Behavioral Mock Interview for Product Interviews: REAL Stories!

all right can you tell me about a time where you've had to deal with a failure hey everyone I'm Diana as you know and this is one of the best channels to get tips on acing your product management interview today we have a very special

guest we have Ari here today and I'm going to have her give an intro hi I'm Arya super excited to be here Diana definitely helped me a lot both in her YouTube videos and we did a private

session as well I'm at stripe now I started a little over a month ago um and I got offers from Tick Tock Lyft

uh stripe and a series D startup called upside awesome and that's why we have Arya here today because she serves as the model examples how to do behavioral

interviews So today we're going to be asking Arya a couple questions that are the most asked questions in behavioral interviews and we're gonna see how she Aces them all right so we're gonna get

into it so most behavioral questions or even case questions will start off asking tell me about yourself so Arya pretend that I'm stripe interviewing you

tell me a little bit about yourself awesome I'm happy to be here let me just give you a little introduction to myself I started my career working in finance initially in Investment Banking and then

moved into Corporate Finance at Groupon I participated in a little internal hackathon um and then kind of discovered product management and haven't looked back since if you've used Groupon before you're probably most familiar with our

voucher product very annoying to use like you always have to print something out so the product that I was on was completely rethinking that experience it was called card linked offers a user could upload a deal directly onto their

credit card swipe it as they normally would at like a restaurant and then earn cash back so I was responsible for the entire consumer experience there initially kind of thinking about growth and then moving a little more into

retention and monetization I then moved to London where I joined stripe and I was on our Advertiser measurement platform team so an example I always like to use is if you're Uber

Eats and you're trying to advertise on Twitter you might want to figure out like is this Taco creative working or is this hamburger creative working and so one of the products that I was responsible for was a b testing to help them kind of figure out what's working

and not working to be able to get some of those Rich insights onto their dashboard so I'm really excited to be speaking to you at stripe today to kind of bridge my experience in finance and product

awesome all right let's talk about what worked and things that folks would have liked to see more so I'll give a Spiel myself and then I'd love to open it up

to Arya to give what she thinks works the first thing that stood out I love the experiences she talked about at Groupon at Twitter I could really

imagine it because she gave really specific products a lot of product companies hiring today care a lot about consumer experiences so the way that Arya was able to talk about it shows

that she can break things down to explain it to a five-year-old the second thing that worked really well was these product Buzz keywords so arya's talking the talk which makes the

other person on the other side believe that she's done the work she mentioned things like retention AV testing you know all these PM buzzwords all right what do you think was great about that

intro yeah I think one thing that's always resonated with the other side of the interview is being able to latch on to something that they can actually understand the team that I was on at

Twitter was actually a pretty back-end heavy product but if you're able to root it in some sort of example that they can kind of understand um I think it helps a lot and then in your following examples and your behavioral questions they can kind of

remember what you were talking about in the beginning yeah and another thing I forgot to mention or did amazingly well she answered a question that was not asked yet but is in the back of the mind

of the hiring manager which is why are you a good fit for this role so you saw her at the end saying I am interested in this role to bridge the

gap between product and finance which she started often in her early career so this again shows why she's a good fit and I always recommend ending with that

in the tell me about yourself so great job all right the next commonly asked question so Arya tell me about a time in your career where you've had to

deal with a conflict sure um just give me a second to just write down some some notes of an example that comes to mind yeah sure take your time um awesome cool so let me just kind of

briefly mention some of my thoughts on kind of conflicts in the workplace I think that they often fall into kind of three categories I think the first it's sort of healthy pushback that you get from your cross-functional partners

like design and Engineering that make the product and the user experience better I think the second is oftentimes like misalignment on maybe how fast you want to get to Market which can often be

solved in sort of sharing like what's your risk tolerance for some of these things in some a vision or strategy and lastly at the end of the day we're all just sort of people and so you're not going to get along with um every single

person and so the example I'd love to share with you kind of had a mix of all three of these which I think um is an interesting experience so this was with an engineering manager that I've worked

with in the past who was new to being an engineering manager from an IC and was also new to our team um and so one day I received an email

that was copying my manager as well as my skip level and his manager and it kind of had like a bullet pointed list of all of the things that he felt were wrong about a certain product decision I

