Creating Your Project Retrospective

Now that you've chosen your stories, it's time to add back detail and prep for follow-up questions.

Step 1: Elaborate

For each of your three projects, you've probably got a few sentences recorded in your story bank. You want to really flesh this out - remember, at minimum, you're likely to spend an hour talking this project through. It's important to add details in several dimensions: context (business goals and justifications for this project), technical details, people management issues, stakeholder communication, results, and personal reflection.

Let's look at each of these.

Tip: Be sure to capture team considerations during every step. They're the focus.

Context

Spend a lot of time here. It may seem tedious, but start at the very beginning. Why does your company exist? Who are your customers? How does your group serve them? What was the environment like when you began this project? Was it a long slog, chipping away at something innovative? Or were you responding to an all-hands-on-deck competitive emergency? Capture the emotion as well as the situational details. You'll talk heavily about your team throughout, so be sure you give enough contextual detail about your group, their capabilities, workload, and mindset going into the project.

Technical detail

Capture the technical context as well. Were you working with or building a new infrastructure, or upgrading something complex? What were your resource constraints (and why?) As always when talking tech in EM interviews, discuss ideals, edge cases, and trade-offs. Make sure you can logically back up all your decisions when pressed.

People management

You should already have some details written down about your team (they're part of the context, and your most important resource!), but take some time to consider both individual and team hurdles and wins. Did you have to coach an engineer through a task that was new? Was another engineer serving as tech lead as part of her career growth plan? Were there conflicts, disagreements, or areas of confusion where you had to mediate? Be sure as well to record the overall morale of the team at different points during the project, and think through what you did you maintain or raise it when necessary.

Stakeholders

A good, meaty project likely involved collaboration with multiple groups and possibly communication with higher-ups. Put yourself in the shoes of major project stakeholders and record their positions (motivations, decisions, resistance) throughout. Were there disagreements? Did you have to persuade anyone to see things from your perspective? Did you have to brainstorm, iterate, and change direction as a group? Finally, how did stakeholders view the outcome of the project?

Results

What was the outcome of the project? Did you achieve your goals? How about timeline/budgets? How did users ultimately feel about your work? If you had to give formal presentation, how was it received? What was the outcome for your team members? Were there promotions, or changes in workflow? Was everyone satisfied? Be sure to capture as many quantitative details as you can to stress the impact of what you did.

Personal reflections

Even after massive success, a good manager always reflects on what could have gone differently and where to improve next time. If there were mistakes, make sure you can make a reasonable case for why they occurred and how they could be mitigated next time. Additionally, the best managers are constantly refactoring their management philosophies based on experience. Reflect on whether your overall outlook to management changed as a result of this project. If not, why not?

Step 2: Translate

Use the STAR Framework to maximize impact and memorability.

Do's and Don't's

• Do use "we" rather than I language throughout.
• Don't feel restricted by the STAR framework, having just recorded such an all-encompassing document. Interviewers will ask plenty of follow-ups!
• Do take several passes at the end of this process to add numbers wherever possible. Take every opportunity to quantify impact. This will also help if interviewers ask hypothetical questions where you have to extrapolate.
• Don't get too carried away if the actual interview is more conversational than you've prepared. It's great that you're getting along with your interviewer, but you still need to be sure to supply them with enough detail to be able to vouch for you during the hiring discussion.