 Hello everyone. Good morning. Good evening from wherever you're joining in and welcome to get another webinar by product school. And today's topic is behavioral interviews for product managers. Before we get into the topic for today, a quick introduction about myself. My name is Afir Reis. I'm currently working as a senior product manager at Zolando, which is one of Europe's largest fashion e-commerce marketplace. I'm based out of Berlin and before Zolando, I've been associated with different etic domain products with e-procurement products and marketplace products. So coming to the topic for today, behavioral interviews. First, let us try to understand what are behavioral interviews. So behavioral interviews are interviews where the questions tend to focus on a candidate's past experience to assess how they navigated through specific situations and challenges and how well they utilize their skills which are relevant to the position that you have applied for. These are typically the questions that start with things like, tell me about a time when XYZ or has there been a situation in your previous organization where you've achieved or where you've built a product but faced a lot of challenges. So these questions would typically like to go back in your past, go back in your previous roles and want you to give examples of how or how you have performed in a particular situation that the interviewer has in mind for you. What it does is it is used to predict future performances based on your previous experience rather than speculate on your future performance based on what you're saying. It's a way of validating the skills that you are talking about or skills that your resume talks about through real life examples that you actually encompass. Hence, it's really important that you support all your answers with real life examples from your past experiences or past roles. The behavioral question actually does not end with things like, tell me something about yourself that's just to start. What follows is a whole round of follow up questions which may pick one particular point that you said and it will go on. The question might be something like, tell me about a time when you had to make a short term sacrifice for a long term goal. Now, based on the answers that you give, the interviewer might take something out from there and then prove further on that. What it does is it removes the ambiguity in the entire hiring process. It is made to know you better as a candidate. It's for the company to know you better as a candidate and to know how do you fit into the principles that they have or do you fit into the company values that are there or the product values that are there. It also reduces the opportunity for the candidate to lie. Now, we all agree that when you're hiring for a particular role, you do not want the candidate to lie. That's the worst thing you can do. You should never lie in your resume, in your interview, but yet there's a way to present yourself. There's a way to narrate the different stories that you're going to talk about in behavioral interviews and that's what we are going to touch upon today as to how do you narrate your story in a better manner. Generally, what happens in an interview is candidates tend to glorify their skills, candidates tend to boast about what they have done, and hence this is like a fact check that the organization or the hiring company is doing for you. Let us now try to understand why are behavioral interviews so important. If you've already not got that from the previous slide. Well, yes, behavioral interviews play a very important role in any hiring process. And when I say any hiring process, that means it is not limited to only product management. You would have a behavioral interviews as a vital piece of the hiring process in a lot of different roles as well. Be it engineering, be it data related role or be it marketing related role because that's what you're doing when you're on the job. You're working with real life challenges, you're facing different situations and that's what adds to your experience and makes you a better professional in your work life. The interviewer is trying to assess your practical experience instead of your theoretical knowledge. The interviewer does not want to know if you know all the formulae, if you know all the metrics, the interviewer wants to know is how you have implemented it. It moves away from a lot of non consequential interview rounds. For example, the one that I never really liked was the guesstimate type of interview questions. Well, it does not really add a lot of value to the company that I'm applying for. So let's assume I'm applying to an Amazon or Google and the question that is asked is how many pizzas are delivered in the city of New York every day. Now that I agree that it does help showcase your analytical skills, but I don't think the kind of problem that you're solving is a very relevant problem. Hence organizations have moved these types of analytical questions to something which is more real and which is more specific to the product that you're applying for. So hence it allows organizations to move away from non consequential interview rounds. Hiring is an expensive activity. When a new candidate is hired, it's not only the investment that the companies bring in the entire hiring process, it goes beyond that. When someone new joins in, there's a certain time, there's a certain pull off period which is involved where the candidate is onboarded and you do not really get on to the job from day one. You need to be onboarded, you need to learn how the company functions, you need to understand the product. There is an investment even after the candidate is hired. Hence organizations are ready to commit a type one error rather than commit a type two error. Well what's a type one error? A type one error may be in this case when the company loses out on a deserving candidate. So they are ready, let's say out of hundreds of deserving candidates, they are ready to let go of maybe 90% of those candidates. But what