Behavioral Interviews: Stories (TMW)

As part of behavioral interviews, you’ll often be faced with a “Tell Me When” or “Give an example” interview question. I call these questions TMW or GAE questions. The purpose of this post is to give you a definitive guide for how to prepare and successfully answer these types of questions.

Recognizing it’s a TMW/GAE question:

I generally define a TMW/GAE question as one where your interviewer expects you to tell them a story. The most obviously way to recognize it as a TMW or GAE question based on the phrasing of the question:

• Ex: “Tell me when you had to manage tough expectations with a peer.”
• Ex: “Give an example where you changed your manager’s mind about something significant.”

However, there might be questions for which it’s subtle or ambiguous whether your interviewer expects a story:

• Ex: “When did you last have a disagreement with your PM partner?”
• Ex: “What do you do to manage low performers on your team?”

If it’s unclear if the interviewer is asking you a TMW/GAE question (and thus expecting a story), you should immediately align with the interviewer really quickly. You can do this by asking a clarifying question, as an example:

• Interviewer asks: “What do you do to manage low performers on your team?”
• Answer: “I’ve done performance management for a lot of low performers, are you looking for me to give some general principles/framework I use, or do you want me to give a specific example of when I handled low performers on my team?”

If you have any ambiguity at all, asking a clarifying question will quickly help you align to ensure you are answering a GAE/TMW question, and thus the interviewer expects a story from you.

Preparing Stories

You’ll need prepare 8–15 stories ahead of time to cover these TMW/GAE questions.

Stories are really compelling

If the question is a “Tell Me When” question, you should expect to be able to tell a story. However, even in some cases when the interviewer asks you a “How do you” question, it can often be compelling to tell a story in order to supplement your answer.

Commonly during the interview you’ll be asked situational questions (e.g. “have you ever had to manage someone out” or “have you ever had to resolve a conflict”). The interviewer is looking for to see the breadth and depth of your experience within the specific domain.

Generally speaking, after you’ve ensured the interview is a TMW/GAE question, you should now pivot to telling a story rather than merely answering a question.

• For Example: If the interviewer asks you a question like “how do you generally handle stress of project deliverables”, instead of answering the question at face value, probe the interviewer to see if they’d also like you to answer the question with a story.
• Ex: “That’s how I generally handle stress when I have a hard deadline…, let me give you an example of my doing this in practice?”

Practice both telling your stories fluidly as well as transitioning from the questions into the story — you can do this by video recording yourself and playing it back.

Picking Stories

In order to prepare for behavioral interviews, you should prepare around 8–15 stories that you can draw upon at will. Generally each story you prepare, likely can be used for a wide variety of potential interview questions.

Try to pick stories that demonstrate multiple values or skills that you have. The best stories can be used to showcase 5–6 different positive attributes about yourself.

For example, let’s say you have a story about how your manager and you disagreed on how to help a colleague who had communication challenges — you worked a few nights to improve her communication and presentation skills so she could demo her project. This story is useful for a variety of different interview questions:

• ex: What was a time in which you helped a colleagues?
• ex: How do you handle others with weaknesses?
• ex: How do you handle a problem that is ambiguous or ill-defined?
• ex: Describe how you disagreed with a team or manager decision?

Think through the entire space of questions that could be asked of you (questions about your mindset, questions about your experience/behavior, questions about your motivation).

Even answers to questions that seem straightforward (e.g. what are you looking for in your next role?) can be made to seem more authentic if you connect with a story (e.g. tell about how you decided on your current role and what did you learn).

Difficulty + Leveling

As you pick the story, ensure that the story is as difficult/challenging as possible (at least commensurate with the level you’re interviewing for). If you’re looking for a very senior leadership position, your story can’t just be about fixing some code reviews. Remember, the more difficult the story the better.

Additional resource: Video about U-shaped story-telling.

Story Format: STAR

Must has already been written about the STAR method for coming up with a story, so I won’t go into much further detail, other than to highlight a few additional points.

(1) Don’t be afraid to be explicit. This might sound awkward, but it is actually extremely helpful to be explicit with your interviewer when moving from each stage to each.

Ex: “Let me start off with the situation I faced...”

Ex: “Now I’ll tell you about the problem/task I was responsible for…”

Doing so allows your interviewer to follow along and makes it much easier for them to take notes.

