#132: Inside the new breed of behavioral interviews at Anthropic and OpenAI | Austen McDonald (Behavioral Interview Coach, ex-Meta)

All right. The countdown has arrived. Austin, thank you so much for joining us. Oh man. It's so great to be here. It's awesome to be on this, this, this podcast. I've watched you guys so much. It's really cool to be here with you. Right, right back at you. I I've seen your posts, I've seen your content, so it's, yeah, it's really cool to make it happen and it's going to be really fun. So I'm excited to kick it off. And it's been brewing for a while. Engineering, product management, collaboration here. I love that, you know, we need it. I mean, we're just walking, we're just trying to walk the walk, you know, like PM, PM and Android blending and what better way to bring it together and to being like, you know, we, we, we could do a, we could do a hybrid podcast here. Um, but I think our design friends, by the way, but maybe the next one, the next one, we'll pull them in. They've been over-representative maybe, um, rather than engineering. But I would say, um, yeah, no, we've been talking for a while. Austin, we met, you know, in our, you wrote, you wrote, uh, it's not every day that you get to meet someone who writes a book about behavioral interviews. And so when I got to know you and got to hear a bit more, and we also overlapped at, um, then Facebook, uh, you left Metta, um, and you had such an impressive run, uh, there for about 10 years and worked your way to like, you know, um, I think the hiring engineering hiring committee for the mobile team, you were the chair of that entire organization and you recruited the people that were on that, that committee and figure out what's going to be asked in the engineering interview. So even though you weren't in the kind of, um, PM interview sphere, we started jamming and, you know, I thought a lot of the way that you approach behavioral interviews and the way you think about helping people get ready for them has so much overlap with what, what I think is going to be useful for more product people. So, um, I think we want to just make some time and, and chat about behavioral interviews. And I think where I want to kick off the conversation just so that we can kind of all get into a nice groovy headspace together is like, you know, as someone with, uh, an awesome track record leaving, you know, after 10 years, you could have done a lot of things with your time. Why dive into behavioral interviews of all, all the things. Right. Exactly. Yeah. This obscure interviewing topic. Why if I invest in that while I was at meta and I did, of course, a lot of behavioral interviews, like you said, I was hiring committee chair. I trained a bunch of the behavioral interviews for all the mobile pipelines that we're hiring. I noticed that the thing that I really loved doing was just talking to candidates, talking to candidates about their life, talking to candidates about their career. And yeah, I think doing coding interviews, doing system design interviews, or doing any number of skill-based interview, that could be fun, right? You can have really productive and creative conversations with candidates and you get to know them a little bit. But in this conversation where you get to ask them about their past successes, their past failures, you know, what really motivated them in this or that, and how do they transition from this career to that career? You really got a chance to know them. And I, I personally hold this belief that it is who we are on the inside that really determines who we're going to be on the outside. And I think you can, of course, you gotta have skills, you guys gotta have some talent in order to do things, you know, in life, but who we are and what we believe and how we treat other people and what we believe about ourselves, this is really what, what determines our long-term performance. And that's assessed in that behavioral interview and those conversations about the past. And we can talk about, you know, how, how companies do that and how this changed over time. But really this, this, this get to know you kind of people relationship aspect of the behavioral interviews is really what attracted me. And I think a big, a big part of that is thinking about, well, what do I want to do? Or what do I want my life to be like at the end? And oftentimes when you read these articles from hospice nurses or whatever, they talk about, okay, what do people regret or what do people want to spend their time focusing on their life? And they, they never say things like, oh, I wish I was better at like determining product market fit. Or like, I wish I was better at designing systems or whatever, right. Or maybe we're doing lead code problems. Like, oh, I wish I was a little better at that. They talk about relationships, right? Relationships is what really motivates people and what makes life worth living. And I think this behavioral interview is a form of relationship. It's you understanding how they will be inside of your company once they're hired. And then also giving the candidate a chance to understand what you value and who you are as a hiring manager. And that starts that, that, that relationship. I know the number of people that I've interviewed that I've later hired, of course, Meta is one of these places where oftentimes you would hire for a pipeline