they're not ready to do is they're not ready to hire a bad candidate. So out of 100, if 15 candidates are boarded and if they do not hire anyone, they are okay with that. But if out of the five candidates they hired, if one or two are not up to the mark, that's an error that they want to avoid. So hence they are ready to sacrifice good candidates but they're not ready to hire candidates who they may seem not up to the mark. It's an art that can be mastered through practice. Behavioral interviews are not that difficult and that's what we're going to learn today. To just give you an understanding, the kind of questions that would come, you're already aware about that. It's just how well you prepare for it and how good your narration is of the way you've behaved in your previous experience. That's what makes all the difference. And finally, as I've said, candidates are ready to commit a tight one error. So there will always be companies who would make a mistake, who would commit an error of not hiring deserving candidates. And so you don't have to beat yourself up. It's on the company and they probably just lost a very good candidate and it's not the end of the world. Okay, now let's look at the preparation. So I have a stepwise preparation in place which I have also used in the past. It's a five step process. Coming to the first step is the question bank. I call this step as the question bank. Now what it does is it allows what the step demands is that you create a repository of questions, maybe in an Excel or on Google Sheet of all the questions that you have come across in your experience. It allows you to go deeper into your career history and start detailing your story in a star format. Before we get into that, let me first actually tell you about the question, about why should we have this question back? Well, what the question bank does is it allows you to be unsurprised. If that's a word, it allows you to be unsurprised when a question comes up. As I said, this is an interview format where you probably know all the questions that can come up. And trust me, there are about, I would say, 10-15 questions which can be asked to you in different manner. Hence, it is always a good practice to make sure you have a list of all the questions that you've come across in your career. Product management is an increasingly popular role and it is a very critical and strategic role for an organization. And hence, the kind of questions would be around the strategy of things. Make sure what's important over here is make sure that you've actually done what you're saying. Do not lie in an interview. Yes, you need to say it in a particular manner, but that does not mean that you're lying about anything or your falsifying facts while presenting it in the interview. And I always say this, a PM interview or product management interview is not a one month or a six month preparation. It's a continuous preparation, it's a rigorous preparation. Even when you're not looking for a change or when you're not looking for an opportunity, it's an ongoing process. Every day on your job, you are actually preparing for it, even though you do not know, but you should always have this thing in your mind that when I'm working on something, I'm actually preparing for a future interview and hence, it is a very rigorous exercise. So, yes, now coming back to the steps, first thing is create a repository. Now, I have actually created a repository of questions and I will share the link for the repository in the comments after this webinar. What the repository does is it allows you to know all the questions beforehand that can come. Now, in an exam, if you know the questions, you can be better prepared. Well, this is definitely not cheating, but it's just your preparation. This is what the syllabus for the exam is. What you're doing is you're creating your own syllabus. So gather as many questions as possible, maybe in your previous interviews or something that you come across on the internet. Or if one of your colleagues has told you about a question, just make sure you have all the questions there in one place. Once you have that, you need to go deep into your career history and start detailing out your story in the star format. Yes, this is a story. It's a story where you are the protagonist and you have to narrate it in a particular manner, which is the star format. For those of you who do not know, the star format starts, stands for situation, task, action, and eventually what is the result that you managed to deliver out of what you did in this particular situation. The situation would be a quick description of what the project or initiative was about. The task is what you did or what you were supposed to do, what your responsibility in that particular situation was. The action is the things that you would write, the changes that you made. For example, if you came up with a solution for a particular problem, how did you come up with the solution? What did you do to implement that solution? Did you do an ABE test? Did you run through it? Did you do any kind of a user research on that? That's what you have to showcase. And finally, the result. This is really important. The make or break of these particular questions is what is the impact that you created. Document your big achievements in a document. What this means is in your day-to-day job as a product manager or in any role that you are actually in, even if you're trying to transition into product management, what you should do is every big achievement that you have done in your present job, start documenting that. So if you launched a new feature, if you successfully conducted an ABE test, start making a note out of this. Once you've made a note out of this and it's really important that you make a note out of this because you tend to forget this minor details as things progress. So maybe after a couple of years, you might not remember what you did back then, but it will be very crucial for this interview. Hence, note on all the details. How did you help? Whom did you help? What