How to Answer Behavioral Interview Questions (Best advice for S.T.A.R. stories!)

[Music] hello everyone and welcome to my channel my name is diego granados and i'm a product manager i'm here to help you understand more about product management how to transition into the role and how to prepare for your upcoming interviews in today's video i want to talk about answering behavioral questions if you do a quick research online you're going to read about the top 20 questions interviewers are going to ask you or the absolutely must know 40 questions to nail a behavioral interview however i'm going to teach you how with just a few stories you're going to be able to answer almost any behavioral question but first let's talk about why do interviewers ask behavioral questions there are three main reasons first the past behavior tends to be a good predictor of future behavior second the interviewers are looking for specific skills that throughout your stories you're going to be able to tell them how you could be a good fit for the role and third don't forget that you are being evaluated on communication skills and so they want to see that you're able to tell these stories in a good and concise way and what kind of behavioral questions can you expect in an interview well there are companies like amazon that are known for asking behavioral questions and going deep into the stories and once you're done they'll keep asking questions about the story until you think you're done and they'll just keep asking more and more questions about it and what about other companies well in general the questions are going to be different but what the interviewers and the hiring managers are going to be looking for are essentially the common product management skill sets they're going to be looking for things like leadership working cross-functionally communication influencing others dealing with ambiguity and many others that you can actually find in my video what is product management here are a few examples of behavioral questions tell me about a time when you had to convince a team to do something that was not part of the original plan tell me about a time when you used data to convince your manager tell me about the time when a customer asked for a requirement that was not good for the product and how do you handle it and of course the behavioral questions can also be very open-ended like tell me about a time you failed or tell me about what is your greatest achievement and like this there are so many other questions you can get asked so check down the description down below for a link to some of the most common behavioral questions you can get during an interview now let's talk about star stories i'm sure that at this point you've heard about the star format it stands for situation task action and results but why do we use this format well you're basically trying to tell the interviewer a story that took place over weeks months or possibly even years in three to four minutes and in this portion of the interview you are being evaluated also on the communication so your story has to be concise easy to follow and have a good format or a framework that makes the interviewer understand the situation the task the action and the result [Music] the situation is about setting the context is about telling the interviewer just enough information for them to understand the rest of the story the task is a moment that you take to explain your role in the situation you described action we tend to talk about the team and what we did if it was a team effort to focus on your role and the actions you took during this situation this is also where you will spend most of the time talking and make sure that your structure is easy to follow for example you can use things like first second third to make sure it's very easy for the interviewer to understand what is happening during the action phase result very briefly mention what was the outcome of the situation it shouldn't take more than a couple of sentences one extra thing that you can actually add is a small lesson at the end it's a nice way to recap the important skills that you learned let's do an example it will be a story i made up but i want you to pay attention to a few things first the length of each section of the star format second the structure of the answer how easy or complicated is it to follow the story in my example and third pay attention to the way the story tells you what i did versus what the team did before i begin let's actually do an experiment the first time you watch this next section of the video try to not look at the screen and identify the parts that i mentioned before in my last role as a consultant i was asked to help with a project that was not properly sized there was almost no time left to finish the project it was evident that we were not going to finish in time and the customer was not happy about it when i joined the team i needed to understand the progress that the team had made how much was left and what can we actually do to deliver what we promised so when i joined this new team the first thing that i did was understand the customer requirements and what was left of work then i talked to the customer to understand the goal of the project we were developing to prioritize our deliverables i realized that this was just the start of what could become a bigger project the customer needed the first step to convince the stakeholders of spending resources on their project next i drafted a proposal for the customer in which we would finish 60 to 70 percent of what was missing in the original scope and the rest would be part of a larger project for the next phase we would also spend time working on the signs and documents the customer could use for their presentation to the stakeholders finally i worked with the team to put together a work plan with specific dates and milestones and improve our communication with the customer through weekly status call as a result of this effort the customer convinced the stakeholders to invest resources in this project we went into a bigger phase too and that created actually a long lasting relationship with this customer and our firm when i left the company the team was working on phase four and other scythe projects started with this customer something that i learned from this project is that it's always important to focus on understanding the customer problems and their motivations okay now you can go back and re-watch the story but this time look at the notes here are some of the most common mistakes that i see candidates do all the time in behavioral questions not adding enough i in the story make sure that you tell what you did in the situation while it may have been a team effort the recruiters want to know what you did not being concise i actually one time interview someone who took 15 minutes to answer the first behavioral question of the interview don't do that not having a structure very often i see candidates repeating themselves over and over and over and over and over again and going back and forth between explaining the situation and the action they took this usually leads to not being concise not going deep many candidates try to tell a story that doesn't go into the details and ends up being a very short and superficial answer memorizing word by word it just sounds too robotic and not natural at all and there's one that i encounter very very often make sure you answer the question the interviewer asked as you're going through your answer as you told your story ask yourself am i answering the question i know this sounds obvious but in many interviews i hear great stories that have absolutely nothing to do with my question and last but not least lying in your stories behavioral questions are about getting to know more about you and making sure not only you're a good