 Hi, everyone. My name is Andrew Oh, and I am here to go over our last episode of how to interview top tech companies, and today we'll be covering behavioral leadership. So as usual, to give you a little bit more of a background on myself, I am a product manager, former founder, and a coach. I coach on exponents, and I have worked at companies such as Grab, Tech Talk, and a Series B startup, Paul Poulin, which is a stock and crypto trading app. And I have also founded my own startup, springing from e-commerce to social through manufacturing and client taxis. So today we'll be going over a few things. First is what is behavioral in the leadership context? What are the type of questions and the framework that we should be using? And then lastly, we'll be diving into each of those questions more specifically. And the strategies that you should take in order to tackle those specific questions. So what is behavioral? Now, just as a recap, I did cover in the last episode what behavioral is in the ICD context. And there are certain interviews there that do overlap in the leadership interview loops as well that you'll get at some of these companies like Meta, Google, and so forth. But I will not be covering those topics, given that the frameworks that I shared in the last episode are incredibly relevant and likely still within the IC context that you would be answering that as well. So those topics include project management, product sense, and execution. Now, I will be going over different topics here that are more specific to leadership. But before I go there, let me first discuss what is behavioral. Behavioral interviews are meant to determine how you operate and execute as a PM. And so to prep for this, I would recommend getting familiar with the mission and the principles of the company that you'll be interviewing for. And you'll want to be prepared to speak on past projects and scenarios that you have been involved in. And in this case, because you are a leader or you've been interviewing for or you are interviewing for a leadership position, also prepare many stories around influencing stakeholders across the organization as a leader. And so why is this important? What are they assessing more specifically? They want to know if you can succeed in a complex political environment. They want to assess whether or not you have culture fit with the organization and they want to assess your leadership style. All three of those that I just mentioned are intertwined. So one usually fails without the others succeeding in that regard. And just to be clear, especially for really great companies that have a huge emphasis on culture, this is incredibly important because they understand that nurturing and hiring the best leaders is subjective to the personality fit of the organization itself. Therefore, even if you are a brilliant leader, it's really subjective to the company that you're interviewing for and the companies that you used to work in in the past. Because you might have been a great leader in X company, but maybe this company that you're interviewing for, company Y, might not actually be a great fit for your specific personality, for your specific skill sets. And that's actually totally okay. So again, leadership is far more of a delicate hiring process. And there is much more rigor when it comes to just making sure that there is that culture fit that that company is looking for. And lastly, who will be interviewing you specifically? This could be either the hiring manager or horizontal PMs of that level. So that could be other managerial or director level PMs. So this is how you should approach these interviews. There are three specific topics that are generally going to get assessed and bucket it into question types. And that includes people management, cross-functional partnerships and operations. Now, while people management and cross-functional partnerships are a little more self-explanatory, operations is assessing more of the culture fit within the company and how you're able to operate within to make sure that there is some resonance with regards to you being able to succeed in this company specifically. And we'll get more into that later. As mentioned in the last episode, your storytelling framework should be to answer each question ideally in two to five minutes using the star framework. Ask for time to consolidate your thoughts if you need it. And I would also definitely recommend... I would also definitely recommend you kind of giving a little bit of a structure or framework for how you're going to talk about story before you go into it. So the interviewer kind of already knows how long they can expect that story to be and they can kind of see the end as you start diving into it. Some companies, and again, this is more specific to the interviewer, may actually require you to answer some of these questions in one minute. And so the key thing for these types of interviews, especially at this level, is communication. Your communication has to be crisp. The shorter your answer can be, the better. But it's not just about it being short as well. You want to just focus on the right areas. The first thing to do whenever you ask a question is first ask yourself, what is he or she really trying to get at in terms of the goal of what they're trying to assess from question X? From there, you can pull out the right story and start crafting your narrative quarterly. Now let's get right into it. Let's first talk about people management. So more specifically, what are they looking for in people management interviews? They're looking for just some of these qualities to begin with. So organizational management, how do you structure the teams? People management style. So what is your style like managing a team of subordinates and people that are driving a lot of the IC work for you? What are your hiring principles? This is a big one. As I mentioned before, hiring for leaders