were the numbers associated with it? And this is the preparation that you're doing for a possible interview in the future. Once you have all the details in place, keep tweaking the answer till the time you have the best version of that answer. When I say keep tweaking the answer, what I mean is start writing it in the star format with the situation, the task, action and result. And finally, always and always include numbers in the results. You could include numbers, you could include dollar values, you could include metrics in your stories to end it. Now, this could be anything like I increase the revenue of the product from the company by X dollars. I onboarded new clients on the platform or it would also be I improve the MAU that is the monthly active users on the platform by so and so possibly. So always make sure that you have numbers at the end and this will make sure that you make an impact with the interviewer. So just to give you an idea, this is the question back that I prepared. I maintain this Excel where you have the questions on one side and then you start formulating your answers. So this is a repository of all the questions that I have come across in my experience. And as I've said, I will have the link of this repository in the comments after the webinar. Cool. Now, let's look at an example question, example behavioral question to understand how to answer this question. The question over here is, let me tell you, tell me about the time when you made a short term sacrifice for a long term goal. So this is the question, assuming this is the question that the interviewer is asking me. Now, I as a candidate, how would I present this? So the first thing is I will start with the situation. And now for the situation, you have to give the interviewer a bit of a background about what the situation was and what was the kind of challenge that you're facing. So I start off like this. Let me tell you about a time when we acquired a European company and a CEO and sales team wanted to rush with the integrations so that we acquire new customers. And then you give a bit more information about the situation that you were in. So while I was with, you can name the company from your previous experience or did you acquire the company and why was this being done? So in order to attract European customers, sales team wanted to present a strong integration. So this was basically to acquire new customers on the platform. What was my task? How am I relevant in the story? So I was tasked with being in charge of integrations because of my past integration experience. So you can say I was the integration product manager where integration was something that I looked after. I was supposed to work with both the European and the engineering team to understand the product and scope out the integration and prepare a working demo for all the clients. So this is what my, this is what the task was, this is what was expected out of me. And then finally, how did I approach it? What are the actions that I took? So when I started with the scoping work, I realized that there's a lot of work involved. I'm bringing a story. So there's a start to the story. There is a description of the story and then this is the actual story where the action is happening. So I speak about the problems that I had and what are the actions that I do. So I realized that there were a lot of work involved and maybe it was not possible to deliver in time with respect to integration. Even if I look at an MVP, there were different things that I had to do. So I had to support European currencies. I had to support localization of different European languages. There was European number format, which is different from the number format which is used in other parts of the globe. Now there was SSO, which was supposed to be done. So I anticipated a lot of work and I took an estimate from the engineering team for bare minimum integration work. The timelines went beyond the demo date. At that point, what my sales team wanted me to do was it wanted me to cut corners and be ready for a demo within the timeline. And I realized that this would really hamper the quality of the product and would set a bad precedent for the rest of the European clients. It also meant that I would be pushing the engineering team unnecessarily and I knew this would result in bad quality product. Now what I did over a year was the short term sacrifice was that I was ready to let go of the immediate European client with whom the supposed demo was going to happen. Whereas the long term goal was I wanted to present a good product. I wanted to present a good experience for future European customers. What could have happened in this case was if the first demo was not good if it did not go well and I knew the product was not ready for a demo it might have led to bad referrals in the market as well. Hence that's a judgment that's an analytical call that I made in this situation. Finally, you gave out the result. What was the result? The result was that I convinced the sales team that we should either delay the demo or go for the meeting without a full-fledged integration. Now what I'm doing over a year is I'm giving the sales team a kind of choice and I'm involving them in the decision-making so that is also showing that you are a collaborative product manager. I offered to give the meeting in such a scenario give the meeting, give the demo in such a scenario and in the end we did not get the client obviously because we were not ready with it. However, the string of European customers that we got because of our successful integration proved that quality should never be compromised for short term and that's how you can end the answer by linking it back to the question originally which was us. Keep in mind that this should not go more than 2-5 minutes make sure that this is not a monologue keep checking in with the interview if the interview is following or if the interviewer needs any more clarity on any particular point so small pauses in this case really helps make eye contact with the interviewer