Do you struggle with questions like, "Tell me about a time you failed. " Or, "Tell me a weakness that you have. " These feel like harder questions because you don't want to come off as incompetent or a failure during your interviews.
Fail. So, in this video, we're going to teach you how to navigate four tougher behavioral questions. Hey guys, I'm Diana and I'm a senior product manager at a large tech company based out of Silicon Valley, California.
Behavioral interviews are usually your time to shine and talk about your proudest moments. Then how come companies nowadays are usually asking about your worst moments like a time you failed or a weakness that you have? Well, it's because companies know that things usually don't go perfectly and hence they want to hire someone who's able to be resilient in the face of challenges.
So, in asking these questions, they're actually assessing a couple of key factors that are important for being a good employee with the first one being someone who's open and vulnerable to talk about hardships. Secondly, people who can take ownership and bias towards action versus blaming others or blaming the situation. And third, people who will reflect and learn and continue to grow.
So by them asking these questions, they're able to tell from your past experience whether these are traits of yours. All right, here are the four most commonly asked behavioral questions [music] in tech interviews. So the first one, tell me about a time you failed.
The second, tell me about a time where you received difficult feedback or what is your weakness. They're similar questions. The third, tell me about a time you dealt with a conflict.
And fourth, tell me about a time you had to make a hard decision. [music] Before I deep dive into each of these questions, I wanted to give some general tips that are going to work across questions like this. So the first one, pick hero stories.
What does that mean? Pick stories where you exhibited leadership qualities and were your proudest moments. So you want stories where you were the hero or heroine in helping to save the day.
The second tip is get to the action quickly. So if you're asked about a failure or a conflict, get to the failure and conflict within 30 seconds. A ton of candidates tend to build up a ton of context to the point where 3 or 5 minutes in, I'm like, well, what was the conflict?
So, don't make the interviewer wait. Even better if you can state it in your first sentence. And I'll show you later in an example.
And also, try to use the main words from the prompt in your response. So, if they're talking about a failure, use the word this was a failure. Make it super obvious for the interviewer that that's what you're talking about.
The third tip is be structured. So with these behavioral questions, people tend to ramble and hence if you have a structure, it helps you answer the question in a way that's more easily digestible by the interviewer. So a lot of you have heard of the STAR framework, which stands for a situation, task, actions, and results, which I think works perfectly.
In the examples we're going to be talking about below, I'm actually going to use a different framework, but it's still similar. It's SAR instead of STAR, which is S A RR, which is situation, action, reflection, and result. So, let's start off with tell me about a time you failed.
So, we're going to use our framework SAR. So, situation. So here I recommend picking a story where you fail at something that was meaningful.
Something that caused you to be sad, disappointed, or upset or even angry. Because what most people tend to do or the mistake they make here is they pick low stake failures that end up not really showing that you're quite open. A good story would be [music] we spent 10 hours a day trying to launch this feature with a goal of 10 million users and we ended up failing and not even hitting 1 [music] million users which devastated the team and myself.
A not so great story is we launched a feature and we failed to get one of the buttons to work which prevented us from launching perfectly. So this is a less ideal story because the failure was kind of insignificant, right? A button not working.
I mean, if you say that button didn't work and the whole feature broke, that's something else. Now, let's go into the action section. So for this question, what are the traits that they're looking for for you to display in your actions?
So, a couple things. They're looking for people who can show ownership of the failure versus blaming circumstances or blaming someone else. They're looking for people who can understand what caused the failure versus sweeping it under the rug.
They're looking for leaders who can communicate transparently to the team and to leadership and stakeholders about the failure versus hiding it. And they're looking for people who are resilient and persistent in the face of failure. People who will keep going to achieve the larger mission versus being scared of another failure.
So reflection, what are one to two things that you learned due to this failure and how might you have used it in the future to prevent other failures and the result is what happened after your actions and even what happened after you implemented your learnings from what you reflected on. So let me share an example so you can get a taste of what this looks like. So, in 2020, I launched an ads feature that ended up failing because we struggled to get customers.