is an extremely delicate position and being able to hire really well. Especially people that can also add through the culture of the company that you're building is incredibly important. And lastly, team empowerment. So how are you able to really empower the people within your team? So there is a strategy for how you should approach these questions. Now, keep in mind, I'm going to list out some of the strategic tactics that you can use. But it's going to be specific to various questions. And when we go to the various questions just for time's sake, I won't be going into each question and how to answer them. But if you stick to the strategy, you should be able to stay the path on how to answer the best on this specific question that they're asking you. So I would recommend that you, one of the first pieces of the strategy is that I really recommend you start with the mission and stick to the goals. This is incredibly important for how to set goals and be able to influence throughout not just your team but across the organization. When you're managing a team, try to keep people to their strengths, as this is also going to be really key for retention. But also, ultimately, do what's best for the company. So even if one of the people on your team that you've identified may be really passionate about one specific area, if you really need that person to work on a high-impact project because you know this person is a high-performer, you might want to frame the narrative and make that decision around doing ultimately what's best for the company and achieving those goals. But again, each situation is complex and complicated. And so you would also want to just talk a little bit more in terms of navigating those trade-offs. Third would be to explain the political structure for context. This is a really key one. You always want to make sure that you're explaining what that structure politically is like in the story, if it's relevant. And lastly, explaining the trade-off decisions, decision-making process that you have for that specific instance that you're explaining. So some of the questions that you're going to get here include, how do you structure your teams? How do you hire for culture fit? Have you ever managed an underperformer? And if you did, what did you do? And what is a good mission? What's a good mission? This may come up a little bit more often than you think, so be prepared for this. This question is important because again, it ties back to defining goals and setting a vision that directly relates back to that mission for the company. So keep that in mind. Now, let's go over just one of these questions just so you have a sense of how you might want to go about answering these. Let's talk about maybe one of the most difficult discussions to have, which is about the underperformer. So the question is, have you ever managed an underperformer and if you did, what did you do? Now, this is a tricky question because, and I'm sure you might have seen this throughout your career, whether you were operating as an IC and looking at peers or, if you have been in that unfortunate position as a leader where you had an underperformer, that company, especially companies on the top, they're going to be looking for excellence when it comes to managing underperformers. And the key strategy for a situation like this is twofold. Ensure you have demonstrated empathy. Everyone's situations are different and not everyone is the same. So demonstrate empathy for a question like this. Secondly, you would really want to be able to make sure that you have equality or fairness in this context. So gathering feedback from other stakeholders. So basically, let's go through like an example of how you might want to answer this. You can first start with describing the context. It's about the context of who this person is. How were they hired in to begin with? Was this your hire or was it someone else's hire? As that could drastically change some parts of the narrative of your story. You also want to go into then what was the outcome that this person was driving? And also what was the scope of their work? So you just want to basically get to this part as quickly as possible. Let's just say that this is a two-minute answer. Because you want to focus the bulk of your response here. The next 60 or 80% of this response, you want to focus on actually what you did to determine that this person was underperforming. And then demonstrate those qualities that I mentioned before. So maybe you notice they were underperforming. It might not even be from an outcome perspective. So if it is from an outcome perspective, like they're not hitting the targets, that's one side of that story. But maybe it could be actually this person just isn't really hitting the bar from a stakeholder management standpoint or from a strategy standpoint from the cracking the priorities, et cetera. There could be so many other reasons that are indirectly actually not attributed to outcome performance, but rather soft skills and heart skills, other heart skills that are maybe not living up to the standard for that person's calibration. And so you basically want to convey how you're defining underperformance in this manner. And you want to be objective. So talk about how you first identified this problem. Was this a problem that you noticed or was this a problem that you saw other people reporting? And in either context, you want to demonstrate how you have gotten feedback from that person's stakeholders to make a fair assessment. So talk to that person's engineering lead, talk to the designer that they collaborate and work with, talk to the business stakeholder, try to get a broader picture of this person's so-called underperformance. And then secondly, you want to understand if this is a blip or a trend. You want to understand that this is actually just a one-time thing that you've noticed then based on previous performance reviews