Lesson: Acing behavioral and leadership and drive questions. In this lesson, you will learn how to ace behavioral and leadership and drive questions. Behavioral questions, which Facebook calls leadership and drive questions, are popular because interviewers want to get to know you. Aside from all the skills that you can do as a product manager, working together often requires one to understand how you might act or behave or take action in certain situations. These questions also allow non-PMs, such as students and other professionals who want to become PMs, an opportunity to explain their unique experiences. Your interviewers expect you to answer behavioral questions using the STAR format. STAR stands for situation, what was happening with your industry, company, team, product, or customer? Task, what were all the things that you could do? What did you decide to do, why? Here, you want to show some agency, not someone else told me to do something and so I did it. Action, what did you do? What challenges you encountered, and how did you overcome them? And finally result, including metrics and the effect or your action on the situation. Here are three examples of behavioral questions. Tell me about a time when you had a conflict with a boss or coworker. Which Amazon leadership principle do you relate to the most? And three, how do you know it's worth your time to solve a particular problem? Notice that none of these questions ask you to use the STAR format. However, there is an implicit expectation that you use the STAR format or another framework to organize your thoughts so that it is easy to follow and very clear to your interviewer. Now, I'm going to show you one of two companion apps we've built specifically for this course. This is an MVP of an app that displays a sample of hundreds of PM interview questions asked by Amazon, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft. If you'd like a source of ready-to-go interview questions, you're welcome to use it throughout the rest of this course. If you want a new set of questions, simply scroll down to the bottom of the page and click the button. Let's take a look and use it to give me a random behavioral question. So this behavioral question says, tell me about a time you have a disagreement with technical stakeholder, and how did you go about reconciling that disagreement? Well, I'd first off say, that's a great question. Let me share with you an example of a compromise conversation that I had with my head of engineering. The situation was, when I was building my last feature, we had a discussion of what would constitute the MVP, so we could launch it on time and which achieved the most buzz. So that was the situation. Now the task, as the lead product manager for that specific feature, I was the one responsible for defining all of the most critical requirements. And for also making the final call on which requirements were part of or not part of the MVP. Which requirements were part of v2 after the MVP, and which requirements were too far off in the distance to not even make it to a v3. Now, this was part of a conversation that I needed to have with my engineering counterpart to ensure that we were on the same page about scope, about timeline so that we could all converge on a single launch date. The issue here was, he wanted to make sure that he had enough time for unit testing, manual testing, as well as security sign-off from overall Amazon in order to make the launch date. From my perspective, of course as a PM, right, you want the world. You want to make sure that that product has the best and most comprehensive set of features possible. However, we definitely needed to compromise on the launch date and what those set of requirements might be. So the action I took from a PM perspective was that I interviewed roughly 30 different customers on what their desired MVP list would be, and what would get them excited about this feature. After talking to all 30 customers, I came up with a spreadsheet, and I ranked all of their top requirements, and I made a call around the cut line. Once we achieved at that decision, then I went back to my engineering counterpart to look at how long it would take him in the number of sprints to achieve that set of requirements. We were finally able to converge on a date. And it also made him happy that we're able to build in some time for him to do all the manual testing as well as operations. And to ensure that the feature worked as it should, both on the console, as well as the command line, and the SDK. Result was we were able to launch on time. And I'm super excited to report that less than 12 hours after launch, we're able to get close to 1,000 AWS accounts using that feature in less than 12 hours. So that is a detailed example of how you might go about answering that question using the STAR format. Also, my tips for if a question catches you off guard, try to relate it to your past attempts to delight customers. That's the common denominator across many of these companies, and it can be a good fallback topic. For our see one, do one, teach one, turn on your webcam, start a recording, and try your own behavioral interview question. You can use a PM interview questions app or your own research for your behavioral interview question. I'll include the link to our app here, since this URL might change as we push to production. After you finish answering, rewatch your recording with this rubric I'm about to give you. Why would you rewatch yourself? Well, because rewatching yourself and your performance creates an OODA loop of self feedback. And you can accurately evaluate where you excelled based on this rubric. My recommendation for how you get good at answering behavioral interview questions is to sit down with your resume, think about everything you've accomplished in the last few years, and write out as many stories as you can for each Amazon interview principle. Then, practice telling them to friends, in front of a mirror, or to your webcam. I did this when I interviewed for positions at Amazon. Plus your answers to Amazon's leadership principles are general purpose ,enough to answer behavioral questions at many other organizations. I've made a template for you here to fill out.
