The STAR Framework

How should you tackle the behavioral interview questions? What do you do when your interviewer asks you to respond with a personal example or a technical retrospective of how you solved a problem?

While Exponent doesn't recommend heavy use of frameworks, we often find the STAR framework to be helpful in a starting place for structuring your interview answers. The STAR framework is broken down into situation, task, action, result. We'll leave some notes on the end about how to think about using this framework, as well.

For this lesson, we'll be using a mock example of conflict between a TPM and an Engineer on whether or not a code refactor should be scheduled for an upcoming sprint.

Situation

Describe the situation, including the context of your role in the situation. This is a great way to set the stage and set up why this problem is worth talking about. Don't just say the basics, but also accentuate the ways in which this set up led to a challenging circumstance that you had to face.

Don't forget to also fill in the gaps with information or knowledge that the interviewer may not have - it's easy to slip back into acronyms or describe projects as if the interviewer was on the team!

In this situation, I was the lead TPM for a project where we were hoping to change the logo of the website. However, the engineer I was working with wanted to hold off on the logo change until they could implement a technical infrastructure that would allow us to easily update the logo in the future.

The context here is that the company was about to raise a Series B round from investors, and the CEO wanted to make sure the company looked in tip-top shape. Furthermore, some of our design teams were blocked on creating screenshots and other assets for our team until the logo change went live.

However, we had just recently dealt with a massive setback in our coding progress because of previous work that had been done sloppily, requiring our team to practically re-design our entire system architecture from the ground up.

Lastly, the engineer that I was working with was new to the team, but had been in the company for several years, and was one of the most senior engineers on the team.

Task

Feel free to skip this step if you feel like your situation step already described it (often TPMs will use a variant of STAR called SAR). That said, it usually helps to clarify what the specific task is at hand here, and your role in it. It's worth calling out here if you had specific benchmarks/goals you were meant to accomplish (e.g. 50% sales increase by Q4).

I had been tasked by my manager to handle the logo change project, and our goals were to be investor-ready in a 2 week timeline. I was also working with the engineering team to improve processes, after talking to one of our company's engineering managers on the recent coding setback.

Thus, I was in a cross-roads between the CEO and my manager's desire to ship the new logo (which blocked important investor-related design changes broadly) versus my partnership with engineering on improving processes for the team.

Action

Here's the meat of your interview! Tell us about how you tackled this problem. Be sure to highlight the skills that are relevant for the job. In fact, we recommend browsing through the job description at your upcoming role to understand what skills they're looking for, and bring out those specifically in the interview. For instance, Amazon publishes a set of leadership principles that you can take a look at here.

In the action section, we recommend not just talking about yourself, but also about your team - it's easy to think that you're supposed to highlight your role in the entire process, but it's also important to have humility and not overstate your role. Be confident while also crediting the larger team - after all, a TPM's role is about the team!

At first, I tried to ask the senior engineer to change his mind and ship the new logo, but I was quickly shut down.

I sat down to think through my options and made a list of options, and shared them with my manager for feedback. My options were, roughly, to 1) delay the launch of the logo 2) launch an intermediate version of the logo while investing more in engineering infrastructure 3) launch the logo and delay the engineering infrastructure. My intuition here told me that I should find a way to meet everyone's needs on the project.

My goal coming into this scenario was to be empathetic and listen. When talking to the design lead, I understood that their goals were to simply have the logo on one of the pages of the site, not updated everywhere on the site. When I chatted with the senior engineer, he seemed to be very intentional about investing in long-term solutions as opposed to hacky fixes for solutions that would cause more engineering work later. My manager relayed to me that the CEO cared mostly about the logo change insofar as it affected his ability to chat with investors and showcase our amazing product.

I then scheduled a meeting with our design lead and the senior engineer where the three of us brainstormed solutions.

The above answer does a great job of demonstrating thoughtfulness, empathy, and interpersonal skills. If the company had been intending to assess something different (e.g. "Explain a time you were analytical.") we could have chosen a different example.

Result

This is the final part of the interview answer, and the most satisfying! Tell your interviewer how the situation was resolved thanks to your help! Be sure to also voice any learnings or lessons from the experience.

At first, the conversation started out a bit heated, but I suggested that we all just re-state our goals for the upcoming project. After hearing the logo only had to be on one page of the site, the senior engineer came up with an idea of a short-term implementation for the logo change that could be reutilized into a larger system design change that the team was hoping to make. This worked for the designer, and the solution unblocked everyone on the team from progressing further.

We didn't need to escalate the issue to the CEO, and I learned a valuable lesson about leaning into empathy and understanding for disagreements first, before jumping to conclusions and directing a change in the team process.

Tips on using STAR Framework

There you have it! Now that you understand the core framework, we do NOT recommend rehearsing or reading through it. Instead, we recommend coming into the interviews with a few examples and situations, and then tailoring them to the interviewer in a natural, conversational tone. Running through STAR line-by-line sounds robotic and not authentic, which will be counterproductive to your success in the interview!