or if this is actually more of a trend that you've seen across the performance reviews during that person's time here. Because you might be a new manager that came into the company at that time and you actually haven't even gone through one performance review for this person yet or maybe you just came in the middle of one. So you want to just understand what the pattern is. And once you've done all of this, the third thing you could do is talk to that person themselves and ask them what's wrong. But of course, frame that discussion, set the context or the setting of how you conducted that conversation. Again, what's key here is showing both empathy and objectivity for how you've been able to define this person as an underperformer. And then ultimately comes to that conclusion whether the person was really underperforming. Maybe that person was actually set up to fail because they were never really clear with the goals or their manager kept switching every quarter or so or the strategy kept switching. And so therefore that person just had a lot of ways to work. There are so many different reasons why this person could be considered an underperformer and it could be interpreted by many different people. As a great leader, it's up to you to cut through the noise, digest all the information and then come to a fair conclusion. Ultimately, your goal as a leader is to help people succeed, is to help the people on your team win and to grow that talent nurtured accordingly. Because one thing that could very well be a possibility is that maybe it was you as a leader that it's actually mismanaged or undermanaged that employee and therefore they were deemed as an underperformer. So again, could be many different reasons. Just make sure that you're encompassing all the different facts and that should be the bulk of your response. So 60 to 80% of response should be focused on just this and then the last part of that response in your answer should be about how did they handle it? What did you do? To turn this around. So if you did deem that this was an underperformance issue, then talk about that specific plan or extra time or focus that you want to be spending with that person to help them turn around that performance. I don't like to use the word performance in group and plan. I think there's a stigma around it, especially in blind and let's be real, this entire tech industry, when people use the term PIP or performance improvement plan, it's really just a sign that that leader or that manager gave up on that person. And that does not really reflect, in my opinion, a really good, it doesn't really reflect a really good, empathetic leader because as a leader you should not be giving up out right on a person. And if you do have to come to a very hard decision after that extended time of focus has not been able to turn around that person's performance, then just have that conversation of whether or not this is just the right place for either of you to be in terms of you managing this person within this company or within this team. And then you can come up with a specific timeline for when it might be, you might have to revisit for a reality check. So that's how I would phrase a question like this. Let's move on then to cross-functional partnerships. So cross-functional partnerships, just to define that once more a little bit again, this is about how you collaborate with people horizontally within your company. So if you're the PM lead, it's about how you might be collaborating with your design with the design lead, the engineering lead. This also could be about how you're able to convince upper stakeholders. So it could be your manager, your step level or another person's manager or skip level. So this is what the cross-functional partnership interview is about. It's also going to be assessing conflict resolution across different stakeholders that you've had in the past. And also really stressing communication skills here. Now the strategy that you want to employ here is coming across as authentic as possible. This is going to be really key to really making sure that you're the right culture fit and that you are someone that this person wants to see collaborating and working with other people within the company. You also want to demonstrate how you dealt with different opinions across different stakeholders. So prepare those stories as well. Always try to look for the root cause analysis for why people might be disagreeing with you. So really I try to understand and empathize with them. What are their goals that are up? And lastly, just be aware and stay open to other people's feedback and opinions. So let's go over a few of these questions. So one question you can get here in the interview like this would be, tell me about a time you had to convince someone of your point of view. What's the strong point of view that you had in conflict with someone else? And tell me a time when you had a difficult relationship you had to deal with in a project that you worked on. So let's maybe talk a little bit more about what's the strong point to, sorry, let's talk about maybe, let's see here. Let's talk about maybe one of these questions which could be, what's, tell me about a time you had to convince someone of your point of view. Now, this is a common question that you could get either as an IC or a leader, but we're gonna take this into the leadership context. So in a question like this, I'm sorry, let's grab that. Let's talk about, tell me about a time when you had a difficult relationship you had to deal with in a project that you worked on. No, no, no, sorry, let's grab that. Let's talk about three, two, one. Let's talk about what's the strong point of view that you had in conflict with someone else. So in this question, as the PM lead, you could be, or the PM leader, you could be talking about this in the context of say the engineering manager, could be the design manager, and