had made to include a feature in this MVP and obviously my initial reaction was very different I think anytime you see your manager or your skip level cc'd on something you feel like it's an

escalation and I was also kind of surprised because the specific feature that he was kind of calling out and questioning my product decision making there I thought we had

kind of had many conversations back and forth about why we wanted to include this feature or not include this feature so I sent him a slack message saying like hey here's kind of the the document

where we kind of talked about this decision and came to something just to jog your memory but we have a one-on-one coming up so let's kind of talk about it live then and during that conversation we kind of

pretty quickly were able to kind of get to like really what the root cause of the issue was one of the engineers was behind schedule and so in order to sort of make up for that lost time he was like well if we get rid of this feature

we can kind of still hit that code complete date I think getting to that root cause helped a little bit you know we were able to Advocate to kind of figure out how to get more resources on the team

Etc so after I think this period of kind of tension where it felt like again I felt still defensive why are you escalating this issue in one of the following one-on-ones that I had with

him I shared that I think that the PM em relationship is so key to the success of our products and also just to making our

relationship good and enjoyable for the duration of the time we'll be working together and one thing that I can see that you perhaps I didn't give that psychological safety in those meetings for example for

him to be able to say well this engineer is behind the schedule maybe that's something that I could have caught and maybe there was something that I was not necessarily showcasing to be able to show that that true partnership

and so I think in this example one thing that I really learned is not every relationship is going to come completely seamlessly and naturally and in this example I think it was a

relationship that I had to more actively move towards to be able to kind of get to that true empm partnership and can kind of happy to kind of talk uh to share some of those details of how we

got there but I think that we eventually got there and I think it was an interesting learning that you know again two people are not always going to seamlessly get along but you can definitely make strides together awesome

now how many of you guys watching are like that's happened to me because that was my mindset I was like I remember that time I am also escalated to my manager copied to see everyone else on the email

so one thing that I loved about that story was how much it resonated a lot of the times when they're looking for product managers they want to be talking

to people who have dealt with the same challenges so Arya talking about her conflict with an em will tell the interview on the other side I know how to manage these conflicts

so that was the first thing that stood out the second thing Arya was very proactive about sharing what she did in this case that she was being proactive

so a common thing we always talk about as some of you might see in in previous behavioral interview videos is you want

to focus on the traits or actions that you did in these stories the context itself is not going to get you very far because the context is going to change from job to job but in

this case Aria focusing on her pulling the EM to the side in a one-on-one to figure out the root cause her then proactively reaching out to the EM to say how do we build a strong

relationship going forward those are the things the traits that they want to see in the people they hire are thoughts from you yep I think I I agree with that I think

one thing with conflict stories like you mentioned is the context is not necessarily important but you want to show that it was truly something that maybe wasn't solved by just like I

showed him this data point and it solved the issue because um things never are that easy I did love the first rendition it was like I showed him the document where

yeah he said we agreed on everything yeah I definitely did that as well yeah I love that I had a question you took a second to write things down what were you doing

what were you writing down for sure I think this is something that uh you've taught me is um it's super helpful for me to write down the question even if it's a rather simple

question like conflict writing it down helps me sort of just remember then I write just a couple bullet points of like what the story is itself that I want to be able to follow so that I can kind of keep track of my own thoughts

and then the last thing that I do is take a second to really figure out what am I trying to convey in this story as Diana was mentioning and maybe that's a few sentences like a

sentence a couple words that you want to convey so here I've written down relationship building ability uh maybe something like empathy that you want to just make sure that that's coming across

in your answer yes and because Arya was focused it did come across right those traits Beyond just context of what happened was what stood out and I'm like

yes I'd hire Arya put her in the war room with the yams that I didn't want to deal with awesome so given that we've dealt with a lot of conflicts there are some times where we

also have to deal with failure all right can you tell me about a time where you've had to deal with a failure yep uh just give me um another a couple seconds to write down some thoughts sounds good awesome I would love to tell

you um about the first time I had to Sunset a product I was working on a new monetization product during my time at Groupon um so it was a product I was super

excited about it was one of those things where like I really felt like this is going to make Groupon a kind of money I rallied the troops and was like this is the next big thing that we're going to work on

