Cracking the Behavioral Interview: Which project should I talk about?

Let's figure out which stories to prepare

You walk into a breakfast buffet and grab a tray. Cereals is right by the entrance so you fill a small bowl. Then the muffins, delicious! Strawberries and yogurt? Sure, why not?

You’re just reaching the bacon and french toast when a waiter stops you and says, “That’s all for today,” gently guiding you back to your seat.

Wait!
French toast is your favorite food!
You wouldn’t have wasted space on cereal if you’d known there was a limit.

Interviews can be like that.

Before you know it, the interviews are over and you never even got to talk about your most impressive work.

Choosing the right project to talk about really matters. It’s a key part of how your answer is assessed.

You might honestly be proud of an easy side-project early in your career that helped a lot of people. But if that’s the story you tell, the interviewer might walk away thinking easy projects are all you’re capable of.

The right project to talk about depends on the type of question. Let’s dig in.

Seniority questions

These questions sound warm and open-ended:

• Tell me about a project you’re proud of

• Tell me about a recent project you worked on

• Describe a project you managed from start to end

• Tell me about a time when you had to win people over

• Tell me about a complex project

• Tell me about a project where you had to set the strategy

They sound like you can pick any project that fits, but that’s not quite it.

They want to know:
How big of a challenge can they trust you to independently lead and deliver impactful results?

“Complex,” in this context, doesn’t mean “hard for you personally because you had to learn a new tool.” It means “not easy enough to be handled by a junior person because of external factors like ambiguity, risk, or tradeoffs.”

Which project?

Rule of thumb: pick your most recent, successful, high-scope project.

If it’s from five years ago, they’ll learn how senior you were then.
If it’s still in progress, you won’t have results to show that your decisions were right.

What if you don’t have a good project to talk about?

Real life doesn’t always hand us the perfect case study. Sometime you don’t have a single project that covers all the senior skills.

Maybe you’ve been working on high-priority but straightforward projects. Maybe you joined the team late or left early. In these cases, see if you can show all the competencies across multiple projects.

If the projects are related, try to elevate your story to be about the portfolio of projects. You can talk about the higher-level goal and project choices.

“I’m really proud of the pinch-hitting work I did across multiple teams to get all of our teams shipping high quality work quickly.”

In this example, the candidate was sent by leadership to work on a variety of teams, mostly at the execution stage. Even though she didn’t select the project, she can show ownership over the goals and emphasize her repeatable approach.

If your projects are unrelated you can name drop them to get partial credit for multiple wins.

“Would you like me to talk about the time I discovered a huge product opportunity for an end-of-life product line, or would you rather hear about the time I came into a team that hadn’t been able to launch in 2 years and I was able to turn things around?”

In this example, the candidate had multiple internships and wasn’t able to see a project through end-to-end. He’s able to convey the breadth of his experience instead of being stuck talking about just one aspect.

Growth questions

These flip the script. Instead of “how senior are you now?” they ask: How have you grown?

You can recognize these questions because they directly ask about a time you messed up (not a difficult situation everyone faces, like a tricky stakeholder):

• Tell me about a failure

• What’s your biggest weakness

• Tell me about a time you got tough feedback

• Tell me about a project that went off-track

• Tell me about a time you missed a deadline

• Tell me about a project that you wish you had done better and how you would do it differently today

Think about it this way: if you time traveled back 3-5 years ago, would you have run those projects exactly the same as you would now?

Of course not! You’ve been making mistakes and learning from them. That’s what the interviewer wants to see.

Which project?

Rule of thumb: choose an older project. Something you’ve clearly learned from and had the chance to apply.

These questions can actually be a chance to highlight your best strengths and values. You’re getting a chance to tell the origin story of your values.

“A failure that made a big difference in the way I work was a time that I deferred to a founder’s belief in what we should build. I skipped the uncomfortable conversations that it would have taken to get aligned, and when the experiment failed he felt like we hadn’t really tested the thing he believed in. I’ve learned now to create a decision-making framework in advance: we review the experiment and what we’d do next in each outcome, and that helps surface the precise beliefs we need to test.”

This is one of my own examples, and I use it to highlight how I balance respect for the founders’ vision with product rigor.

Think about which of your strengths you want to highlight, and pick the failure stories that match.

