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

Put on your interviewer hat and see who you'd hire!

This article is 2rd in a series about Cracking the Behavioral Interview. We started with getting into a confident mindset, today we’ll put you in the interviewer seat. Future articles will cover what interviewers are looking for, which projects to talk about, what makes a story impressive, what details to include, and how to put it all together into the PEARL framework. Subscribe for free to get the future articles!

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After last week’s post on building your confidence with a wins warmup, you might be eager to practice your own interviews. But, before we start solution-ing, we need to really understand our customer… in this case, the interviewer.

When you’re deep in the weeds of practicing your interview answers, it can be tricky to understand how your responses come across. So, instead of practicing your answers, today you’re going to put on your interviewer hat and see how you feel about other people’s answers. And next week we’ll get into some rubrics to make those feelings more objective.

Let’s evaluate some candidates!

To set the scene, imagine you’re a hiring manager, looking to hire a senior PM to work on your team. You’ll be interviewing 4 candidates.

Listen to each of them talk about a project they’re proud of and see what you think about them.

• Would you want to hire them?

• How confident are you?

• Does any part of their answer give you doubts that they’d be right for the job?

• What do you assume based on their story?

Let’s get into them.

Candidate A

 I'm really proud of a customer-focused project at my last team. Our team helps sales managers understand their sales pipelines so they can optimize and close more deals.

During user studies, I noticed customers copying the pipeline from our website into Excel to tag risky deals. I wanted to understand why, so I asked follow-up questions and learned that they’d do some calculations on our fields which worked well in Excel, once they’d done the work of copying each page of the pipeline. Digging into the data, I saw “export” was a top customer support request. So, I proposed we build CSV export — it would save managers a good amount of time.

I worked closely with designers and researchers to decide how the export functionality should work. The design was tricky because there were so many columns and filters. Through research we found that the current view was a good default, but a significant set of users also needed customization options. We landed on a split-button design so that the default options would be quick, while the customizations were still available.

I ran stand‑ups, briefed Customer Support, and the launch was successful. 60 % of managers used in‑app export and the customer feedback was positive.

What do you think? Does candidate A get the senior PM job?

If you’re like many people, you think that candidate A did a good job structuring their answer, but they just seem junior. CSV export is a straightforward feature, and it doesn’t take much strategy to build the top customer request. They followed a lot of PM best practices, but I’m not sure they’re having much impact on the company goals. Nothing they’ve said hints that this might be a more complex project - it sounds easy. Basically, they seem like they’re doing a good job of being an APM.

During your interviews, are you telling any stories like Candidate A’s?

Maybe you picked a story from early in your career, or you picked a really easy recent project. Or maybe the project was really meaty and complex, but you’re making it sound too easy when you talk about it.

Do you sometimes jump right into your team’s work without setting the company context? Do you talk about your results just in terms of what it meant for your launch, instead of how it moved the company’s goals?

Candidate B

 I’m really proud of launching proactive pipeline control because it’s a major product and impacts millions of users.

I joined the CRM Pipeline Intelligence team and needed to set up a vision, requirements, and roadmap. It was really complex and I needed to work with 20 stakeholders over 2 years. I met with customers and determined their biggest problems and found a new opportunity.

There were a number of challenges. I needed to learn about AI and work with engineering to learn new AI techniques. I also worked with our sales and support team to make sure all our customers understood how to use it.

It's been a big success, earning $50M in revenue and with over a million users.

What do you think? Does candidate B get the senior PM job?

The good news here is that this candidate seems to be more senior and seems to have had really impressive impact, with high revenue and usage numbers. Also, it’s short enough that the interviewer will have time to dig in with follow up questions.

The bad news is that this answer is entirely generic and shallow. It’s not telling us anything about what the candidate actually did, or even what the product is. It seems like this candidate is obsessed with process. They don’t seem very customer focused. It’s also mind-numbingly boring.

At first it seems nice that they talk about a challenge. But the challenge isn’t something inherently tricky about the project. It’s a personal challenge (needing to learn new technology), and I’m left wondering if a better PM wouldn’t have found this as challenging.

If you’re answering questions like this, don’t worry — I’ll have tips in the rest of this series to help you figure out what parts of your story are impressive and what details you should be including.

Candidate C

 I'm the PM for CRM Pipeline Intelligence.