I set our success criteria for the initial launch as well as sort of kind of a North star metric that we wanted to eventually get to which is based on proper per thousand

Impressions was the metric so after our launch we we crushed that initial success metric and you might be wondering well how is this ended up

being sunsetted so one thing after that initial launch was I started thinking okay great now how do we start to build a road map to get to that North Star I think that was

my mistake number one is that even prior to that initial launch I should have some idea of how I plan to get to that North Star Metra so rather than kind of

being nearsighted and just looking at that initial success metric how do I get to where I actually want to get to whether that be in six months or a year and that was something that I didn't have so because I didn't have that now I'm

starting to put together kind of a list of feature ideas I brought together one of those that same kind of troops that I mentioned of design and Engineering to

brainstorm and every time we came up with an idea we would size it and we were barely moving the needle we needed to move it by dollars of profit and we were really looking at cents

so this is when I started to really think oh like what are we going to have to do now that we're really not moving the needle and we are so far away from getting to that North Star metric

so I remember literally going back to my desk and starting to kind of write down my thoughts here to figure out like what went wrong here how did this go from something I was so excited about that now I'm kind of questioning if this is

even going to be a successful product in the long term the things that I noticed with this product is I over indexed on the numbers you know it was really a monetization product and I was like running all these models

figuring out how this is going to be successful from Strictly a monetization perspective but when I really thought about it I was like what is the user problem we're solving and I couldn't articulate that and I think that's

really bad if um as a product manager I can't articulate the user problem we're solving for so sort of a solution to a problem that didn't exist and I think one thing

that I could have caught here it's just doing kind of basic user research I remember there was A co-worker who was you know didn't work in this area at all and she said she saw it on our groupon.com page and she had

like no idea how the product worked and so we have an employee who has no idea I could have done some like really Scrappy user research to do some of that kind of gut checking does this make sense or not

so that being said I kind of had to make the decision to Sunset the product poked at it from every angle to see if I can make it work and again there was really no problem that needed to be

solved and so I brought that back to that same group of people very nervous because just a quarter earlier I was saying the opposite to this team and kind of just like shared with them

exactly what I had kind of been going through hoping to be able to bring some of those insights into you know these are some of the gaps that I missed and this is why we need to Sunset this product

and was kind of hoping that the key takeaway was like we make mistakes and in this case I definitely did but part of that is just product development where you fail and you kind of have to get back onto it

I think that there was a bunch of people who understood that and I remember there was two Engineers who were upset because it felt like throwaway work and kind of wasted their time and so with those two folks in particular I had

to really be super diligent about every feature thereafter like in the couple Sprints after every product requirement was like super thorough I made sure I didn't skip

any stands and stuff like that to really be able to to get that trust back with them and so I think some of my learnings here were I think there's some tangible things like make sure that you have a

sort of a road map when you're doing product development and part of that kind of initial strategy is being able to really articulate a problem and make sure that you have

a lot of conviction around that problem and everyone is able to Rally behind that and if you do need to Sunset a product you need to be able to regain that bus from your cross-functional partners

I love that again another story that resonates I've definitely Sunset products before but what I loved about that story when they ask you these failure stories

they are looking for humility and vulnerability so when those folks answering these stories like oh I failed at not making this thing perfect that's not what they're looking for so

Ari did a good job of going through a story where she actually failed and lost the trust of some of her co-workers so that's the first thing that stood out the second thing that I notice

throughout the story arya's sprinkling in again product skills she talked about coming up with the metric uh what was it something

impressions yeah uh profit per thousand Impressions pkis I think it's a standard metric a lot of times in e-commerce so that's a skill that they're often looking for in product managers as you can see in the

case studies they gave you can you come up with success metrics she also talked about skills that included figuring out what the

monetization plan was the strategy was and also optimizing for empath that's what they're looking for so even though it was a failure story she highlighted some of these successful things that

they are looking for in a product manager and then third thing that I loved this was a story ultimately so she gave initially

this we killed it on our success metric but then you might be wondering why did we Sunset it so as you know a good story is when there are teasers or some

thing unexpected thing that something that was unexpected so that really continued to engage the audience our thoughts from you

yep I um I definitely agree that I think sometimes you need to I think anytime it's like conflict or um failures you need to just sort of show

that really kind of tell the story yeah the Arc of when you even were maybe disappointed in yourself or others were disappointed in you but then ultimately what the learnings were

