 What's the biggest failure in your life? Tell me a time you failed. Tell me a time you really failed miserably. Those are trap questions in all the behavioral interviews and those situations when you failed. Most candidates lose their job offers because they don't know how to answer this question very well. Can you really tell them the truth when you failed or can you tell them an okay story but people continue to dig in to answer to find out why you really failed? This is one of the hardest interview questions to answer. I've interviewed hundreds of candidates out there. In this video, I'm going to share with you the unique framework I invented that was able to answer the situational questions. Tell me a time when you failed, much easier so that you are able to confidently present yourself in the interview and then your job offer 10 times faster. Stay until the end of this video where I share with you a trick to quickly turn your failure story into a success story. Hey guys, this is Dr. Nancy Lee, a director product and feature in force. I help 100 people land a dream PM job offer in fan companies and unicorn startup and continue to get promoted as a product leader. In this channel, we talk about tech trends and product management. Like and subscribe to get more free product management training right here. The three steps answer this question. Tell me a time when you failed. Number one, understand the intention behind the question. The interviewer really want to understand your true failure story and how you recover from the failure. And they also want to stand if you're able to make the same mistakes in the company so that they can predict what kind of behavior you're going to join the company. And also can tell your leadership style, see how good you are turning a failure into a success story. When you tell your stories, you must tell them the success part of the story significantly more than only talk about the failure because it's kind of very difficult to talk about failure and it's miserable. All they want to see is the trap see if you fall into this trap or not. Stand number two, and try to answer your question within two minutes. It's very easy. You must time yourself and write down all your stories end to end, you can free flow and then start to cut, cut, cut, cut, cut and until you're able to fit all your questions into two minutes because there's a golden rule. You must make it short and concise and make the interviewer hooked in the entire process. Even if the interviewer asks you full of questions and they're supposed to ask you full of questions because they want to verify if you lie in the process of answering these questions or not. But that doesn't mean that you shouldn't make it short and concise and many people out there tell you really, really long story. It's not engaging, fails like old women's long socks, forever going super smelly, nobody is interested. Stand number three is actually use the right framework to answer the question correctly. First of all, let's understand the many different type of behavioral interview questions. For example, there are questions like how do you prioritize product features on product roadmap? Those questions should use three by two framework and there's also questions like design what Uber app for blind people and this type of question, you should use modified circles framework and I made videos right here regarding the modified circles framework to answer those kinds of questions right here. So to get ready for any type of interviews out there, you must understand what different type of interview questions out there. Feel free to go to this 50 product manager interview questions database. You can download those and understand different type of questions within different type of company so that you can get ready and prepare and use the right framework to answer these questions. Now let's dive into Grail framework. I call this .NCD's Hoodie Grail framework. Now, Grail stands for G get to the point, R reason, A action, I stands for impact, L stands for learning. Now let's talk about first part of framework, get to the point. You must get to the point to answer this question within one sentence. For example, they ask you, tell me a time when you failed, give them one sentence like the example below. When I was a product manager at Verizon, I failed to acquire customers when I launched the first AI-empowered Smart Cities product to help cities reduce car crashes. So within one sentence, you tell them your title, what you failed at, and what product did you launch? Only one sentence. That's G part of framework, get to the point. Now let's talk about the R part of framework. R part of framework stands for reason. The reasoning can use two to three sentences describe the situation to make it really dramatic and memorable and create a hook for the interviewer to continue to listen to your story. For example, it was one of the biggest failures in my career. I had a team of 30 engineers to launch a machine vision product to help cities reduce car crashes. Millions people get killed in the car accident. It was such an important problem to solve. However, after we launched the product, no customers were interested in purchasing the product. So I took the following three steps, so I decided to fix the problem as soon as possible. By now you must be intrigued and want to see what's next. So you're hooked by the R part of framework. Now, this is the same methodology as all the movie stars and directors and making movies in Hollywood because they want to create the important hook and story at the very beginning, but get to the point much faster. If you like the examples I gave you so far and also get hooked by the story, please make sure to like this video and comment below. Let me know your hook and your story. Next part is the three actions I took to fix the problem. You need to only use six sentences in the action part, which includes three bullet points and two sentences per bullet point. Here are the examples. Step number one. I investigate why cities do not purchase this product. And I discovered that cities actually really love the product, but they couldn't make decisions on buying one single product. Whenever cities purchase any traffic safety product, they want to see the entire city planning of the entire city, not just traffic and also parking and lighting solutions as an entire holistic plan. So therefore they can make decision of one single product, but even if they love the product, they decide to not to buy it. Step number two. I immediately look into our existing sales strategy and sales model and work with our sales marketing team to redesign our strategy. In the past, we used business development and direct sales model to build relationship, make them purchase product and the new plan is sales through city planning agency and create winning situation with our city planners. Step number three. We restructure our go-to-market strategy. We put all our effort into building relationship partnership with city planning agencies so that we're able to sell through them and we use them as an instruction to get our food in the door to launch our smart cities product. After you give them three very action driven concise steps, you need to lead to impact. Here's the impact I give if I was in an interview. Our product went from no customers into deployed into 10 cities within six months. And the product also receives the mayor's best practice award was in 2017. Most importantly, thousands people were saved from car crashes because of our effort. Your impact should be very short concise within maybe two sentences or so so that you can leave a very impactful impression in front of interviewer. And finally, L stands for learning. You must use one sentence to summarize your learning. What I learned from this failure is that it's very important to understand customers decision-making process before we design the go-to-market strategy of our product. I was able to use the same grail framework at the beginning of the pandemic and leading to four offers through those that direct product offers. And many people out there and sending emails regarding how much it helps and significantly. And you must try to implement as well. Now here comes the bonus tip. How to turn failure into a success story? Most of you guys feel like you don't have that many failures that can turn into success story. Here's a very simple step you can do right away. Number one, whenever you think about any kind of failure stories, you must start with success stories first. You should have interview questions bank, your past stories bank, to understand which ones actually went through different challenges and eventually became any kind of success. So find those specific challenges and turn into a failure story. Number two, when you write the stories, you must turn all your energy into the actions or making it a success story and recover from the failure instead of spending lots of time talking about failures. Number one failure when people tell this answer to, tell me a time when you fail. If you like this framework so far, you must like the part two of the video where I break down the specific framework and show you through a mock interview how I coach other people and turn their bad answers into an answer that's 10 times better and much more impressive. Check out this video right here and other simple answers in this playlist. Make sure to download the 50% managed interview questions database so they can use it for your mock interview as well. This is Dr. Nancy Lee from PMExcelerator.io. I'm gonna see you in my next video right here.