(2) Be prepared to still be flexible. Despite using the STAR method, still be prepared to be flexible with your interviewer. Your interviewer might want you to skip one or more of the sections and jump straight to the result, or they might just want to skip all of the S, T, A, R sections altogether. Don’t just blindly tell the STAR story without regards to what your interviewer is asking.

(3) Use the word “I” instead of “we” when describing T and A. The interviewer wants to know what you did and what you were responsible for, not the team.

(4) Flexibly offer additional letters/sections. Where appropriate, flexibly offer to the interviewer additional components to your story besides (S), (T), (A), (R). For example, you can also offer to tell the interviewer about your (L) learnings from the story: “I can also tell you a little bit more about my learnings and how I’d handle the situation differently in the future.”.

• (M) Mistakes: You can offer to include what you think are mistakes (e.g. “happy to also tell you about the mistakes I made in this process”).
• (L) Learnings: You can also offer to share what your learnings are from this (e.g. “I learned a lot from this process, happy to share what those learnings are).
• (C) Additional context: You can also offer to describe additional context besides (S) in more depth (e.g. “Given this situation, I can also provide a bit more context about XYZ).
• (O) Obstacles/Challenges: It might make sense to offer to the interviewer additional obstacles (e.g. “To complete this project/task, I also faced 3 additional challenges: X, Y, Z. Happy to go more into depth about these obstacles”).

Merging / Consolidating Stories

You likely have more than 15+ total stories you can draw from, but it’s helpful for your own sanity to merge/consolidate them together. There’s many different types of merging that you can do:

1. Common characters. If you have multiple stories centering around the same person (for ex: the product manager on your team or your manager), you can probably consolidate them into a singular story.
2. Similar actions. If you took similar actions (for ex: you refactored your team’s codebase in multiple instances), you can likely consolidate them into a singular story to tell.
3. Similar timeline/contexts. For example, let’s say during the US 2020 election at Facebook to combat misinformation, you had to take on multiple heroic efforts separately that spanned 1–2 months. You can probably consolidate this into a singular story (with shared context) that you can tell.

Different Length Stories

Now that you’ve prepared the stories, you should practice telling them effectively. I recommend you prepare different length stories. It might be good to have a short (30 seconds), medium (2 minutes) and long (6–7 minutes) version of the stories you’d like to tell.

Example short answer/story: “I hired an engineer on our team, and I knew he wanted to do a startup in the long-run. He stayed on the team and we helped him grow from an IC3 to IC5. His interests aligned with the team when he was junior, but once he became a senior engineer, the skills he would learn/develop no longer aligned with his long-term startup desires, so I helped him find a new team in the Growth org. We used the headcount to hire scalability and infra experts to join our team, and it worked out best for everyone. I learned the importance of keeping in mind engineers long-term career desires when planning their projects/goals.”

When you answer a question you can start off with the short-version, but be prepared to go down deeper and give the medium or long-versions if your interviewer is interested. You can proactively offer this up during or after you give your short answer with something like “Throughout this process, I learned XXX. I’m also happy to talk a bit more about what techniques I used to uncover his long-term startup affinity or how I went about finding his new team for him.” Your interviewer might decide to move onto the next question with “no that’s okay, let’s move on”, or he/she night decide to oblige and ask further questions. Even if your interviewer (for interests of time) doesn’t decide to go deep, it will still come across that your answers have a significant amount of depth, and you’ve done a good job reflecting on your experiences.

Practice Telling the Stories

Once you’ve written out the stories, here are afew tips for practicing them.

1. Record yourself telling the stories. It’s helpful to practice telling the stories in front of a webcam and record yourself. After watching it back, you’ll understand and capture a lot of learnings and improvements (e.g. using filler words, or being too fast/slow/rambly).
2. Have a practice partner probe. Have a practice partner probe your story with follow-up questions to help test whether you’ve thoroughly prepared your story.
3. Track your time-management. Track how much time you’re spending on the story.
4. Practice offering follow-ups/clarifications. Practice pausing at various points during your story-telling and offering additional follow-ups or clarifications for your interviewer (e.g. “Let me pause, do you want me to go into more detail and talk about why these problems were especially challenging?”).