Specific Strengths and Values Questions

Some questions are testing a specific strength or value. You’ll usually hear them framed one of three ways:

• Direct

  • Tell me about a time you worked on a project that had legal regulations (Subject Matter Expertise)

  • Tell me about a time you dived deep into a problem (Dive Deep)

  • Tell me about a time you had to show good collaboration (Collaboration)

  • Tell me about a time you helped someone improve their skills (Coaching)

• Neutral

  • Tell me about a project where you used data (Dive Deep)

  • Tell me about a time you worked on a cross-functional team (Collaboration)

  • Tell me about a time you coached a report (Coaching)

• Negatively framed

  • Tell me about a time when data lead you astray. (Dive Deep)

  • Tell me about a conflict you had with another person (Collaboration)

  • Tell me about a time you had an underperforming report (Coaching)

All of these questions are constrained to specific situations that you might face. You can guess which strength they’re testing by the constraint.

Which project?

Don’t let negative framing trip you up! Identify the strength or value they’re looking for, and pick a story where you demonstrate the strength.

If you’re talking to the hiring manager and you haven’t already told a story that demonstrates your seniority, see if you can pick a story that demonstrates the strength and seniority.

If you’ve already told a story about a big successful project or if you’re being interviewed by someone at the same level as you, it’s likely that they’re just testing for the strength; don’t worry about seniority, focus on picking a good example for the strength.

Don’t pick the worst interpretation of the question

As you’ve seen, sometimes these questions are framed to trick you into telling a bad story. You get to choose which stories you tell, so don’t pick the ones that make you look really bad.

I worried a little about including this chart, since the trick question aspect is designed to catch people who naturally gravitate towards anti-social behavior or who really were bad at their jobs.

But, in practice, I don’t think I’m spilling the beans on a deeply kept secret. I’ve also seen that the problematic people don’t realize how bad their stories are and so they keep telling them.

Brainstorming Stories

Now that you know how to pick stories, start brainstorming stories for your story bank. You’ll want at least 5, but 10 is better. You won’t need to fully develop all of them, but it will be helpful to have several as backup.

Here are some prompts to help you think of stories:

Wins

• Projects you're proud of

• Project you led from 0 to 1

• Project with cross-functional collaboration

Strengths

• Subject matter expertise

• Customer Focused

• User centered design

• Data Oriented

• Technical

• Scrappy

• Ethical

• and so on

Challenges

• Hard to get approved, but you convinced people

• Hard to figure out solution, but through your insights you figured it out

• Hard to market, but through your work you succeeded

• Needed a lot of iteration, eventually succeeded or set things up for a future success

• Project fell behind schedule

• Big surprise obstacle, that you overcame

• External problem, that you dealt with

• You made a mistake, that you learned from and avoided in a future situation

• Conflict with a coworker that you resolved skillfully

You can also walk through your career chronologically to jog your memory. Write down each of the major projects and interesting side projects.

What if they ask a question and you don’t have a good example?

Some interviewers want to push you to answer a question you haven’t prepared for, or they care about a specific type of experience you weren’t expecting.

First, don’t panic. This doesn’t mean you didn’t prepare well enough, and it doesn’t mean that you don’t have the right experience. The interviewer wants to see what you say when you can’t recite a memorized answer. If your skills & values are real, they can still shine in an on-the-fly answer.

Take a moment to think about the situation presented in the question. Maybe they asked “Tell me about a time when a key person on your project suddenly left.” What’s the problem they’re getting at?

Well, when a key person leaves you’ve got a few problems: the schedule was counting on their work, the implementation might have counted on their expertise, team morale might be at risk.

Validating and empathizing with those problems is a great quick response while you make time to think about which story you want to tell. If this is a familiar situation, make sure you convey your “been there, done that” confidence.

“Oh yeah it’s definitely tough when a key person leaves the team. You need to find a replacement, decide if it’s okay for the schedule to slip, and make sure the other people on the team are still feeling supported. Let me take a minute and see if I can think of a good example to tell you.”

As part of this empathizing, you can start to get a sense for the strengths the question might be testing for. In this case, it’s probably overcoming obstacles and keeping a project on track.

Now we want to think of a good example. Maybe one popped into your head, or maybe one of the stories you brainstormed is close enough because it demonstrates the same strengths. You can ask, “This isn’t exactly the same but there was a time our designer got pulled into another project and only could dedicate 25% time to ours, would you like to hear about that?”

The big trick here is don’t pick the worst interpretation of the question. Double check that you’re telling a story that demonstrates your strength. In this example, don’t tell a story about a time you fought with a key person and caused them to leave in the middle of the project, that’s not what they’re asking!

Finally, if you can’t think of any stories, talk about what you would hypothetically do in that situation. Sometimes your hypothetical answer will show enough expertise on the problem to count as a good answer.

Good luck!

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In case you missed them,

Cracking the Behavioral Interview: Build up your Interview Confidence with a Wins Warmup

Cracking the Behavioral Interview: "Tell me a project you're proud of" - 4 Mock Interviews

Cracking the Behavioral Interview: What is the interviewer looking for?