Six tips to help you interview

Lessons learned from 300+ Product interviews

In my product team at Credit Karma, we interviewed nearly 300 people in 2018 and hired over 40 new people across product management, design, content and research. It was a huge team effort and terrific to grow so rapidly in the competitive bay area job market. There are clear patterns we saw in these interviews, so I pulled together a set of tips to help you in your own job search.

Tip #1: Be original

Your interviewer is likely speaking with more than one candidate in a week, maybe even more than one per day. It’s hard to keep you straight from others! To avoid bias and remain consistent, interviewers may pull from a standard set of questions. So when you answer, be personal and original. A textbook answer won’t stand out and will bore your interviewer.

As example, when asking the standard question “what are you looking for in your next job”, 90% of responses include these words: “challenging environment where I can grow”, “great culture”, “good people I can learn from”, or “growth environment where I can have impact”. There is nothing wrong with these ideals, it’s just what everyone says. So doesn’t help me understand what makes you special.

Have you ever played the game Taboo? It’s the game where you try and get your team to guess a word without saying the most common ways to describe it. So imagine these common responses were listed as “stop phrases”, yet you had to answer the same question. What would you do?

You would have to be creative. And tell me far more about yourself. Instead of “I’m looking for great people to help me learn”, you might say “I’ve never had a manager who was my future self. In the past, most of my managers were just people who had been at the company longer, or didn’t know my function. Though this is the biggest company I will have joined, I’m hoping to be surrounded by several different types of leaders who have been in my function before and can help me grow”.

So before you answer an interviewer questions, strike those common answers from your vocabulary. It’ll help you stand out and engage your interviewer.

Tip #2: Do not filibuster

The top concern from our interviewers was that candidates simply could not get to the point. Their answers meandered or their answers were so detailed that the interviewer either stopped the candidate or just let them drone on, reducing the number of quality exchanges.

If you can’t engage your interviewer in a healthy conversation, it’s unlikely you can succeed in a fast moving workplace. Conciseness is judgment and is just as important as intelligence. Knowing what to skip is an essential skill.

So consider pausing a few seconds to understand the question before you answer. Get clarification when you aren’t clear. Maybe even jot down a few points before speaking. Not everyone can instantly start to answer a question just heard. And when you think and talk in parallel, you drone on making it harder to distill your answers from generic verbiage.

And once you’ve started to answer, check-in with your interviewer after a minute or two. Don’t force them to interrupt you. If you find yourself talking for a few minutes without interaction, you might be veering off into a direction that isn’t productive. If the interviewer wants more, they will ask. But if they have what they’re looking for, they’ll move on. And voila, you have a productive conversation going.

Tip #3: What are your superpowers?

You don’t have to be a superhero to have superpowers. All of us have them, and I like framing your strengths as superpowers since I really want to know what makes you extra special. Your friends and coworkers know these about you, just ask them. “What do you do better than the vast majority of others they know?”

Once you have your list, ensure your interviewers know this list. Note these aren’t always hard skills. You don’t have to be the strongest coder, be a math savant, or have a Toastmasters trophy. Some examples include:

• “You show a lot of grit.” Challenges in your personal life which forced you to persevere; success in a company despite its struggles; professional growth despite effective managers or mentors.
• “You are a quick study.” You worked on several different and unique projects despite no instructions; you were thrown into the deep end with no instruction manual, and within a few months, had a nice playbook, completely up to speed.
• “You partner well with many different types of people.” You had successful projects working with lots of cross-functional teammates; your relationships started out fresh, yet you continue to stay in touch despite leaving.

Weave these superpowers into your conversations with your panel of interviewers. Perhaps you can start an answer with “One area where I feel confident is in my ability to X”. Or when relaying a past project, describe it with “Project Y required X to succeed, so it was an opportunity for me to discover a strength of mine.”

It’s unlikely your answers will be arrogant, if you have the appropriate tone and acknowledge others in assisting your efforts. So don’t hold back and be clear about what makes you special.

Tip #4: Describe your development areas authentically

A good interview should discuss your areas of improvement, past and present. Some interviewers will try and decipher this through questions on your background, others will flat out just ask (I like being direct).

An authentic review of your development areas helps validate your entire interview. If you are candid on areas of improvement, the interviewer can be confident they have a complete picture of you, not just a fake interview persona. Ironically, most candidates believe admitting weakness will go against them, when the opposite is true.

Approaching this can be tricky, for it’s awkward to start itemizing a laundry list of blemishes. A simple starting point is to identify a past development area where you’ve improved: “I used to get frustrated when things took too long. I escalated and complained and pushed a bit too aggressively. Though I am still impatient, I’m better at finding the bottlenecks and openly discussing them. In fact, in my last review, my manager called me out as calmly problem solving a tricky area for our project.” This positive spin is a nice warm up and possibly more comfortable for you.

