Deep Dive Into Behavioral Interviews
For the next few weeks, I am diving into behavioral interviews. This means going back to the basics with Amazon interviews.
Amazon is the gold standard for behavioral interviews.
If you are new to Amazon interviews, you need between 25 and 30 stories prepared. This is why I recommend you prepare an audit of your stories. Here is a template.
Since I am helping a friend, I am going to start with a mini-audit and think about different question types. I will walk you through my process for these leadership principles to show you how it is done over a series of articles.
High level, my process starts with a list of questions for one leadership principle. Get started jogging your memory. Then migrate to the spreadsheet when the stories are unlocked and come to fast to segment in a document.
Note for Newbies
If you have never worked at Amazon, start with Customer Obsession. You will most likely get it for your hiring manager's phone screen. Right now, I am helping an ex-Amazonian looking to go back, so we are jumping ahead a bit.
I will start with I will dive into three leadership principles:
Are Right, A Lot
Disagree and Commit
Insist on High Standards
Let’s Dive In
Remind myself of the leadership principle basics.
Leaders are right a lot. They have strong judgment and good instincts. They seek diverse perspectives and work to disconfirm their beliefs.
Instincts and judgment come from experience
Diverse perspectives mean I am not a lone wolf
Next, I review the top questions in the category.
Tell me about a time when you had to work with incomplete data or information.
Tell me about a time when you were wrong.
Tell me about a time when you had to use your judgment to solve a problem.
Tell me about a time when you incorporated a diverse set of perspectives into solving a problem.
Tell me about a time when you had your beliefs challenged and how you responded
I will use the prompts to jog my memory.
When storytelling gets muddy, I move to the spreadsheet
Once I move to the spreadsheet, I widen the field of view.
First Prompt: Decision with incomplete data
First thoughts: PMs always work with incomplete data.
I have a ton of stories, why aren’t they coming to mind?
Next I go company-by-company for high-level concepts
intrico.io - As a coach, I am always working with incomplete data, but I remain curious and inquisitive to understand what my client’s problems are.
catch&release - Setting up a strategic plan for a startup means we are always working with incomplete data. I did a lot of user interviews to test hypotheses and find (as yet) uncovered problems.
google - Metrics pipeline was dead, and it was going to take 6 months to get up to speed. Used what we had, hypothesis and interviews with sales and biz dev teams.
yelp - it was all about getting data in the right place. I actually had to help executives with incomplete data discover that they were not aligned because they each thought they had complete data but in fact did not.
lendingclub - I didn’t love the role. I hated it so much I don’t remember much, so I avoid it in interviews. If asked, I explain it was a gamble that didn’t pay off and I learned to be more critical about the roles I take.
amazon - this taught me how you need to dive in at least a few layers, even if what you will find is incomplete. I learned to look at the quality of the data here because I made a bad decision. But it taught me to make better decisions in the future. Look at how I was able to mediate between executives at yelp.
bottlerocket - everything was incomplete. I set up systems to enable sales where i knew data was rarely 100% right every day given breakage and theft as well as multiple channels that didn’t connect selling from the same pool.
That was easier than it felt at first. Thinking that way got me unstuck. I started jogging my memory. I wrote down something for each role, even if I thought it crappy.
Let’s go look at the next question. My goal is to find overlap while also seeking a new view to find a new story.
Next Prompt: Tell me about a time you were wrong.
This is easy; we are all wrong a lot.
The challenge is finding something significant enough to matter but not so significant I scare them away.
And, I can see already my list above tackles the problem for at least one example.
I have an example from Amazon. Check.
If Amazon had been more recent, I would have pushed it and dived deeper for another example. But for an error in judgment, a fundamental story from history is good but can only be used once. They are likely to ask me for something more recent. So, let’s go through the list of the last three places I worked:
intrico.io - The most costly mistake to my immediate role caused a hit to my cash flow. It was ultimately not setting clear expectations. The client had different expectations and so rated me poorly. It led to me changing procedures. Now, I clearly set expectations. I haven’t had a problem since on that front. I have had others, but not because I failed to set expectations.
google - This one I struggle with. All the situations that come to mind are where I was wrong in my communication approach, I wasn’t wrong on strategy (in fact, I found out just the other day my bet was in the right direction and the product continued to flourish after I left, so I made the right investment), but culturally, I made mistakes in my approach to get the work done and caused a loss of trust with some of my stakeholders while winning over others. But the ones I lost trust with had more power.
yelp - Here was one of my biggest mistakes. But the interview challenge here is when and with whom do I use this story. I can’t repeat it and it works well for a number of other leadership principles. It was around executive communication. So I need to find another.
Switching Gears
I think you can see by now, that this is an excellent short exercise to get started, but I really need to move this over to the spreadsheet because even I am beginning to get lost in my own thoughts.
I jumped over to the spreadsheet, now sharing some highlights with you.
The first few stories are tough to remember.
I got to about 25 stories with a quick mental walkthrough of my career.
I broke big stories into smaller ones as I thought about key points.
Trying to come up with at least 2 examples for each of 4 prompts for each category.
Question > Story List was the unlock for me. I thought coming up with 30 would be difficult and I am currently at 41 stories with 13 more leadership principles to go. Trying to answer a few prompts opened up my memories.
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