and just try to gauge if the interviewer is understanding or if there are any questions that you or she might have and just do not go very fast at the same time don't take a lot of time. The next one is tell me something about yourself boy can it get any more cliched than this particular question now this in most cases will be the first question that you are asked in an interview it can be asked in a lot of different ways as well so tell me something which is not on your resume or can you talk about your background and what do you do currently it can be asked in different format but it basically means the same thing now since it's a question which in 95% of the cases would be asked as the first question it's a crime to be unprepared don't commit the rookie mistake of going unprepared on this and assuming that he's just asking about me so I can tell them about there is a certain way to answer this you need to be prepared if you want to make the maximum impact so not be unprepared for this you need to have a very strong elevator pitch in this case many companies also call this as ice breaker question because it's supposed to break the ice between the candidate and the interviewer it's supposed to loosen things up and you should also do the same with the interviewer also grab their attention and stand out from the crowd well my steps for this particular interview question is you start with the most recent roles and go in reverse chronology order because that's what the interviewer is looking for interviewers would generally look at the last company that you've worked for and in most cases they would expect you to go in the reverse order so start with the most recent role and go in the reverse chronology order you don't have to see all the companies which assumption of what are the companies that you want to talk about if it's a company which has made a big impact sure you definitely need to bring that out you can then talk about the role and the company name as I said and any major achievement that you have had with this organization you can also give a description of the company if it's a company which is not very well known you can also tell them that hey I work for company ABC and this is what the product was you do want the interview to be in the dark as to what are the kind of products that you worked on in the past also make sure that if it's a competitor company you might want to include that in it because companies generally want to have that competitive analysis so you might be a good candidate in that case moving on you can add on the line about your education or qualifications including any kind of certification which are relevant to this position one thing I generally follow is I also add a personal touch at the end this could be anything about your hobbies or any interesting fact about yourself what it does is interviewers interview a lot of candidates and it's very difficult to remember all of them if you add a personal touch it leaves an impression in the mind of the user and they start associating you with that particular characteristic for example if you play the flute so you can say hey and also in my spare time I play the flute and I'm a very good flute singer that might inculcate some interest in the interview and there would be a better equal value for you when the evaluation is happening finally the icing on the cake is you tell the interview what makes you a good fit for that role so for example it can end with something like this and that is the reason I feel I am a good fit for this particular role that's how you can end it and where will you get the lines for this when you can pick it up from the job description from where you have applied and this would also help out because the job description would most likely be written by someone in the interviewing panel so if you justify it, if you tell them this is why I am a good candidate it would leave a good impression in the interviewer's mind again as an example we can talk about something myself so start off with thanking the interviewer for this opportunity thank you XYZ for this opportunity start off with your name I have product management experience of 7 years so if this is something that you want to highlight you can say that these are the number of years of experience that you have in product management in my most recent role as a senior product manager at Conestron On Demand over here I really want to highlight that it's a NASDAQ listed company which means it's a big company it's not a small company and I am also telling them what it is about employee management software products what was I doing in Conestron so I was enabling the entry into a $500 million PXP industry now $500 million is a number so as soon as you say numbers you get all the years so try to put in some numbers of what the industry is all about I was leading the discovery, design, definition and delivery of two components on the platform now if you see this covers most of the things product managers should be doing they should be discovering and identifying the problem they should be designing and building it defining it from the engineering team and finally delivering the feature I'm also involved in user research competitive analysis running an early adopter program alongside guiding my engineering team now a lot of these keywords are something that you can get from the job description itself and we are looking for someone who is an expert in user research competitive analysis you can include them over here but make sure that you have actually done that because you will need to provide instances of how you showcase these skills in the past I worked with EdCast an eLearning startup where I scaled government of India's future skills prime initiative to a million users within a year now the reason I wanted to give one more example of the company that I worked for I've made an impact on future skills prime where in I we were managed we were able to scale it to a million users within a year which according to me is a big achievement and I want to talk