Select - Choosing A Response
Why you need story catalog
To choose the story efficiently. We need
- 3-5 core stories:
- These are the one where we want to bring out first, hitting multiple signal areas
- These are the one if we have only a few minutes we wanna say
- 5-7 alternative stories
- To cover some additional signal areas if we used all our core story
[!note]
The goal is to be able to response to anything they throw at you so if you need more story, prepare more
Finding core stories through journaling
This is how you are going to find and form your story.
First go through the key points here, list out all the possible experiences that you had with it
| Key point | Example |
|---|---|
| High impacts projects | Major feature launch, significant refacotr, system migrations architecture descisions that impact/influence mutlple teams |
| Chellenging situation | Tight deadlines, organisational change, technical failures, team or interpersonal conflicts, ambiguous requirements, project where success was uncertain |
| Leadership moments | Mentoring others, driving cross-team initiatives, representing your team externally |
| Learning experiences | Mistakes that led to growth, feedback that changed your approach, skills you developed under pressure, times you had to completely rethink your approach |
| Career transtions | Promotions, job changes, team switch, role expansions, responsiblity significantly evolved |
Core story example
SWE II:
- Research, planning, and executing small project that lasted for a month
- Identify, investigating and resolving a performance bottleneck affecting many users
- Building tooling that reduced deployment time from hours to minutes across multiple engineer team
Senior
- Lead some project or migraiton while coordinating with stakeholders and managing rollout risks
- Design or implement something that widely adopted by other team
- Resolve complex technical debt that was blocking team velocity, required buy-in from leadership and careful sequencing
Building story catalog
Once you listed out the experience from previous step, you will build the story in the following format
| Part | What include |
|---|---|
| Context | Situation, role, why it matters to the business. A feature that prevent customer churn carry different weight to "nice-to-have" enhancement. Interviewer need to understand that scope |
| Actions | Describe what you did, not "we". All the parts including: brainstorm, planning, approvals, architect review, testing, roll out, follow-up actions. This include communicating, iterating( feedback) even thinking and deciding |
| Result | Impact of your actions, quantifiable results are preferable. If it's non-quantifiable, we prefer for senior: increased personal or team scope, growth in the people, adopted by other team, culture changes… |
| Learnings | Ability to reflect, grow, apply wisdom to future situations. This includes technical learnings (new approaches or tools adopted), process learning (better project management or communication strategy) and strategic leanrings |
| Signal areas | Which of the 8 signal areas this land on |
Building additional story
These additional story we should focus on 1 signal area at a time, it can hits mutliple signal areas as well but it should be mainly for one signal areas. This is mainly for something like describe a time where you have a conflict etc.
| Signal area | Example |
|---|---|
| Scope | Largest project you have owned end-to-end? When you take on work that was clearly above your level |
| Ownership | Solve a problem that not your responsibility? A time you followed through the end even though others have moved on |
| Ambiguity | A project where requirement keeps changing? When do you have to move forward with incomplete or conflicting information |
| Perseverance | When did you face a technical or organizational obstacle and have to find a way through? Tell me a bout a time you had to cancel or significantly change course on a project |
| Conflict resolution | A time when you strongly disagree with manager or teammate? A time when you have to work with difficult teammate |
| Communication | A time when you have to communicate to non-technical audience? A time when miscommunication caused real problem |
| Growth | Biggest mistake you have made, what happen next? Receive a critical feedback that changed how you work? |
| Leadership | When you influence a decision without having authority over people involved? Tell me about a time when you helped a colleague grow or get unstuck on something important |
Ways to help identify story
- Look through email threads, calendar, past convo etc
- Interview existing or past coworkers
- Visit past work location, view team photo to remember back the time.