Story

📖 Everyone Loves Interviews (not)

Here’s something we can all agree on: Interviewing sucks.

It’s not fun being under the microscope with someone on the other end who seeming is evaluating our words, facial expressions, tone of voice, and choice of shirt for the day.

Let’s dive into how we can not only make interviewing suck less, but more importantly is how you can get really really good at it with the TPM Interview Prep Playbook.

But before we get into that, let me tell you how I went from stuck to landing a job with this prep method.

I was stuck and frustrated

It had been 5 long years since I lasted applied to or interviewed for a new job when I decided to leave ExxonMobil.

In fact, I wanted to stay at ExxonMobil for my whole career partially because they offered something unique: one career under one roof, with many jobs. That means less interviewing throughout my career.

😲 But it turns out that I’m a lot more happy not trading my career fulfillment for career security.

Leaving Exxon was tough though, it took me nearly a year of applying and interviewing.

Interviewing was incredibly intimidating to me. I didn’t know how to show up with confidence (an attribute I definitely was not born with).

😖 When I landed interviews (which felt like a miracle), I felt awkward. I definitely didn’t perform very well in those interviews at all, and that’s when the market was hot and interviews were more forgiving.

However, I was determined to learn from each interview and get better at the skill of interviewing.

As I invested time to reflect on my interviews, I noticed a trend: the portions of the interview that went exceptionally well were typically associated with strong story telling.

With this theory in mind, I went down a rabbit hole of story telling.

🧐 I began to write. And write. And write. What did I write? The stories of my career.

Learn

👨‍🏫 The TPM Interview Prep Playbook

Play 1: Core Memories

When I first wrote my stories, it was in a google doc. It was very far from polished writing. In fact, it was pretty ugly.

Instead of getting caught up in how to write the best story, I just focused on jotting down core memories 🧠 of my career where I felt that might be a valuable story to tell.

There isn’t much meat to these stories yet. That’s on purpose.

This was what it looked like in my google doc in that first iteration:

🗒️ Play 1, core memories, is “post-it-note” quality, ie you won’t lose any sleep if you throw it away immediately. You just need to get your brain working with some initial ideas from 10,000 ft view.

Play 2: PAR Format

Problem —> Action —> Result

Now before you check out and say “I know the PAR format!”, listen.

🚨 There is danger in this step: do NOT to create a script. Don’t do that, please. PAR is not meant to do that for interviewing.

I didn’t try to write ‘fancy’ or formal. I tried to use conversation language as if I were sitting down with a friend at a park to talk about our careers.

Simply aim to put a beginning, middle, and end to a story with PAR. No matter how messy.

Let’s dig in with some questions to consider in each.

• Problem: There is much you can say about the problem. Some questions to consider: What was the problem that needed to be resolved? What was the cost of this problem existing? Did this problem put anything critical at risk? Did you identify this problem by yourself?

• Action: Let’s get to what happened. Some questions to consider: What was your specific role in solving the problem? How did you work with others to resolve it? How was the solution identified? Was it backed by data?

• Result: Action is pretty useless if there aren’t any results. Some questions to consider: Who cared about the results? What was the result? Was it measured quantitatively? Or more qualitatively? Did you have to iterate on the solution to get the desired result? What did you learn once the result was achieved?

These questions are not exhaustive, just some suggestions to get your brain started.

Play 3: Attribute Tagging

There is one major challenge with interviewing: you don’t know what you’ll be asked.

This can make story-telling preparation hard! You want to prepare the right stories to answer the right questions, but without knowing the questions, you’re forced to be creative.

🪄 Here’s the trick up your sleeve: each story from your career story can address many situational or behavioral questions.

• A story about (1) overcoming a project failure can also be a good story about (2) change management.

• A story about (1) risk management can also be a good story about (2) influential leadership.

• A story about (1) your solution design knowledge can also be a good story about (2) engineering partnership.

• A story about (1) driving a key decision across many groups can also be a good story about (2) having a bias for action.

• A story about (1) objectively measuring the success of a program can also be a good story about (2) stakeholder management and alignment.

There are a lot of tactical ways you can tag each story with an attribute or interview question: an excel table, a bullet point list, hand written notes, etc. It doesn’t really matter.

Play 4: Career Flash Cards

💪 At this point, you’re feeling a bit more confident in at least 1 - 3 personal stories:

• You’ve identified some confidence-boosting moments in your career

• You’ve crafted an authentic narrative for 1 - 3 stories

• You’ve figured out how to use each story across multiple interviewing questions to demonstrate multiple valuable attributes.

You’re ready to roll with the punches!

But let’s take it one step further by revisiting a grade-school learning tactic: flash cards.

Why?

🧠 You’ve got to give your brain simple triggers that link to these career stories so you can tell them in an authentic, unscripted way.

Maybe you’ve already noticed, but we’ve avoided writing a script this whole time. Good interviewers can smell scripted stories from a mile away.

So what goes on the career flash card? Only two things:

• A name for the story

• The attribute(s) it addresses

Once you have these, you can flip through them at dinner with a friend or family member to improve your ability to retell these stories in a very natural, unscripted way.

(this is also a really effective way to know who your most patient friends and family are 😅 )

Here’s one of my earliest career flash cards:

So what’s the point?

My personal experience tells me this: a structured way to prepare for interviews boosted my confidence, but only when that preparation allowed me to be flexible during the interview.

That’s what I designed The TPM Interview Playbook around: Confident preparation, flexible execution.

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🙏 Share these tips with fellow TPMs

Many of us have been out of a job within the past few years, including myself.

If you think someone will benefit from this post, please share direct to the person or share it on LinkedIn.

I’m going to keep this specific newsletter post completely open to the public (subscribers and non-subscribers).

Why? I hope it can help someone gain more confidence in preparing for interviews and eventually land a job.

Thanks for reading!