and you wouldn't always directly hire onto your team. But then I would go and seek out these people that I had these interviews with because I said, oh, that person, they're going to be a great engineer. Let me get them on my team. And so I love, I love behavioral interviews. That's why I chose to do it after I left. Amazing. So it sounds like there's like an element of, from like personal almost fulfillment, like there's just something really cool and beautiful and exciting to just get to know people at their like, almost like deepest level and more intimate level of who they are as a person. I think no other probably interview like allows you to do right. And I think, but, but I also think you got to the point of like that, you know, someone who is probably like, you know, um, no, I don't want to say calculated, but like, you know, that you, like you also, I think probably got, went into this knowing that the, there's a really good, almost like business case for companies to, to do this well, right? Like there's all these like, you know, maybe I think you, you hinted at like, maybe like indicators that like who you are and how you show up to those interviews will also be a very important indicator of, um, of like, you know, how this person performs the job. So maybe can you show a bit more about like, what, why do you think is so important for companies to take behavioral interviews seriously? Um, yeah, companies take people. That's a really good question. So I think companies, um, when a company is really successful at creating an interview process or an evaluation process, they deeply understand what makes their employees successful. So if they've done that work, then they're going to find, especially nowadays, I think that this is somewhat changing. We talk about this, how, uh, in the past, maybe what made a successful engineer was significantly some set of knowledge, like some set of esoteric, you know, uh, incantations that you could type into to some, uh, like, uh, IDE and then out would come some product on the other side. And so assessing that kind of, uh, you know, esoteric knowledge was really important for, uh, you know, for an interviewing process, especially for engineers. And I think that that is not necessarily no longer the case at all, but I think it is changing and shifting. And so, um, if you are an honest company right now and looking at the, your internal teams, looking at your workplaces, seeing how they've changed with the rise of AI, then you will definitely see, and, and, and it's pretty obvious how ownership is becoming such an important part of the hiring process. So, um, we have to be able to assess whether or not someone can take an idea from the very beginning and then move it all the way through to the end. Um, and, and pushing through difficulties and challenges, we have to be able to see that you can, um, adjust yourself to new circumstances. I mean, every couple of months, we're totally changing how the workplace is coming across, totally changing what we're doing, changing the tools, changing everything. It's funny to read articles from just February, right? About, uh, open class or whatever, about different things and saying like, oh, this is so old. I can't read this article. So I think this, this, this has not been the case. I think even in, in, in the fast moving tech industry where you have had to move quickly, you have had to learn new things in the past, and that's always been part of the job, especially on the engineering side. But this just turned up to 11 right now. So you have to be able to assess whether this candidate in front of you can keep up and can, can learn and can grow. I think the, uh, the other thing would be, um, you know, potential for expanding beyond their, their assigned role, right? Where we definitely seeing, like we talked about earlier, this PM, EM, uh, design, you know, data science, all these roles are, are, are kind of convolving into a builder, right? That's what I like to talk about. Just being a builder, somebody who comes in with a problem and can do all the different verticals that are inside of solving that problem and come out the other side. And how do you do that, right? Are you going to give this person like a design interview and a PM interview? You're not going to do that, right? You're going to talk to them about how they've been leveraging tools and have been learning things, what they've done in the past. And I think, um, I think this is why when you think about your process as a company, you really need to think in this behavioral interview, first off, do I, can I just get away with one? So a lot of companies are adding additional rounds of additional behavioral interview rounds. We can talk about that, what they're assessing in those rounds, but in these behavioral interviews, am I getting at this person's potential to be an effective builder in my organization? And, um, of course skills, technical things are still important. Um, you know, skills on the product management side, still really important talent on the product management side. So really important, but, um, getting at these character traits, this is what's going to really determine whether this person is, is, um, is, is majorly successful in your organization going forward. It's a great predictor. So when we, when good, maybe a good moment to define behavioral interviews. Um, so