It was devastating because we spent six months tirelessly [music] working with the team to try to launch it. And I even spent a ton of social capital convincing [clears throat] our leadership team to let us take the risk [music] when they were pushing to kill the project early on because it wasn't going to have impact. So a few weeks after the product launch and we weren't getting any traction, I saw that my team was really discouraged and bummed out.
So what did I do? The first thing that I did was empower the team that we can actually do something about it. So, I gathered our user research team, a product marketing manager, and a data scientist to try to come up with a couple hypotheses, and I ended up helping the team nail down five hypotheses on what could be causing the low usage.
[music] Second, I took the data that we got from those different functions and shared it with our team to let them know transparently that our product was failing, [music] but why we thought it was failing and how we can work together to actually fix and solve it. Sadly, after implementing the fixes that we thought had the highest chance of leading to low usage, we still didn't see traction. So the third thing that I ended up doing was thinking through the options that we could take and clearly presenting that to the team so we can make an aligned decision on how to go forward.
And I thought to myself, well, we can keep going down this road and chasing other hypotheses, but the five hypotheses we came up with were the most impactful. So the next five is probably going to have an even lesser chance of success. So I presented to my team we could chase after the five other hypotheses but they might lead to lower impact versus another option is we can start investing in this other space that we have data for that could be hugely impactful.
So working on a new thing and basically cutting our losses on this failure and I managed to get my team super excited about this next phase rather than being discouraged about the failure that we faced before. So what did I learn in this failure? That number one [music] that it's important to reframe failure for my team so we don't get stuck and lose momentum, but rather we see failure as a formula to success.
And the second thing I learned was being transparent to the team was super important [music] to getting our team aligned and to take a next action versus hiding it and telling them afterwards. That's when you have disgruntled employees. So what was the result?
So although we failed in that project, the next project that we decided to invest in, which was a project that was going to net us a million dollars per day in revenue, I actually in advance got our team to communicate to think of scenarios where we were going to fail versus succeed and defining those very clearly. So with the failure scenarios, we can proactively come up with ways to avoid the risks and at the same time if we did fail, we had a clear plan of action on what to do next. So the second question that's commonly asked that is a bit of a challenge is tell me about a time you received difficult feedback or what is a weakness of yours.
So using our framework sorry I'm beginning to like this framework. So situation. So here you want to pick a story where you receive feedback but one where you intentionally took steps to improve and work on that feedback.
Here they want to see a leader who can become aware of their weaknesses but then proactively work to improve it because none of us are perfect. And hence instead of seeking for a perfect person, they'd rather want someone who's focused on growth [music] even when they aren't doing well on something. So a good example sounds like so I was told that I wasn't being strategic enough on the team as a product leader.
First being strategic was a really loaded term. So I worked and talked to my team members one-on-one to understand [music] what are examples where I could have been more strategic and what are specific things that I could have done or deliverables that I could have given. So that helped me understand what they meant by being more strategic so I could break down what I needed to work on.
Second, I tried to figure out what were the best tools that were going to help me. So, I wanted a combination of things that I could do on my own and things to where I can get help from some of the best product leaders at our company. So, what I did was started to read some strategy books that were recommended by thought leaders and I found some product managers who were known for great strategy [music] and solicited their feedback on strategy documents that I created.
A few months later, I created the strategy that was focused on helping large businesses buy and sell ads. And I noticed that leadership were much more bought in when I presented it this time versus previous times. So, what's a not great story?
Sounds like this. So, my colleagues told me that I wasn't being strategic enough, but I felt it was because they didn't agree with my strategy and [music] hence pinpointed that I wasn't being strategic enough. So, in this case, I don't know if their feedback was very valid.
And at the same time, there were already a lack of resources on the team. [music] So, it was going to be a struggle for me to invest further in being more strategic. So, as you can tell, not a great response.
[music] One, they were blaming their colleagues. They weren't really taking ownership of the feedback. And they didn't work on the things that they were told to improve on.
So, now let's go into actions. What are the traits that interviewers want to see for this particular question? Well, one, they want to see that you can understand the feedback that you're receiving rather than ignoring it.
They want to see that you're motivated to improve versus being discouraged that you have a weakness. They want to see that you can come up with a plan versus just hoping it'll improve on its own. And lastly, they want to see that you can ask for help when needed.