then maybe in this context, we'll just take the engineering manager. And so a classic example here could be, maybe you're working on new projects with this end lead, could be even be a zero to one. And this, and you guys have clearly defined the scope, you guys are aligned in the goals, but the approach of which they wanna take the project is very different from how you wanna take this. So, you know, especially the zero to one, if you're building a product that's going from zero to one, that's the kind of project where as a PM, or even as a founder, you're gonna wanna be as accurate with that end solution as quickly as possible, meaning you are going to want real customer feedback as quickly as possible and iterate accordingly to be highly accurate with the end solution and then focus on scale. So you can talk about how this could have been your goal and set up this as the context for your answer. And maybe the engineering manager disagrees. The engineering manager wants to build a very high quality scalable products and they want everything to be in it for the longterm. Very typical conflicts that you're gonna get, maybe as PM versus that engineer. And so, granted the context, you can talk about perhaps, you know, in a situation like this, how you really want to better understand why the engineering manager has so much conflict in this, even though this seems like a pretty logical thing to do. You wanna maybe just demonstrate how you got to understand what exactly that goal of the engineering manager really is. What exactly is it that's causing them to differ very clearly from the success of the overall project in a quicker timeframe than the goal that they have because clearly there's something not right here. You can talk about maybe how you talk to one of the most trusted people on the team that's really close to the engineering manager and maybe just have built that relationship with that person in order to get that person comfortable enough to have the ability to speak on behalf of the engineering team on what's been going on here. And maybe in this situation, it could be that the engineering manager is assessed very definitely from the product team. Engineers are actually assessed by their leaders and in the performance reviews by simply the quality and the scalability of the products that they're building. They are not at all assessed by whether or not the institution is right or wrong and whether or not it succeeds because ultimately that's down to the PM's responsibility. And so once you've discovered this as the key issue, then you can talk about the next steps. Maybe you can actually pre-plan with your head of product or with the head of engineering on basically what, aligning on what the real goals should actually be. What is the timeline and what is the plan? Again, it could be that you wanna be accurate really quickly with this end solution. Unless we watch to the market, we have real customer feedback tested in the ocean to really determine if this is the end solution that we should double down on on all the resources and the growth in the marketing and everything else. Therefore, it doesn't make sense for us to actually build something of which you might have to rewrite the whole thing or jeopardize the entire project entirely. And so that could translate into like a promise whereby for the first three months, for the first three months, you wanna just focus and get the MVP out as quickly as possible and iterate towards PMF by the end of the three months. And after that time period, once you guys have found it and have say 80, 90% confidence on that end solution, you guys can then turn gears to invest more time on refactoring that code and building a much more scalable solution that you guys can scale and go along with. So, and then of course, you can then talk about how you went back to the engineering manager with this plan that you might have already pre-lined deep with your other skip levels on. And from there, talk about how you guys were able to come to an agreement. So that's just again, like a rough but an example of how you could talk about a strong point of view that you had in conflict with someone else and how you went about to resolve it. It's showing both empathy for activeness and a willingness to actually be a little bit politically savvy in terms of your approach towards getting alignment. Now, the last piece we're gonna be covering here is operations. Operations slash culture fit. There's many different ways to call this specific interview. But we can just say operating at X, X company which could be the company that you're working for. Now, this is basically looking for a few things. It's looking for how you operate as a leader and what is your operating principles at the companies that you've worked on in the past? How do you take feedback from others? How you define culture? And how do you contribute to the growth of others? Mainly your peers. It's not actually addressing the growth of the people that are working under you. So you want to essentially take a few strategic approaches to this kind of interview. So the first is to really demonstrate a really deep reflection, especially for like a question about how you're taking feedback from others or someone giving you negative feedback. You wanna just demonstrate that you've actually reflected deeply on a situation like this and what were the steps that you took to correct that situation. Demonstrate pro-activists in your willingness and desire to help others grow. And again, these should be examples of people that you have less influence over. So don't talk about, again, someone that you had managed in the past, talk more about someone that you might have seen struggling horizontally from you in terms of level. So it could be a brand new design manager that's drawing the company or brand new product that's just drawing the company. If you wanna go with an example of you being