Common Pitfall: Failures
Failure prompts: Be honest. Many people try to go too safe and end up telling useless stories that make them seem arrogant or at least not humble.
When you get a failure prompt, think:
Tell me about your top strength and top weakness
What are your three weaknesses
What are the things you are focused on improving in yourself?
If I interviewed your boss or collegue, what would they say are your greatest strengths and weaknesses.
Not necessarily failure questions but sometimes your answer is or should point to a learning from something that went wrong.
Tell me about a time you disagreed with your engineering partner.
Tell me about a time you disagreed with your manager.
Rules of Thumb
Some general rules to follow with failure prompts:
Be honest
Don’t pick softball answers
Ideally, pick something you have known about long enough to learn and avoid a similar problem recently.
Don’t pick something too far back in history unless it is fundamental to how you manage products or teams.
Don’t say you work to hard or don’t have a good work-life balance.
Pick from what you are actively working on to improve yourself (if you aren’t doing that, start today).
For Disagreement Questions
When talking about a disagreement with an engineer, don’t blame the engineer. Take ownership for a communications problem on your end.
With the manager question, make sure you don’t sound defensive or don’t make you sound as if you think you are better than your manager.
