Grading Advice No. 1: Behaviorals
This is part of a series on how to be a good mock partner and ask the right questions. It is also great for thinking like a hiring manager to better prepare for your pending interviews.
To see the rest of the articles in the series, find the list here.
Let’s Dive In
Behavioral interviews are the easiest to grade because they are storytelling about their experience. Here are things to look for:
Hard to follow. If you get lost and can’t follow, that is your truth. Share it. There can be a number of reasons: rambling too much, over-sharing, not sharing context, etc. It is nice if you can explain why they were hard to follow, but if you can’t explain it, the advice to self-reflect and look for the cause is fair feedback.
Too much detail. PMs tend to give too much detail. I don’t know if it is because engineers frequently want technical details or if they are convinced their product is just too technical to be understood without pre-work. In 90% of the cases, that detail isn’t needed when explaining the story, if the interviewer is looking for more details, they can poke. It is more difficult, to be precise, so a PM who can do that will win. Again simply observing that is helpful.
Over justifying. This is most common with career changers or people coming out of a role with a particularly bad manager. You’ll often find the candidate over-justifying what they’ve done. They often list too many execution points. They fail to address how they are strategically thinking like a product manager. For those with bad bosses or company politics, you will also see this behavior. When people who are frustrated by their current employer often try to over justify something that’s gone wrong at work but isn’t relevant to the interview. In fact, they set off a red flag for the interviewer on something they may not have even been looking for.
Metrics that prove impact. Quantifying the impact, and the outcomes, using measurements and context for those measurements, are crucial for product management roles. People new to PM interviewing and sometimes experienced PMs will focus more on their tasks and execution details than the outcome. This is a major problem for anyone with 3+ years of PM experience. This category of problem can be broken down into three common mistakes:
Mistake 1: No Outcomes - No outcomes mentioned, just general responsibilities. No metrics were mentioned. Generally, noting that is helpful in understanding the impact you had on the product and/or team. (In fact, I found myself falling into the trap in a recruiter phone screen the other day. It is such an easy trap to fall in.)
Mistake 2: No Context - Listing one number but no context. For example, I drove $1 million in revenue. Out of what? How big is the company? What was the goal? They don’t need all those answers, but they do need context. For example, I drove $1 million in revenue for Amazon. against a goal of 1.2 million in under six months. Notice how that example gave a number plus some numbers for context, so it didn’t sound like I was just bragging but that I actually did the work.
Mistake 3: Wrong Numbers - Listing numbers with the context or the wrong context. I still have no idea why you’re telling me this. Or you’re justifying a marketing activity and not a product management activity. Or you focus on a project management activity, not a product management activity.
What's the point? Often people will give you excessive details but missed the point of your question, or their story was.
So, as you can see, by these five points alone, there are some very simple observations. One can make to give good feedback for a behavioral interview mock.