A more direct approach is to simply list out 3–5 things that you wish were superpowers. Areas a manager might help you with. These don’t have to be workplace failures. In fact, they might be adequate today, but could be dramatically better with investment. Of perhaps the new experiences of a new job will challenge you and develop a set of new skills. Consider these:

• Relationships. How effective is your work within a team when you don’t have authority? Or with peers who have different styles or come from different functions? Or coworkers who have weaker skills than you?
• Knowledge. How many domains or types of businesses have you experienced? Each stage of company (from pre-product fit to hypergrowth to scaled orgs) all have different challenges and are worth experiencing. Industries (like healthcare or financial services or manufacturing) are all distinct. And even your discipline (product management, marketing, sales or eng) has many nuances that come from experience.
• Indirection. I’ll use a pro-basketball analogy. Consider the difference between these roles: bench role player, starting player on the team, best player in the game, coach of the team, general manager drafting the team, owner of the team, and commissioner of the league setting the rules for the league. Each vantage point has its own set of experiences, challenges, and opportunities. When you are on the court, you make direct impact on the game being played. As you are further removed, you can’t impact a game as much as the team or the league. This is similar to a work project. When you grow in seniority, you transition from direct to indirect influence and must build different types of expertise. Your decisions get bigger and have greater impact yet you have less information. So think through what you’ve experienced and have yet to learn. All of us have roles and positions yet to experience, and these present new challenges and development opportunities.

Tip #5: Roll up your sleeves

Another goal for our interviews is to determine what a candidate actually did vs. witnessed. Being in the room isn’t enough, we really want to understand what impact you directly had in a project or at a company.

In some cases, a candidate wasn’t hands on and didn’t have an impact. But more often, they were directly involved but they chose answers that stuck to high level generalizations. Avoid doing that. The more specific you can be, especially about your work, the more you leave the interviewer with a clear picture.

As example, when describing a project, start with a concise background on the project, its customers, challenges and impact. But by moving quickly through this, you can transition to: “My role on the project was X. I had to solve Y and here’s the approach I took.” The more your answers are about you and less about the environment, the better it will be.

Side note: many of our product managers and designers like to see you on the whiteboard. This puts you in teaching mode and mimics what it’s like to be in a real working environment. So don’t be shy if that’s natural to you. The more clear and engaging you can be, the better.

Tip #6: Prepare your story

I start every interview with the same first question: “Tell me your story”. I’ve heard hundreds of stories this past year, and with this simple warmup question, I hope to understand a candidate’s foundation.

Why do I ask this? Well, you know more about your background and history than any other subject matter. But it’s a vast body of information, and quite hard to distill. In fact, answering this question requires mastery of all five of the previous tips. Here are a few things I look for:

• Level of detail. Too surface and I learn nothing that I can’t glean from your resume. Too much information, and it’s easy to get lost.
• Conciseness. As noted in this article, knowing what to skip is more important than knowing what to cover. A good answer to this hits your highlights, skips the mundane, and lasts no more than ten minutes.
• Empathy. Do you check-in with me to see if I’m understanding, getting bored, looking for additional detail, want the information faster/slower, etc. Communication is 90% non-verbal so I’m expecting you to pick up any relevant cues.
• Tone and style. Storytelling is an art and some tell stories better than others. And great storytellers can make terrible employees. So describing your background in scintillating narrative isn’t worthy of a touchdown celebration. But many stories I hear involve a lot of finger pointing, pointing to the environment, manager, or company for a shortcoming. Pretty much everyone to blame but themselves. I’m always looking for a balance. Another common pattern was to focus on “I” instead of “we”, both in language and in mindset. Companies are team sports, and not recognizing this is another flag. So I want your tone to be authentic and energetic. Don’t sell too hard or lack the passion and energy to drive the conversation.
• Transitions. Backgrounds naturally describe a chronological list of jobs. I request you start at the very beginning and move forwards, as I want to hear each chapter in order starting with the prologue, just to ensure clear understanding. But I also want to understand why you made a change. Change is really hard for most people and when a job transition takes place, I learn a lot about what you prioritize, how you approach challenging decisions, and which ones were good, bad, and lucky.
• Impact. Last but not least, beyond what positions you held, I’m looking for durable impact. That’s not to say I want you to work on the same thing for many years. But people who work at a bunch of hot companies can be artificially celebrated. You learn a lot working at multiple environments but you learn more by building something that matters and taking a project through multiple iterations. Sometimes the less glamorous is incredibly educational. So definitely ensure you cover what you did as much as where you worked, as it opens up a series of follow-up questions.

Summary

I hope these tips will help you in your next interview. Remember to be concise, authentic, and original. Create a conversation with your interviewer and ensure you give them an accurate picture of you, your strengths and development areas, and what makes you special. And prepare a good set of stories to help you in your discussions. Good luck and drop me a comment if you have other tips that might help others!