So, in your actions, talk about some of these points and reflection. What are one to two things that you learned that helped you either overcome the weakness or deal with the difficult feedback? And the results should be focused on based on the feedback that you worked on, what was the impact it had for you and your team.
So in this case, let's say I got much more strategic and I mentioned that got the leadership more bought in than the previous time. So for this question, I'm not going to go through an example because this video is going to be way longer if I do. But if you are interested in more examples, comment below and let me know.
I'm happy to create a separate video giving examples to demonstrate [music] some of the principles that I'm talking about. So the third question is, tell me about a time you dealt with a conflict. So here for the situation, think of a story where there was some tension or conflict [music] or disagreement or misalignment between you and another team member between different teams that caused you stress, but you took on ownership to resolve it.
So in your actions, the traits that you want to emphasize are that in the past you've understood and listened to the other side that you've disagreed with versus being defensive or ignoring them or blaming them. They also want to see that you're able to communicate maturely versus bickering or fighting or yelling or screaming. They also want to see that you're taking the initiative to resolve the conflict [music] versus avoiding the conflict, which most people tend to do.
And the last one, they want to see someone who can think of the bigger picture versus being very narrowly focused on the goal that they're trying to achieve. So reflection, what are one two things you learned in the conflict or how you dealt with the conflict that you might have wanted to change for the future? and result.
How did the conflict resolution help you and your team and the relationship? So, here is a quick example. So, I worked with a content designer who seemed very prone to conflict, which meant in meetings he would make snarky comments that were disrespectful.
And I let it slide in the beginning because I didn't want to be oversensitive or cause tension for the sake of it. But over time, it became a bit too much. So, the first thing that I did was I pulled her aside one-on-one and communicated clearly to her that he was doing that was making me feel disrespected.
And I wasn't doing in a blaming way, but I was creating awareness for him versus being very hostile about it. The second thing, I opened it up to be a larger conversation about how we work together. And I think that was the Kim lock because when I asked for his feedback on how things were going and how our relationship was, I realized there were some underlying frustrations that we never addressed that was causing the symptoms of these snarky comments.
And then third, based on his feedback, I said in this meeting, let's brainstorm together like these are some valid points. So let's think through together how we can improve this for our relationship and the team. And this took it from a combative conversation to one where we were working together and thinking about the bigger picture of how we can improve for the team instead of letting our egos and our own relationship get [music] to us.
So my main reflection from this experience was I needed to build space for regular feedback versus just letting things sit because people generally are uncomfortable with feedback. So they might not proactively give it, but if I create space for it and ask for it, they might be more willing and open. So the result was from that initial conversation we had, our working relationship was much more trusting because I continually went to him to seek for feedback to avoid what had happened before and he would give me feedback about how we can improve as a team holistically which improved how we function as a team.
So, here is the last question. And before I go into it, if this video has been helpful, I'd love for you to take a second to like the video and subscribe to the channel. So, the last question is, tell me about a time where you had to make a hard decision.
So, this one is tricky because people are like, well, what does it mean to have a hard decision? Why is this decision so hard? in.
So here in your situation, you want to pick a story where first you had a decision that was meaningful or impactful, something that's chunky, not something little like like what color the button needs to be. And then while leading up to the decision that you were at some crossroads between multiple options and it wasn't obvious which was a better option. So here in your actions, what traits does the interviewer want to see?
So one thing is show that you can get clarity on what you're optimizing for. So a lot of times decisions tend to be hard because people don't know what they want. So align the team on what objectives they're optimizing for.
The second thing is seek data versus deciding subjectively. Another thing they want to see people who are decisive versus sitting on the decision for months because they can't make the decision. And lastly, they want to pick a product leader who can understand the trade-offs between multiple options versus always trying to pick the perfect or make the perfect decision.
So, in your reflection stage, you want to pick one or two things you learned during the decision-m process that led you to make better decisions in the future for hard problems. And for the result, what was the impact on how you made the decision [music] andor the decision itself on your team? Check out this video which is focused on the top tips in helping people pass their behavioral interviews to help them stand out.
All right, see you guys later.