about it you talk about your education background so I'm an engineering graduate and management postgraduate CSPO certification because it is relevant I talk about that as well and finally give a personal touch so apart from work like blogs and product management you know this is also an interesting way interesting way in which you can link your hobbies to the characteristics of a product manager right so and this is not made up this is something that I actually like and what is important is how you narrate it so I write articles and blogs and product management this allows me to improve my storytelling and also improve my knowledge now these are two things like product management storytelling and keeping yourself updated with the latest happenings in the industry I consider myself as a lifelong learner I'm always learning something new I've been learning German for the past one year and I've recently started rifle shooting now this is something which will get a lot of attention so people have asked me as well here rifle shooting can you tell me more about it so that also allows you to build a rapport with the interviewer now finally I see myself as an intentional product manager not an accidental one this is to showcase my keen interest in product management and I think my experience in solving complex problems and working on 4D makes me a good fit for this work now this again can be from the job description and you can sum it up by saying how for that particular position what you've done in the past is relevant and why you should be hired the next one is keywords keywords are important they're very important why people don't like taking interviews because it's not a part of their day-to-day activities it's an add-on responsibility and it's not something very enjoyable that they would like to do they would rather work on their product and they would rather build new things but it's a necessary evil that has to go through in such a case you might only be getting half their attention when you're talking and hence keywords are really important it's humanly impossible to remember everything that is being said in an interview hence you try to give in keywords because what the interviewer will remember are the keywords that you've mentioned so you get all the years when you utter the right keywords keywords depend on the discussion and the interviewer you need to use the right keywords for the right audience for example if it's an interview with an engineering lead and you were tested on collaborative product management then you know keywords like pushback or iterative are the keywords that you should focus on so try to bring these in your conversation if you're interviewing for around analytical thinking and you're interviewing for someone on the principle of analytical thinking things like trade-off are the ones that will make the right impact and you will get all the years from the interviewer keywords help only when the storyline is good now please bear this in mind they would help only if the story that you're narrating in the behavioral interview has a good narration has a good story is something really impactful otherwise simply uttering keywords will not really help you and you cannot fold the interviewer in this case the fourth one is the questions at the end now in a typical interview the format of interview is as follows you start off with an introduction which is tell me something about yourself when both the parties talk about themselves then there is the two answer of the questions which are asked by the interview and you're giving the answers and finally usually the last 15 to 10 minutes are reserved for questions from the interviewer which is the candidate in this case now don't assume that just because you've been given the opportunity to ask the question your interview is full well that's not the case you're still being judged you're still being judged for the quality of questions that you're asking for the attentiveness that you showcase in the interview always make sure that you customize your questions based on the interviewer again for example if you're someone at a very senior level you can ask questions about the vision of the product or the company if you're interviewing with the hiring manager you can ask them as to how what are the what is it that we take to succeed under that particular person or what are the short term goals which are required to succeed in his or her team whereas if your interview round is within engineering aid you can ask questions about engineering or the kind of development practices that are followed or the technology stack which is there which is used by the engineering team so these are the kind of questions that you are asked at the end and this does have an impact you're still being judged even though you are asking the question finally mock interviews are serious business product management interviews are serious business there are many paid services that conduct mock interviews and provide feedback what happens in a mock interview is that a seasoned product manager will give you valuable feedback and point out your mistakes if you offer some if you offer a service like this what I recommend is I definitely recommend mock appearing for the actual big one so if you have an interview with the company of your dreams it is highly recommended that you at least have 10 to 15 mock interviews before that you can also offer peer to peer mock interviews there are many platforms again which do the service how they work is if you as a candidate I mean two candidates who are preparing for let's say product management roles or any other role as well can get together for where you can interview the person for half an hour and the person interviews for half an hour and then you exchange feedback on how they perform many a times when you are talking when you are practicing yourself you are not self critical and that's when mock interviews really help in getting over those barriers how did the mock interviews help me well it gave me real time feedback from a