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Behavioral Interviews: Creating Your Story Bank

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Here's the secret to preparing for your upcoming behavioral interview: create a story bank.

What's a story bank? A story bank is a list of 5-10 stories that you know well and can speak easily about for your upcoming interview. While you can't anticipate the exact question an interviewer may ask, you can at least have a few stories in your pocket to share that best fits the question being asked.

When crafting your story bank, be sure to pick examples that are diverse. This could be based on the company it's with, the size of the team, the type of problem, or even the emotional sentiment of the story (e.g. preparing for a weakness-based question).

Ultimately, the best stories are ones that, when you tell them, you feel confident and knowledgeable about. Thus, we recommend picking stories that are vivid and clear in your mind, and ones that you'd be happy to answer follow-up questions about.

Some of the most common questions that you'll want to "stress test" your story bank against are:

  • What's your best strength?
  • What's your biggest weakness?
  • Explain a time you managed conflict.
  • Explain a time you learned a valuable lesson.
  • Tell me about a time you had to adapt.
  • Tell me about a time where you made the wrong decision.

For instance, here's an example of a few ideas for a story bank that you might write up for a TPM interview:

  • When I launched a new product and crashed the site, but then rapidly followed up with the SRE and engineering teams to resolve the issue and bring the site back online in 10 minutes. I wrote up a postmortem that then prevented several issues in the future.
  • When I created a new program in our team that no one was a fan of, but by talking to each team member individually, I found a way to customize and tailor the program and it got widespread adoption.
  • When one of my teammates was about to get fired for not being productive and shipping code in time, I sat down with him to discuss life, and realized a few personal issues that they had, and encouraged them to take some time off. The engineer is now happily still employed at the company.

Ultimately, we can't write your stories for you - but believe in yourself! Everyone has stories worth telling. One simple tactic we find helpful is practicing saying the stories out loud - so try it now! Take out an audio recording device and record yourself answering the question "Tell me about a time you managed conflict."

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