are you overwhelmed by all the different behavioral questions that they could ask you in an interview here are three tips that are going to help you tackle any behavioral interview question and make you memorable so we're going to start off with tip number one which is prep your 10 best stories of your career I want you to brain dump what happened in those 10 stories and get out all the details of why you shined in that story then I'm going to want you to tag these stories to the questions so here's what you want to
do search up the 50 most likely asked product interview questions for Behavioral interviews and you're gonna tag your best stories to which interview question it could answer because think about it each of your stories you can probably look at it at a different angle to answer the tell me about a time you had a conflict and you want to make sure each question has at least two stories that you could tell just in case you already use that story for another question when you go through the 50 questions you might notice there are some questions
where there are no stories from your 10 that will work and those are the questions that you want to prepare and customize a specific story for but you'll quickly realize when you go through the 50 question a lot of your 10 stories will already work for a majority of those questions and this is different from the usual approach which is really overwhelming when people think of specific responses for all 50 types of questions that they could ask you you're much better off remembering and practicing really well those 10 stories that best highlight your career and
then talking about it in a specific angle so that it answers the question asked for example if you're asked tell me about a time you had a conflict on the team I bet from your 10 stories 50 of those stories you can look at it at an angle where there was some conflict with a team member whether how small or big and that's how you'll finagle your stories to be able to look at it from a different lens to tell your story story I call this strategy the politician strategy you know how politicians sometimes you'll
ask them a question and their response will kind of touch upon your question but not always the most directly but they still have a way of convincing to the audience that they are a trusted figure the once you come up with your 10 stories you'll want to practice delivery as much as possible and then after practicing in the mirror on your own out loud you then want to practice with someone else make sure that someone else is asking you follow-up questions so that they're really putting you in the scenario as if you were actually being
interviewed by someone there is nothing like trying to replicate the real deal and that's why they have dress rehearsals in acting my tip number two is to lead with a situational framework think about it in an interview they're asking you behavioral questions like tell me about a time so they can understand how you approach problems but they also want it in a structured way they used to ask people questions like how would you deal with X Y and Z and then they realized that wasn't the best way to interview people because people would just come
up with ways that they would theoretically deal with things but not in actuality so the industry has transitioned to behavioral questions which is asking people tell me about a concrete time but you can still use the structural piece of situational interviews and here's how when her active behavioral question you want to use a situational framework by structuring what you would do in response to that type of scenario basically what are the series of steps I'd do to tackle some situation for example a common question that is asked is tell me about a time you had
a conflict so I'm thinking in my head this structure is well how do I best deal with conflicts on their team step number one for me is to create a safe space and make the other person or other people feel heard before I'm sharing my points step number two I take an approach of problem solving together rather than imposing Solutions onto someone else versus getting defensive and my last step is to make sure we hold each other accountable based on the feedback that was given in the conversation which includes things like following up on progress
creating touch points and check-ins to make sure that what we complained about before is not Behavior that's continuing to show in situations so I would share this structure up front before I get into the details of the actual example Story one time when I worked with my content designer at Facebook and we got into a conflict about a document that she saw that I was starting to change the content in and as I mentioned the first step is I made her feel heard so I set up a time with her because I noticed that she
was frustrated and basically let her know I really want to understand what's going through her head and how we can make this better so I let her speak first and on top of that I asked her follow-up questions to dig deeper on some of the things she said and then I repeated back some of the things that she mentioned to make sure that she really felt hurt number two I mentioned problem solving together so with this content designer instead of imposing Solutions I asked you know what are some things you think we can do to
improve this for next time so she gave me an idea I threw in another idea and we were basically building on each other so that she felt like I was there in with her trying to solve the problem and then step number three I asked her can we maybe start doing a check-in once every two weeks to ensure that we're making progress on the things that we talked about and she was more than delighted to feel that I wasn't just listening this one time but that over time I wanted to make sure to check in
that we're actually improving on what we said we were going to do and the result of this in consecutive meetings was that this kind of designer trusted me much more than when we started out which meant things like when I did try to change the content or when I provided suggestions there was no more hostility from her so from just this example you saw that this last piece is you just filling in the details of the structure that you provided up front and this is important because sometimes you might run out of time and you're
sharing the structure of the situational framework will at least help the interviewer understand how you would approach the problem on and it will be so much easier for them to follow along than getting lost in all the details of the actual story because at the end of the day they don't really care so much about your story they care about the traits that it exhibits and what you did in reaction so tell them that up front very clearly without getting lost in the details of the story which is a good segue and point number three
which is focus on traits to communicate so a common mistake people will make in behavioral interviews is they're going to be so focused on the story that they get lost in talking about the details when if you think about it the company doesn't really care what happened to you the scenarios and the situation could change when you join this new company but they care about the traits that you exude what you did in the face of this challenge or this difficulty and a lot of these companies have specific traits that they're actually looking for that
they will explicitly tell you so for example if you're interviewing with Facebook the four leadership principles they look for when they're hiring product managers includes things like resiliency empathy ownership so once you know what traits they're looking for it makes it so much easier to focus your stories on the things that they're looking for so it always starts with finding the traits that these companies are seeking and either recruiter will tell you directly or you might be able to find it on the company page then you'll want to embed those traits in those stories to
let each story shine and be very focused on those specific traits and you'll either want to express those traits explicitly or implicitly so explicitly you might say I showed empathy by X Y and Z implicitly you might Express I want to understand how the other person felt so I made sure to listen to them very intently of course I want you to be authentic when you're telling these stories if you didn't actually exude empathy don't use that trait and instead from the different things that they're looking for hone in on the one that that story
best exudes and the last thing that's really important is you'll want to ask someone for feedback you'll want to ask them what are the traits that were conveyed through the story that I told you and you'll want to see what they said did it match up with what you were actually trying to communicate because sometimes when we think we're trying to communicate something It Gets Lost in Translation there is one question I know that's not going to be included in your 10 stories which is tell me about yourself and that is the question that's most
commonly asked in interviews especially in the initial rounds so you want to take a look at this video to give you some hints on how to best tackle this question for you to be memorable and I will see you guys in the next video
