Creating A Story Bank

The best way to prep for behavioral questions is to build a story bank, or a list of stories you know well and can speak easily to when prompted. You can’t anticipate the exact questions you’ll get, but prepping stories beforehand to adapt when asked will give you confidence, polish, and help avoid one of the biggest pitfalls in behavioral interviewing - rambling.

Here’s how to build one.

Learn Company Values

Organizational culture in tech is anchored by a set of company values.

For example, Google's include:

• Building belonging
• Expanding opportunity
• Protecting users
• Responding to crises
• Advancing sustainability

Read up on everything you can find to get a sense of what the company strives to offer the world - and what values it looks for in its employees.

Once you've got a feel, go one level deeper. Try to get a sense of how each value is embodied in day-to-day life at the company. Some great data points you might consider in addition to the company website include:

• The value propositions given for major products. Read the customer-facing material. How are they selling themselves?
• Annual reports/10-Ks
• Social media platforms (get a sense of the branding & company voice. Is it playful? formal?)
• Company review sites (Glassdoor, LinkedIn, etc.)
• Company blogs

Doing this research now will help you build a better story bank (coming up soon) and answer strategy questions, so don’t skimp on this!

If you have specific questions, leverage your network to see if you can find a current employee you have a connection with, or ask around the Exponent Slack community.

Choose Your Stories

Choose 5-10 experiences that 1) made an impression on you, and 2) reflect at least one company value.

These should be:

• Vivid. Choose something from the past two years if you can.
• Rich in detail. You’ll want to include numbers where possible, and lots of detail around stakeholder interests and issues.
• Diverse. If you’ve worked at startups and big companies, you might choose one from each. Stories with varying team size, type of problem, or even the emotional sentiment of the story (e.g. preparing for a weakness-based question) give you good coverage for followups.
• Exciting. Interviewers, like all humans, are wired for good storytelling. Dramatic stories make a bigger impact.
• Mapped to company values. As we discussed, you want to position yourself as a culture fit throughout.

Add Detail

Once you've chosen your stories it's time to fill in the details. You're probably able to talk through your strategic decisions and operational details without much practice, but remember - right now, your focus is on stakeholder management.

As soon as you’ve written the high-level context (problem, solution, and results), shift your focus to the "people" aspects. Begin by mapping out all the stakeholders involved in the story. It may be helpful to diagram stakeholders visually, like this:

It's helpful to specifically write down the who, what, when, where, and why, for each "act" in your story. Take care to record how this project or task fit into larger business goals and why. This context will help you answer follow-ups later. Were there disagreements? Were mistakes made? Were you in a leadership position? What did you learn?

Choose at least one story where things didn't go your way, and spend some time reflecting on how this situation changed the way you work. Since PMs rely on cross-functional partners to get things done, think about steps you took to understand disagreeing stakeholders and accommodate needs. Remember, the best stories are vivid and nuanced. You shouldn't be able to sum up the entire experience in a sentence or two.

To recap: choose 5-10 stories that you can describe in detail and that cast you in a good light when reflecting on the importance of cross-functional collaboration, leadership, and any relevant company values. Write them out in as much detail as you can, taking care to cover the context, problem, solution, and results, and anything important related to stakeholder concerns and team dynamics.

Test Out Your Story Bank

Browse through the interview question database filtering for behavioral questions asked at your target company. Using your story bank, spot-check a few to see if you'd feel comfortable answering them using the stories you've chosen. If so, you're ready to hone your answers! If not, you may want to choose a swap out a few, or simply write up more. We don't recommend writing up more than 10 or so stories in detail, because it will become hard to remember details and you may end up getting confused.

If you can't find company values for your target company, or you want to be prepared for all kinds of follow-up behavioral questions, we find that using Amazon's Leadership Principles is helpful for practicing behavioral questions, since they're comprehensive enough to account for most behavioral questions.

You can use this template as a guide.

Some interviewees like to write their stories directly in a spreadsheet like this, while others use it as a reference. Either way - give it a try, and when you're ready, consider sharing some of your answers with the Exponent community for feedback!

Rewrite Using STAR

If you've captured all the detail you can remember, you're probably looking at several messy pages. You'll need to tighten these up before your interview. We recommend rewriting using the STAR framework. STAR stands for:

• Situation
• Task
• Action
• Result

This format maximizes the information content of a short answer, which will make you more memorable and keep you from rambling. Because it's simple, it's also easy to practice.

Situation

Begin with context, taking care to emphasize team dynamics. What was your role? Were you an embedded team member or a consultant on a short-term assignment? What prompted the situation? What timeline were you working towards? Was the project an executive initiative (potentially high-pressure) or customer-led (collaborative opportunity)? Set up the situation so that your interviewer knows how to frame your past experiences.

Task

What was the specific problem you were facing? Try to incorporate insight into the interests of various stakeholders. Was the project high-visibility due to competitive pressure? Were there conflicts around resource allocation for growth initiatives? How did that affect the product team? Engineering? Design? How did they respond?

Action

Time for the nitty gritty. Challenging projects require creativity. Describe in detail how you arrived at your situation, emphasizing how you communicated and acted intentionally to bring about the best solution for everyone.

Results and Impact

Finally, cover results and impact. What were the positive outcomes? Use specific numbers, revenue, or tangible examples to highlight your point. In behavioral interviews, it's helpful to quickly summarize what you learned as well as what results you got. How did this experience shape your management-by-influence skills?