neutral point of view who has not met me who does not know me is giving me feedback and that's how the actual interview scenario will also be it allows you to learn from peers who are preparing so you can actually see someone interviewing and how they perform in an interview and you can actually take some of the trades that are helpful for you it allows you to time yourself as I said in earlier do not extend beyond 2 to 5 minutes for that particular question so what it does it also allows you to know and this is the feedback that we get from the one who you are having a mock interview with is how long did you take to give the answer for that and also break some false assumptions about yourself when you might think that the story is really powerful but it is always helpful to make sense to them for example in my case I was initially from an edtech background and when I was talking about my achievements in edtech to someone who is not from edtech it did not make a lot of sense to them I was using a lot of terminologies which was alien and hence I had to improvise on that when I also made sure that if I am telling something which is not known what terminology means so that is what mock interviews does it allows you to have a very neutral perspective of things it also gives you some constructive feedback again taking my example one of the constructive feedbacks that I got was I use a lot of fillers when I am giving interviews so things like also these are all fillers since then I have been really conscious about not using a lot of fillers when I am talking especially in an interview these were the five steps as I mentioned that really helped me in preparing for behavioral interviews for product management and finally what I would say is consistency and discipline it is really important to be consistent and disciplined in your preparation start making a list of all the questions that you come across and these questions can be asked in different ways for example one question and you need to answer it for the questions that you have prepared in a different way example could be the question is tell me about a time when you showcased high risk high reward now let's say if this is a new question for which you have not really practised or for a scenario that you do not have you can proceed like this you can always ask the interview is it okay if I talk about my biggest product management achievement and also talk about the pitfalls that I encountered on the way now it is a similar question but you have just changed the wording and in most likelihood the interview will allow you to answer this question so you give up the answer that you have for the situation you have and you always conclude the answer where you say and this is when I showcase high risk high reward kind of behaviour pre-interview research is really important research about the company and the interview beforehand companies might have certain principles for example Amazon has the 40 leadership principles and the behavioural interviews are around that some company might have something else that they focus on so you should use a lot of resources which are available on the internet talk to people on LinkedIn who are working for that organisation check out the interview process on Glassdoor a lot of things that you can do which forms as the pre-interview research now another very common question in this case would be why do you want to work for that company and in that case the pre-interview research really helps you can always split it into three points I want to work for this company for so and so reasons so the first one could be because of what the company is into and what the mission of the company is the second one could be how you like the product and how your interest is in that domain and the third one could be something which is very specific to the company culture I remember for one of the companies I actually did mention that I went to your website and I noticed that you have employees from sort of distinguished I mean not distinguished but from various backgrounds from people of different races people of different colours and that's what I really like that you are such a multicultural organisation so that does two things that is a very genuine reply that you are giving it is not a made up thing and it also tells the interview that you have done the research you have gone to the website and you have always helped and you know avoid cliched answers while answering this question have the confidence and don't lose hope interviews can be stressful I agree what you need to do is keep come and keep trying and you will surely get it at the end and always remember if you are not hired the company is making changes being cautious and what you need to do is you need to prepare better for the next time and finally customise focus on the question bank customise the structure of the stories remain the same you need to answer it in the star form at the situation remain the same but customise the answer for every interview the way you want to portray it would differ you might have the way you present it the way you customise it for every question will change so it could either be by changing the question slightly and linking it back to the original question or presenting it in a different manner so that's really important that you customise and for that the excellent or the question bank comes in really handy because you know all the questions and you would also know that fit situation fits into you would be surprised to know that one situation can fit or can fit into multiple questions that are asked so that can only be mastered through a lot of practice and finally remember that a job interview is not a test of your knowledge but it's your ability to use it at the right time and that just summarises behavioural interviews well that was my time thank you so much everyone for being a part of this for any question for anything for any behavioural interview tips you can always get in touch with me on LinkedIn gives my LinkedIn and I will see you soon bye