Building Your Solutions Architect Story Bank
Behavioral questions help hiring managers get to know you, and how you'll interact with customers. They're looking for core competencies like communication skills and team orientation as well as "fit" within a set of company-defined values.
You might be asking "how can I simultaneously showcase my soft skills, cultural fit, be authentic, and actually answer the question?" It'll be easy once you've built a story bank.
A story bank is a list of 5-10 stories that you can confidently speak to. We can't predict the exact questions you'll face, but because we know what's being assessed, we can work backward and map your experience to common questions. Preparing a story bank will give you both confidence and polish, and help you ace the interview.
Step 1: Research your target company
Before you even begin thinking through your own history, you need to understand your target company's culture. 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
Airbnb's are:
- Champion the mission
- Be a host
- Embrace the adventure
- Be a cereal entrepreneur
Don't stop there. Try to get a sense of how each value is embodied in day-to-day life at the company, especially in engineering. Some great data points you might consider in addition to the company website include:
- The value propositions given for major products. For solutions architects especially, read the customer-facing material on any cloud products. How are they selling themselves?
- Social media platforms (get a sense of the branding & company voice. Is it playful? formal?)
- Company review sites (Glassdoor, LinkedIn, etc.)
- Annual reports/10-Ks (often found on the company's "investor relations" page)
- Engineering blogs (look for your target company's engineering blog here.)
Once you feel you understand your company's culture and how that's reflected in the engineering org, it's time to begin your story bank.
Step 2: Choose your stories
Choose 5-10 experiences that made an impression on you, and that reflect at least one company value. Include success stories, but don't stop there. Make sure you have at least one story mapped to each company value.
Choose at least one story where things didn't go your way and a few where you learned significant lessons. Interviewers want to hear recent stories, so stick with stories two years old or less. The best stories are vivid and nuanced. You shouldn't be able to sum up the entire experience in a sentence or two.
Here are a few common questions where the story bank comes in handy. Use these as inspiration if you're having trouble choosing.
Do's and don't's
- Do choose recent stories.
- Don't choose anything where you can't remember details, even if it shows you in a good light.
- Do map your stories to company values.
- Don't choose anything you wouldn't feel comfortable talking about at length.
- Do include a mix of successes, failures, and lessons learned.
Step 3: Record the details — both technical and interpersonal
Once you've chosen your stories and mapped them to company values, it's time to fill in the details. You're probably able to talk through your technical decisions without much practice, but be sure to write down the "people" aspects as well. Were there disagreements? Were mistakes made? Were you in a leadership position?
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. Make sure your actions clearly show you embodying company values.
Do's and don't's
- Do consider all stakeholders. Customer interactions are key of course, but you'll work with an internal team too. If you worked with an account executive to define requirements based on an important customer discussion, or you collaborated with an engineer to come up with a complex proof-of-concept or demo, be sure to record those interactions.
Once you've built your story bank and mapped it to company values, it's time to practice. In the next lesson, we'll cover a framework to keep you focused.