if you're interviewing for a product manager role or any job in tech you'll for sure get a behavioral question what is a behavioral question so an example is tell me about a time you had a conflict with a co-worker and what did you do to resolve it behavioral questions are meant to help the interviewer understand your past experiences and your behavior in those past experiences for them to use as a predictor for how you would in the future perform on the job so today we're going to go through some best practices and common mistakes i
see all the time when people answer these type of questions [Music] hey guys i'm diana and i'm a senior product manager at a big tech company in silicon valley california i bring you the best tips to get into product management or tech and teach you how to succeed once you've made it so again what are behavioral questions tell me about a time you had a conflict with a co-worker and what did you do tell me about a time where you had to lead a team without giving official authority how did you go about it tell
me about a time where you were given feedback that you didn't necessarily like what did you do about it tell me about a time where you had a disagreement within your team what did you do about it okay are you annoyed already all right i'll stop you get the idea three things key themes i want to leave you with today the first one is structure your answer please make it easy for us as interviewers the second is focus on what you did and less on what happened and third answer the so what so we'll summarize
this at the end but let's jump in so the first theme is to structure your answer first let me explain why think about it the interviewer's job is to get signals on whether you would be a good fit for the role that they're hiring for while they're doing that they're listening and taking notes at the same time to get a sense of that so help them help you make it easy by structuring your answer into sections so it's easy for them to follow along and take notes on structuring your answer means breaking into sections and
explicitly calling it out when you've moved to a different section so for example if i were asked the question tell me about a time i had a conflict with a co-worker i would say so let me tell you about a time that i had a dispute with a co-worker on my team who was the marketing manager and you explain a bit of the context the problem was you explain the problem what i did was x y and z and lastly the result of what i did was x y and z another great way to make
the answer digestible is to number things so if you're in the section of the things that you did or what we call actions number the actions that you took so the first thing that i did was this the second thing i did was the third thing that i did with it so it's easy for them to grasp and again jot down notes so that when they go into the deep breathe for your interview it'll be easy for them to advocate for your actions and how you might perform on their team another tip to structure your
answer is don't jump right in so many times as an interviewer i'll ask a question and i can see people immediately jump into answering the question even before they've gotten a chance to digest it or even think through the question so here i recommend take seconds clarify the question repeat the question and ask the interviewer can i take 30 seconds or a minute to jot down some thought and then share it with you and jot down bullet points of key themes you want to convey you don't have to write a whole essay because you're not
going to have the time but pull a point is enough to structure your answer and people ask me all the time diana but isn't it going to be super awkward the silence sure but i'll take one minute of awkward silence over five minutes of rambling any day you can make it less awkward by giving the interviewer a heads up you can tell the interviewer i'm just gonna take a minute to jot down my thoughts and then share with you is that okay so the third thing under structuring your answer is to actually use a framework
basically sections of what you can talk through that you can have in the back of your mind to easily convey your answer and that is the star framework which a lot of you have probably heard before star stands for situation tasks actions and results and it's a great and easy way to memorize some sections that you want to hit when answering behavioral buttons i'll give you one piece of insight that i don't see many people mentioning which is how much proportion of your time you should be spending on each of the sections so people have
a tendency to spend about 50 of their time in the situation or the context section and i actually recommend spending 25 in the situation section 10 on the task or the problem 40 on the action that you took and 25 on the result that came from your actions so while we have the sections down for those who are not as familiar so let me quickly explain what you're trying to cover in the star framework so the first part is situation and here you just want to give a bit of context what happened so this includes
which parties or stakeholders were at play the conflict or the tension and this is a great segue then into the problem statement which is the task at hand you then go into okay what did you do to try to resolve the problem with the actions that you took and lastly make sure you speak to the result of what happened from your actions hey guys if this is helpful so far i'd love for you to help out the channel by clicking the like button and subscribing to the channel it really helps us create more content like
this for you all right let's jump back so the second theme i talked about is focusing on your actions and less on the context which i gave a precursor to before so common mistake that i see interviewers make is they spend more than 50 percent of the time sharing contacts telling the interview about every single detail every single email that was written sure it makes for a great story but you only have 30 minutes or an hour to convey to the interviewer that they should hire you and spending this time explaining every detail crowds out
