to enable you to follow all the tips and frameworks above right away! Stay tuned 📺
Inspiration for the week 💪🏼
Just last week Netflix released a documentary about a Nepali mountaineer Nimsdai Purja who conquered all the 14X8000m 🏔️ around the world in 7 months, which was deemed as impossible. He named his quest Project Possible to show the world that anything is possible. This goes on to show that if you put your heart and mind to something, almost anything is possible.
If you have been trying to break into product management, the role might seem elusive at first. But constant work and effort can not only help you break into it but also thrive in your product journey!
Questions? Just reply to this email and ask! Or let me know about a topic that you’d like to read about next :)
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Sincerely,
Tanay 👋