I, by the way, I agree, I agree with all that. Um, and I think it equally applies to engineering and product and, um, a lot of these functions. So that's a good kind of already learned something is definitely true. And one thing I'll say, just like quick shout out to the engineering culture at Facebook is I think Facebook has always, as far as at least when, at least when I was there, rewarded engineers, um, largely for the non-code contributions for like pushing project forward, projects forward and driving stuff. So I think that's, it's cool that the company already has a headstart in that sense. Um, so, okay. So when we talk about behavioral interviews, you know, when I think about almost like if we follow a quick, like candidate journey, what comes to mind for me when I think of behavioral interviews are, you know, maybe like in a recruiter screen depends on the company can be a bit of a behavioral interview. They might ask you, tell me about yourself. What are you looking for next? So I'd consider that's probably the first one in a typical loop. Then some companies, there's like a screening round, maybe a case of some kind or an assignment, then a hiring manager or a hiring manager, and then some more investment. But definitely I would consider most hiring manager rounds for sure to be behavioral in nature. You know, they might have a case element that might be associated with what they are, but there's always going to be like, repeat, tell me about yourself kind of thing and what you're looking for next and why, maybe why our company or what's the boat about this opportunity is interesting for you. All these little, you know, layups, right. For someone who's excited to go into a behavioral interview. And then you've got this last bucket. I would, well, maybe not last bucket, but like third bucket, which is the maybe cross-functional behavioral interviews. So like, you know, for PMs, there's often like a cross-functional with engineering or design. And it's like, how do you like to work with engineering and design or whatever those kinds of behavioral interviews tell me about a time or whatever. And then I'd say there's maybe like that last bucket in my head, at least, which is the maybe like an executive, like you're meeting an executive or someone's just doing kind of like a last check with you before they kind of move forward. And that's also obviously, maybe it's a cell call in some companies, it's a cell call, but like, it's another chance to like, tell your story, get them excited about you. Is there any other kind of behavioral interview that I might be overlooking that you guys. There's two, there's two types. So one of them would be, it's similar to one you already mentioned, but just to make it explicit. This team match phase at the very end. So a lot of companies who have some kind of pipeline hiring phase and they have some hiring manager interview. I mean, it fits in with how you were describing hiring manager interviews before, but often it's at the end, after you've quote unquote, passed the interview process, you have to actually pass the interview process by convincing hiring manager to take you on. So definitely that's a behavioral interview. And the other one I would say is, is any kind of project deep dives in the middle. So if you are asked to present a project that you've done in the past, this looks a lot like a behavioral interview. Sometimes it's very, there are technical aspects or there are skill based aspects that might fit specifically with a PM or design or an engineering context, but surrounding those aspects are these behavioral signals of what did you do to clarify this situation? How did you figure out the ambiguity? You know, what kind of stakeholders did you work with? And even in describing these technical bits, like these really look like hiring manager parts where you're describing the same kind of technical bits, same kind of skill and project based bits. And it's, it's really difficult to do this. So I think most people are not able to take, especially the engineers, I think to be able to take some difficult technical subject with no diagram, well, maybe with minimal diagrams, with a minimal context that we have shared about the project, no reference to code, no long time to be able to, to, to build up that kind of context and be able to explain to someone why it was this difficult to do and how did I approach it and what were the options I considered and then why this was the right one and then what happened in the end. That kind of skill is a, is a behavioral interview skill. So yeah, those would be the two things I would add to your list. But Ben, what about like, for example, like the culture interview at Anthropic or values interview at DoorDash, like, would you, would you put those in under the like cross-functional like alignment type of thing, or would you put them in like a whole like category on its own? Cause those are the ones I would consider those behavioral, those are good additions because like, well, Anthropic is, as far as I know, the only one and I'm excited to see if there may be, end up being more, but like where there's like this company wide culture interview, but I definitely would consider that behavioral, although it's like the laws of physics in that behavioral interview feel kind of different than a lot of like traditional. It's like more