IC and talking to someone and then helping another IC grow, that's also fine. And lastly, you wanna talk about, you wanna kind of place a little deeper focus on how you were building relationships with that person and the example question that you're being asked. Now, some example questions that you get out of this interview could be how you define culture within the organization. Tell me about a time that someone gave you negative feedback. So that could be from a manager, could be from subordinate, could be from a horizontal stakeholder. It'll be up to you unless the interviewer takes you otherwise, so compare those three stories for a question like this. And lastly, what are the top three values you think are most important in a company? And so for a question like this, again, you need to really study what are the principles, the operating principles of the company, every company has it in the handbook, and it's usually public. So you just want to review what the mission is and what are the values of the company. And again, if it's not public, you're pretty sure it'll definitely give you those. And even, and you might even get hit with a situation where maybe it's not about the company, but rather what are just your top three values that you think are important to us later? So these are basically just a few of the questions that you could get asked. Let's talk about one of these questions. Let's talk about defining culture. So I might have hinted at this a little bit in the beginning of this session, but the way I like to define culture is that culture is the personality fit or the girlfriend fit of the company. And you are essentially just one of many people who are looking to interact within the personality of this organization. And essentially good culture and how that's defined is really the outcome of two things. One is the increase of productivity and output for the company. Based on the operating principles that the culture personality fit has with its employees. And second would be the increase of retention, the retention rate of the organization as a whole. Again, there are many different ways to define culture and you can dive deeper into the ways that you define it from the high level. But that's essentially it. There is no rather one answer on culture, but it is really important to kind of demonstrate how you're thinking about and how you're defining it because this in itself is the culture fantasy and this in itself also reflects how you would likely hire other people or how you would demonstrate or build into the culture of the company itself. So again, a very simple but very, very important question that can dive into tons of follow up questions that you'll need to answer. And some of those follow up questions that could get asked is how do you measure, sorry, how do you hire for culture fit? How do you measure the health of the team? These are just some of the questions related, follow up questions that are related to culture that you could very well get asked. Maybe another question that we can go over briefly could be tell me about a time when someone gave you negative feedback. For a question like this, obviously there are various different points in your career of which there are various different points in your career of which you might have received negative feedback. Prepare different examples. Prepare an example from a subordinate that was working under you. Prepare an example from a horizontal stakeholder and also prepare an example from one of your managers or leaders that gave you that direct feedback. Now these, this could be an example of you being an IC and that's also okay if you don't have a lot of leadership experience coming into this interview. But again, try to come up with some or one of those examples from you having at least managed a person. And essentially this example, this example, you do wanna be a little bit more blunt with it. It's the same as what I discussed in the last episode where it's very similar to the example of tell me about the time that you failed. The deeper or shall I say the more negative the feedback actually is. It's giving you an opportunity to demonstrate a few qualities. The first quality it's giving you an example to describe is basically humility. And humility is again like a really big part of you being a leader and also demonstrating a culture fit. The second and the most important is it's giving you enough depth to then show what was the key learnings or how this personally affects you to then drag you up to become an even better version of yourself than you were before you got this feedback. So, it could be a feedback that led to your co-founder leaving you could be negative feedback that ultimately you were not actually aware of but it was really adversely affecting their retention rate on your team or it was actually affecting the outcome performance of your projects whatever it is, I would recommend just be honest with it be honest, show humility because it's not so much the negative feedback directly that that's being assessed in a question like this. Really what's being assessed is what's really being assessed here is how deeply did this affect you and how did you come back even stronger than you did before? Okay, so that would be all for today. This is part five and then to part five of the product leadership behavioral interviews. I hope you guys had a great time in this series as much as I have. And I really hope that the last five episodes have provided enough value and information to help you guys succeed in the interviews that you have whether it's interviewing for startups or big companies across the board. If you guys have any further questions feel free to reach out to me on LinkedIn. I'm always here and always open to respond to questions and I really look forward to hopefully meeting you guys one day. All right, so that's all for today. Take care and good luck on the hunt.