I'm really proud of launching proactive pipeline control. It uses AI to predict risk and provide sales managers with early warning on risky deals.

We prototyped risk-scoring and it worked well but was very slow to run. I worked with engineering to iterate on our ML approach to improve performance. We also built alerts and launched to trusted testers. They loved it so we launched to everyone.

It's been a big success with a large increase in new customer acquisition and even modest retention wins

What do you think? Does candidate C get the senior PM job?

In contrast to candidate B, this candidate gets into some of the details. We find out what “proactive pipeline control” actually does, and we get a bit more of a hint of customer focus and technical skill.

But, what did candidate C do, in particular? There’s a lot of “we” which raises the doubt that maybe they just called the meetings and took notes while everyone else figured things out. It sounds like their manager might have said “Go join this team that’s using AI to predict risk” and they just helped get the project across the finish line.

Personally, I like that candidate C is calling out not just a revenue increase, but which mechanisms (new customer acquisition & retention) drove the increase. It shows a deeper understanding of how the business works. But, without an impressive number like $50M, I don’t really know how big of a deal this launch was.

When you’re interviewing, does your desire to be collaborative and give your teammates credit cause you to miss showing your personal insights and impact? It’s tough to brag about ourselves.

Candidate D

I’d love to talk about the strategy I lead that helped my company go from the #5 sales solutions for auto dealerships to the market leader.

When I joined the team I went on lots of site visits. One thing that stood out was several customers manually copying the pipeline into Excel to tag risky deals.

So, for background, sales managers have several levers they can pull to save a risky deal, things like offering discounts. But they only want to offer a discount if they think the deal would otherwise fall through. I learned these managers were copying into Excel to do some simple calculations.

I realized that we had the data to do much better risk prediction than what the managers were getting from Excel. Using machine learning, we could provide earlier warnings so they could save more deals. This felt like a promising strategic direction because we could upsell the risk prediction for increased revenue, and we could market the AI to gain market share.

Whenever I work on product strategy, I start with cross-team brainstorming. It gets teams involved early, gets good ideas out, and helps everyone feel bought in.

The big strategic question that came out of those early meetings was whether to focus on managers or directors. Dashboards for directors would optimize for expansion revenue, but I saw it wouldn't get us the quick wins that manager features like ML risk-scoring and alerts would. Quick wins also let us validate as we work towards our north star vision.

Last quarter we launched Proactive Pipeline Control with those manager features and it's been a big success. It’s brought in an additional $50M in revenue, mostly through new customer acquisition.

What do you think? Does candidate D get the senior PM job?

Your answer might still be no, and that can be very valid depending on what you’re looking for on your team. But I really like candidate D.

This candidate does a few things that make them seem especially senior. They’re teaching me about their customers which helps me follow the story and understand the user problems. They know their industry & technical space enough to know what’s possible. They’ve considered the strategic implications in relationship with company goals. Phrases like “whenever I work on product strategy” show that they’ve done this a few times and they’re ready to teach other people how to do it.

The story highlights their key insights (“I realized…”, “I saw…”), which makes it clear they weren’t just along for the ride.

The tradeoffs discussion about directors vs. managers shows off their judgement and how they think about problems. I learn a little about their product management philosophy. It also makes it clear that this wasn’t a straightforward “build what the customer asks” project, but one where it could have gone multiple directions, and they chose a good one.

When you interview, do you talk about your key insights and discuss tradeoffs? Are you giving interviewers background on your product, industry, and customers so that they feel like they’ve learned something interesting from you? Do you make the problems feel hard, then show how you solved them?

Conclusion

These four candidates represent four common patterns:

• A - Project without much complexity

• B - Generic, process-heavy answer

• C - Too much “we”

• D - Bringing the complexity to life

Now, imagine that B, C, and D were the same person, who did exactly the same things on the project and lead the team to equal success. The only difference was how they chose to talk about their work in an interview. As an interviewer, they feel different.

Photo by Dylan Gillis on Unsplash

Hopefully this practice gave you insight into how your interview answers sound to an interviewer.

If you’d like to keep practicing, try out this custom GPT: PM Interview Candidate. It can pick a random-skill candidate for you to interview, and it works in voice mode for a more natural experience.

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In case you missed it: try out last week’s custom GPT: Wins Warmup.