I think one piece of advice is sometimes with stories you can have a specific metric like the increased conversion by five percent but in a lot of Behavioral stories you don't have like a metric of success and

so your metric of success is um your key learnings so maybe try to end every story with a these are the two things I learned or my biggest takeaway from this story was X that's a real good point key learnings

because they want to show someone who continues to learn can continue to grow so that is something that I have heard from many companies and I'm also curious Aria how do you come up with your

stories I know most of my clients they struggle to remember one specific story for all the 50 hundred variation of questions yep for sure um I remember I also did the same thing where I put

together like a hundred most asked questions and a story for each but that's not sustainable so instead I sort of thought of the five to ten most

memorable career stories for me um it's honestly maybe even closer to five different really big products that I've worked on that have a lot of stories with them

and you can kind of get stories from any of those experiences so even with the conflict story there's sort of a follow-up with another designer who I had conflict with so you

can kind of get a lot of answers maybe from just one key story or product you worked on Amazing so the takeaway with that was focus on

five experiences that you had I think about five products that I've launched in ship and then Daria's point you kind of go deep because throughout that product development life cycle there were conflicts failures

ways that you came up with a metric and managed stakeholders so go deep thinking about those experiences which can be hard right because yeah those were things in our past and you work in a

Groupon that was years ago how do you tend to recall them I think one thing my dad actually taught me is that like if you're kind of in the middle of something that you feel like is going to be something you want to

retell later just document it right now like maybe you're like struggling with a co-worker or you're working on something that you think is like really successful just putting in like your own personal Notes app um so you can kind of refer to

it later wow that is very proactive so come up with a work diary is what yeah yeah yeah I wish I was of course you can like you can kind of like Ping old co-workers and stuff like that

investment to jog your memory but yeah what was that thing we thought about and thingy yeah yeah amazing all right we have one last story

so Aria tell me about a time you committed to a deliverable and you couldn't deliver on it great um yeah an example from from Twitter

comes to mind as I mentioned I was working with advertisers and so one of the specific features that I was working on was one of those features that advertisers were long knocking on our

door being like when is this going to be ready when is this going to be ready and so naturally in turn sales is always pinging me saying when is this going to be ready and we finally had a date for our beta launch and everyone was super

excited so when it was kind of finally coming time for that launch we were not actually hitting our beta success metric meaning we were not able to kind of pass

that threshold to sort of give us the green light to get to Beta where I kind of had to make a decision you know do we still want to move forward given kind of this excitement

around this launch or do I want to you know really respect the success metric and I decided to delay the launch of that beta because ultimately you set

success metrics for a reason that being said then I needed to kind of go back to the folks that I had committed to namely sales to kind of explain what was going on

and so we have this bi-weekly meeting between product and sales during which I wanted to kind of talk about this and before going into that meeting I wanted to make sure I was really prepared and

one thing I thought about was if I was sales what would I ask and like why why do they keep pinging me and why are they going to be disappointed in this the

same way product managers think of users and really empathize with them I try to now think of sales in this case as my stakeholders that I needed to empathize with and kind of figure out what their needs are

and so there's a couple of things that I knew that they were going to ask me was why like why is this delayed what's going on what's happened with the success metric they were going to say okay well now

what when is it going to be ready and then lastly they were going to kind of ask like well what can I help with like how do we how do we expedite this in whatever way that we can so I sort of

prepared questions for all three of these the the first was a little tricky with the why so I tried to sort of demystify why in this specific example there are ml models were a little off

to kind of get that into a sound bite that they would be able to resonate with the reason they might be concerned with these ml models not working is because they actually showed Twitter in a less positive light as advertisers

it was actually underestimating the effect of Twitter as an advertising tool and so I knew that was something they would be able to latch on to and they'd be like okay yeah it makes sense like we're not going to launch this unless that's fixed

that was helpful and then the second is now when is this going to be ready and I'm sure you've been in this position sometimes you don't know because you still need to wait for a root cause from