and distracts the interviewer from getting signal on what you did versus what happened to you so for a four minute response you should spend no more than a minute preferably 30 seconds on the context to set up the stage if we're not supposed to spend so much time on the context what should we spend time on the most important part of your interview is the action section but here's a key insight don't just talk about actions that are in the job description rather talk about what you uniquely did that may be different from any other
candidate that comes into interview so for example i interview product managers and a common thing on the job description is they lead research or they help enable research and sometimes i get candidates that come in and just say oh i led research on my team to try to help them decide whether we should be able to feed your ex or future why instead what you want to convey is how you uniquely did that action so a great example that i've come across in the past so we had a hospital client that we were trying to
build a solution for so how i did research was i spent two days in the hospital myself so i can empathize with the users and get a sense of what was most important and i invited our engineers to join me in the two days staying at the hospital you see how that's a non-traditional answer and really shows that the candidate is passionate about empathizing with the user because they stayed at a hospital for two days another way that you can show how you uniquely work is by prefacing your actions by your philosophy so in the
last example the research i might say something like as a product leader it's really important for the whole team not just me or the researcher to be the voice of the user so what i do is i invite all of our team members from the engineers to our legal staff to join on these research excursions so we can all serve to be customer obsessed a common mistake that i see again often is people focus on what we did and not what i did as an interviewer they're not trying to hire your whole team but they're
trying to assess your fit for the role so what you want to speak to is what you did on the team so an example is instead of saying we brainstormed as a team to resolve x y and z problems you can say i brought together 10 of our team members and initiated and designed and led the brainstorm so that we resolved problem x y and z the third and last theme is answer the so what a common mistake i see people make is they forget to talk about the results of what happened definitely if the
results were impressive do not leave it out if something like you raise revenue by 20 on your team don't forget to mention it i think most people forget to mention it because they forget to think about it a question i get all the time as an interview coach is diana what if the results weren't positive well that they were actually negative don't be afraid to share share the negative thing that happened and also share the learning that came from as i like to say mistakes are lessons in disguise and this is a perfect opportunity to
show the interviewer that you're reflective as a person and that you can grow and learn from past mistakes and if the result was neutral find any slightly positive even indirect impact so for example you can say we ended up not getting that client deal by building this feature but this feature helped us increase the total addressable market so that in the future more clients would be interested in buying our product versus the competitors again be results oriented the second part of this theme is traumatize what happened no i'm not telling you to lie or stress
the truth i'm telling you help the interviewer understand the gravity of the situation help them understand the consequences if the problem that you took on went unresolved add in the tension add in the conflict throw in some emotion and share your own thoughts in that moment of the story not only is this good for storytelling and keeps you memorable to the interviewer but it helps you set yourself up as the hero in the story and the last part of this theme is to quantify your results when possible we talked about this in my last video
on preparing resumes for tech and the idea is you want to show a numeric number that represents the results whether it's something like grow revenue by 10 percent instead of saying i let a team to solve x y and z you want to say i led a team of 20 people to solve x y and z that led us to a 10 increase in efficiency do you see how that's a much more impressive answer and like in my last video that i talked about you don't have to come up with an exact number like 5.25
impact on revenue but was it a 50 impact or was it a 5 impact all right now that i've shared my best practices and insider secrets as an interviewer what do you do next so when you finish this video these are five things i want you to do next the first thing is find a list of behavioral questions for the company that you're interviewing for you can find questions like that on glassdoor or just google the most asked behavioral questions second when you get those questions brainstorm responses to this question third take those answers and
put into a neat structure like the star method fourth optimize your answer using all the tips we just talked about and fifth practice delivery this is one of the key parts just because you have good responses doesn't mean you can communicate it well so practice the delivery first in front of a mirror to yourself and after mock interview practice with someone you most likely don't know so you can get yourself a bit uncomfortable if you'd like to see a video with me answering the most commonly asked behavioral questions comment below to let me know what
are the interview questions that you often get stuck with thanks all
