Cracking the Behavioral Interview: Build up your Interview Confidence with a Wins Warmup
A two-step tool for building up your confidence so that you can shine in interviews
I was doing a series of interview coaching calls (in preparation for this series on behavioral interviews), and I was struck by a mystery.
Many of the calls went really well. People shared a project they were proud of, I probed, flagged what sounded unimpressive, and we brainstormed the details that best highlighted their skills.
But some calls fell flat. They got defensive, fixated on surface-level issues, and tried to steer us to fit their current story into a framework. It felt like they were avoiding the real substance of their experiences and just looking to check boxes.
Softening the feedback didn’t help. Following their lead didn’t either. I couldn’t understand what was different about the calls that went poorly. Then I started asking for two confidence ratings before the call: one for doing the job, one for interviewing.
That was the explanation. If they believed they could do the job, we could shape great answers no matter how low their interview confidence. But people who worried about the job were afraid to dig into their stories, so we couldn’t unearth the gems that I knew were there.
Was there anything I could do for less confident people? I brainstormed ideas with chatGPT, and that’s how I came up with the Wins Warmup, a quick exercise that became a beta-workshop hit.
Wins Warmup reminds people what they’re amazing at. Even if their current job isn’t a fit, there’s something they’d absolutely crush. Once that confidence clicks, the interview follows.
Wins Warmup
There’s 2 steps to the wins warmup:
Jot down wins
Get hyped up — for each win, have someone (friend, coach, AI) highlight the hidden PM skills
Jot down wins
Think of 3 wins - times when something got better because of you. They can be big or small. This could be a bug fix, a customer you delighted, a problem you solved, an approach you drove alignment on, a product launch. You can pick the first things that pop into your head, it’s just a warmup.
Get hyped up
For each win, get hyped up and really bask in the skills, values, and competencies you showed. Have a friend or coach highlight the hidden career skills that contributed to the win. Or use this custom GPT, Wins Warmup. You’ll find that even small accomplishments can illustrate several valuable competencies.
Examples
Let me show you how this works in practice.
Unblocked delivery of an ML platform that doubled throughput
This shows a few different skills. You must have had strong technical skills. You’re showing the ability to overcome obstacles, which is really important for delivering excellent execution. I bet you’ll have lots of great nuggets to talk about if you use this as a story.
Came up with a new feature idea that boosted conversion by 30%.
Thirty percent is a huge win. What will make this story powerful when you tell it is how you came up with the idea. There’s a few ways that ideas like this can happen, and each shows off a different skill.
One way is that you were doing the work to watch people and you paid close attention to them. Then you dug in to really understand what was going on. That shows user focus. Another way is that you've been staying on top of technology and on top of new products which shows you're the subject matter expert on good product design.
A lot of these ideas come from our past experience. They come from the years of experience that we've built up and the values that we've started to accumulate as we've done our job for a long time. There are principles that we start to build up and strategies that we start to put together. These things we’ve learned from our experience are core to what seniority means.
When you came up with a great idea, we can elevate that to not just be a story about “One time I came up with a good idea,” but rather, “You want to hire me because if you hire me, you get all of my years of experience and all of my seniority and all of my values and principles and strategic thinking.”
Launched a reporting system from scratch despite ambiguous requirements from managers who just wanted a static platform for all teams
I love this example because it's really showing the contrast. The managers had one direction in mind, but you realized there was a better way. You dug in, looked at costs and benefits, and understood the needs of different teams. That’s showing autonomy and strategy. That contrast makes your story really strong.
The ambiguous requirements are also nice because dealing with tricky stakeholders and unclear requirements is a key skill. I bet that there’s something in the way you dug into those requirements that was really good — something that showed your skills, where someone less skilled might have thrown their hands up.
Retained a strategic enterprise customer by building a custom GPT during a company-wide feature freeze; then landed 10 more customers.
This shows something I love seeing in senior candidates — flexing the processes.
It’s not that senior PMs ignore the formal process, but they have that higher level of judgment to know when it’s a good idea to push through, how to push through, and how to use their connections in the company to make things happen.
There are a lot of senior skills that go into work like that. And the connection to strategy—this was a strategic enterprise customer—you understood the company strategy and what was important.
And, you did something that didn’t just help one customer, but helped ten. That’s the kind of skill a lot of B2B enterprise companies look for: someone who can balance solving one customer's need with building products that address a whole market.
Dug into regulatory & treasury topics to enable next-day payouts, differentiating us from competitors.
When I think about subject matter expertise for product managers, this is really it. You don’t just show up and say, "Okay, what exists?" You're like, “Wait a second, I think there’s an opportunity here.”
Getting into regulatory and treasury topics—not being afraid to do difficult, boring work to get the best results for customers, that’s a really nice demonstration of your values.
This also sounds like a story that might demonstrate North Star vision: instead of just make things incrementally better, can we figure out what the ideal situation would be and work backwards from there?
Reinvigorated a declining product category by using data to find profitable segments and aligning roadmap with marketing & merchandising
This is a really nice example of analytical skill — digging into numbers to identify the customer segment, not just relying on anecdotes.
You mention aligning the roadmap with marketing and merchandising. That could be surface-level, or it could be really deep. The details you use here can show how you've learned to do great product over time.
This story has an opportunity for you to teach me about merchandising, because I’ve never worked in merchandising before. So this has a chance to show off your expertise and your ability to communicate and teach someone something new.
Why it works
Interviewers are trying to figure out if they can trust you to do the job. When you’re feeling really confident in yourself, the interviewer can feel it too. And on the flip side, if you’re not sure that you can do the job, they won’t be either.
When you ground yourself in your skills and hype yourself up, you’re in a great mindset to answer questions about your experience.
A question like “Tell me about a failure” stops feeling like a threat, and starts feeling like an opportunity to talk about a project that did not go the way you wanted and you were still able to turn it around, learn a lot, and use it as the basis for future wins.
When you’re feeling confident, you’ll tell better stories and have more fun interviewing.
Give it a try
Go to Wins Warmup and give it a try today.
Got any other tricks for building up your confidence before an interview? Share it in the comments!