engineering you still need to kind of get a date for a date so in lieu of that I basically put together like a week by week kind of cadence of providing those date for dates so by the end of this

week I'm going to make sure that we have the root cause completed from there we're going to do like the technical design review and then from there we're going to commit to the work etc so rather than this being a bi-weekly

meeting I said I'll be able to give updates twice a week so that you're able to kind of follow along and was able to give them the Geo tickets to follow along Etc so normally maybe that level

of granularity I wouldn't provide to sales but in this case I knew that would be super helpful then to actually track what the end date might be um and then lastly I had sort of an Ask

prepared for them as well I wanted to get another data scientist on our team and so I had the head of sales sort of co-author this ask with me to be able to get that extra data science resource

and so we didn't get that in time for this specific launch but we got them on board later and I don't think that that would have been possible unless I had sort of this ask prepared in this meeting to really kind of show the case

of why this product is important and next time we can maybe hit our launch dates in a different experience awesome awesome as with every story we've seen our has been really focused on the

particular traits she's trying to make so I'm curious can I guess the traits that you were about to convey and let's try to say it at the same time and see if we come up with it all right okay

two three empathy yay that's how you know you've done a good job when the audience can play back to

you what they heard and that is that validated that she was able to successfully convey the traits she's trying to show and empathy is a really really key trait as a product manager

whether you're dealing with the products to deliver consumers or building relationships so that really stood out what do you think worked in that story what did you like about it yep I think

this is probably also an experience many people have had working with sales as maybe kind of your users because they're your liaison to oftentimes your end users and I think oftentimes we see

sales teams are legal or something as roadblocks to be able to get your product to be shipped but I think hopefully this story showed that I didn't see them as that but rather as enablers to be able to get to

my users so like against sort of empathizing with why they might be excited or disappointed about this product being delayed that's hopefully what I was trying to convene and she also conveyed

other skills like managing stakeholders oftentimes as the product manager you're managing multiple whether it's leadership you mentioned sales and figuring out imagine usually we don't

give them a week by week update but in this case to build that relationship you went out of your way to do the extra work to do that you then also sat into their shoes to say what are they going

to need to convey to their consumers and what's going to be enough to persuade them that this is okay I really like that one where like I told them that they don't want to look bad in

front of customers right yeah also she was strategic thinking yes amazing so we saw a star example of what it's like to answer behavioral

interviews so some of the things we talked about just to summarize is one focus on the trait you're trying to convey to talk about the different product skills just embed them and

sprinkle them throughout your story and third focus on the storytelling element right having these teasers uh things

that we talked about a lot of failure stories so how do you create that heroism the heroic Arc is what a lot of

these famous movies are known for so those are some of the things Arya did any other advice you give and awesome curious you've been interviewing during a crazy time when the tech Market has been down

have you struggled yeah I think I got those four offers that for every offer there was probably you know maybe 10 on-sites that I did legitimately that I didn't get offers

from so it's a tough Market I mean I think even in a good Market product interviewing is very difficult so if you're watching this like hang in there and try to find the the light at the end of the tunnel I think one thing that um

Diana shared with me during one of our one-on-one coaching sessions is to really just kind of show yourself as a person like for me I think that following the

star method for example to a t didn't really bring out the traits that I wanted to showcase so instead I kind of figured out my own way of Storytelling

um and being able to highlight those to show vulnerabilities to show humility um so I think kind of just like figure out what works for you and don't feel like you need to necessarily stick to

one framework rigidly yeah that's such a good point but do have a structure I think that's also what Arya did really well throughout you remember her story about tell me about a time you had a

conflict and she's like these are the three types of conflicts that's something else they're looking for in your behavioral responses because most common mistake we'll hear is people

start rambling they lose whatever point they're trying to make they're trying to figure out as they talk so that was something already did great throughout and then as you heard from Arya it is a

struggle and you guys are not alone so whoever is watching because I have seen them in a lot of forms or even my own clients dealing with rejection after

rejection hang in there it only takes one job for it to matter in this case I already got four offers but it was after you know a while where she was struggling

so hang in there guys and again thank you so much Arya for showing us a great example of acing the behavioral interviews thank you so much all right