fit for the role but that you're also set for success when you join i've interviewed many many pm candidates and i've been in a few of these situations before where you can tell they are lying and after asking more questions to go deep into the story it becomes a very awkward moment so please don't lie in your stories now before we talk on how to prepare your star stories let's talk again about amazon amazon's interview process is about asking you behavioral questions around their 14 leadership principles and they can ask you questions like tell me about a time you didn't meet the client's expectations how do you remedy this situation tell me about a time you invented something or tell me about a time you didn't have enough data to make a decision but like i said before today is not about amazon so why are we talking so much about it then let's look at these principles while amazon makes this 14 leadership principles part of their core culture i believe that most companies are looking for individuals with very similar if not the same leadership principles in my own experience preparing for an amazon interview even if you don't have one can actually help you ace any other behavioral interview let's clarify one thing first the fact that there are 14 amazon leadership principles does not mean that you need to have 14 different stories your stories will usually mix two or three of these principles in one single story in the end you'll have a handful of stories to help you through the behavioral portion of any interview there are many ways you can craft your star stories and actually there are many frameworks you can use today i'm going to show you how i create my own stories start by taking combinations of two or three leadership principles and identify stories from your experience and your resume that can be a match for those principles for example customer obsession earn trust and deliver results in the description below i'll leave you a list of leadership principle combinations that will help you have all the stories that you need once you identify these leadership principles keep them in mind as you write your story you want to make sure that they come through in it now typically when we tell a story we want to make sure that the other person has all the context of what happened before we get into the conflict and the resolution of the story and the more context you tell the more you realize that they need more context so you keep going on and on this probably you know won't work in an interview you want your entire story to fit within three or four minutes for the situation start by writing down all the context of your story don't worry about the length at first now we need to remove parts of the story until we have at least a minimum for the story to make sense to achieve this remove one part and look at your story if the story makes sense after removing this part then you're on the right track and stop if it doesn't make sense anymore then we create the task it is actually likely that you already added the task as part of the situation or the context if you did that just move it here remember that the task should be about your role in the situation and now it's time for the action remember that it's natural for us to want to talk about the team and what our team accomplished here but you should talk about you this action should be an order list of the things that you did within the team from the things that you did condense it into a list of three to five items but not more than that this is where you will highlight most of the leadership principles so make sure that some of the items that you're writing show your customer obsession or earning trust or any of the other leadership principles you think matches your story think of the result as the impact on a bullet point in your resume at this stage you shouldn't be adding more context this will be a two or three sentences of what was the outcome similar to the situation you can write the result and start reducing it by removing phrases one by one and finally the lesson while this is not something required if there is a good lesson that you can share in one or two sentences go ahead and do it you want to highlight here something that is relevant to a product management skill and now that you know how to create stories repeat this process over and over until you have five eight stories and that should be enough to help you answer any behavioral question now you're probably asking yourself well we saw how to create stories but we haven't really seen how to answer the question i mean sure if you created a story from one of the leadership principles about customer obsession and they'll ask you a question about customers i'm sure you can answer it but what about if they ask you something like tell me about a time you failed first don't panic okay let's look at some of the stories you may have created i'm sure that at some point when you worked with a customer or led the project or worked on a long-term plan something went wrong now take one of your stories that you created with this or other leadership principles and focus on three things focus on the reason why you failed not your team the result of all the actions that you took and the lesson that you learned to avoid the same mistake in the future and you're gonna do the same process with any of your other questions depending on the type of behavioral question they're gonna ask you you're gonna be having more emphasis on the customer or on the conflict that you solve with the team or on how you influence others to do some project but essentially with just a handful of stories you're gonna be able to answer almost any behavioral question okay up to this point you know what star stories are how to create them and how to change them to answer different questions but there's just one more thing that is probably the hardest of all and that is practice and practice and practice again and when you feel like you're done practicing continue practicing [Music] if you want to ace the behavioral part of the interview here's what you should do first time yourself if you're talking for more than four minutes maybe five you're talking too much it's time to reduce the story number two record yourself listen if i'm doing this for you to be able to watch me i'm sure you can do it for yourself make sure that you listen how you're telling the story does it make sense are you answering the question and is it easy to follow you and last tell your story to others ask your family friends classmates other people who are practicing for product management interviews tell them your stories and ask them how easy was it to understand your story in this four or five minutes and listen the first time you tell your stories is gonna be the most awkward thing in the world but the more you practice the closer you're gonna be to getting that job you've always wanted thank you so much for watching guys i hope you enjoyed this video and learned something new today about star stories leave a comment down below with your tips on creating story stories or any questions you have about them and don't forget to like and subscribe and i'll see you next time [Music]

Channel: PM Diego Granados

Views: 30,422

Keywords: How to Answer Behavioral Interview Questions, Behavioral questions for Product Management, How to answer STAR stories, Product Management Behavioral Questions, how to answer behavioral interview questions sample answers, tell me about a time interview questions examples\ntop behavioral interview questions and answers, answering behavioral interview questions, pm diego, product manager interview, google product manager interview, amazon product manager interview, product manager

Id: 9q2bICnG6ac

Length: 15min 10sec (910 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 31 2020