philosophical. Yeah. And I know, by the way, I'm starting to hear open AI is doing something. They're not exactly calling it the culture interview though, as explicitly as Anthropic is, but it's like the kind of stuff that, that I'm, I'm, I'm hearing some signal that open AI is starting to do some of this too, but like, anyways. And then, yeah, the values, the values one, I put the DoorDash is like values interview and like their retrospective interview is kind of like in this very similar bucket because they're both kind of like talking about past experience through, but with slightly different rubrics, like their value. Yeah. I would totally include the culture round. It's such a fascinating piece of, of, of interviewing science, I guess, selection science, I, I, I am really curious to see other people who will start to mimic this Anthropic round, given the Anthropic's attractiveness. We saw in the past, you know, in the last 20 years where these FANG company interview practices get spread around to start startups spread around to midsize companies for better or worse, right? Sometimes you just look at these big companies and you think, oh, they're doing this thing, so I'm going to do the same thing. And I think it'll be interesting to see how many people start to, to pair at that culture round. I think that one is certainly a behavioral interview. And I, I would latch onto what you said about how the laws of physics are changing within this interview. And I think in the past behavioral interviews were, you know, we would coach people to be pretty rigid in their response structure and try to be very focused and what they have conversations about. This is where you get all this training about STAR, right? Situation, task, action, result. And, and still, you know, if you going into behavioral interview tomorrow, that's all you have, I think that's, you know, that's go with that, right? That, that does work. It does tell a story arc. Um, but I do think in general, people are moving, uh, they want to see more in-depth conversations, more in-depth, uh, responses. It's almost like we have gotten used to a STAR response. And so now we're looking for something deeper. And certainly in this culture round, we're looking for more of a real conversation between, between you and the, and the interviewer about what your true values are. And I think that the other place where that, that, that lies, laws of physics or physics are changing for that one is I think personal stories were almost, you know, verboten like in, in other behavioral interview contexts, like don't tell me about a conflict you had with your wife in some, in hiring manager round, right? This would just not be appropriate to do. Um, but I think in the culture round for anthropic, it, it, it, you can drop into this, this personal experience one, because they're looking for more again, like I've talked about before, they're trying to leverage this, who you are as a person in order to, to predict how you'll perform inside the company. And of course, how you perform in personal context is part of who you are. Um, so that, that is another way it's changing, but I'm really interested to see what people do. And then I'm interested to see over time, I have kind of like, um, maybe I have a somewhat cynical view possibly, but, um, it is really difficult to conduct good behavioral interviews. I think you have to truly know yourself as an interviewer. I think you have to truly know the company and what the role requires and what makes, makes or breaks success inside the company. And so as companies scale and more and more people do behavioral interviews, um, it's much harder to do them well. And it's, it's tactically even very difficult. So how do you listen to someone's responses, have, uh, choose, choose whether to go deeper into that response or to, to shift gears and ask something else to make sure that you're covering the breadth of signal that you originally planned to cover, um, while also listening intently and trying to be a good representative of the company. It's quite tactically difficult to be a good behavioral interview, interviewer, and then to conduct this culture round and to have anything intelligent, insightful to say about someone's true values in 45, 60 minutes. It's like, uh, you have to be a pretty good therapist, like pretty good philosopher for that one. And I'm curious to see how that will scale. And I think there's is like 30 minutes is most of the culture rounds are atropics, like 30 minutes. You've got a few minutes in the beginning, a few minutes at the end for a small talk or whatever. Uh, I recently had someone go through that round, very experienced person and who interviewed them as someone who's like a few years out of college. It just happened to be who got assigned to their culture interview. Right. They got trained up on the interview internally. I've been at the company a few years and boom, boom, there you go. Um, and so, yeah, for my hiring, for my hiring committees, I would never allow, um, anyone less than, uh, sta senior to do perform to do a behavioral interviews. I know that on the generalist pipeline, they would allow, uh, like, uh, mid level engineers to conduct, um, behavioral interviews, especially for like junior engineers. But I, I, I said, no, I'm not going to do that. And then I resisted forces that would sort of want me to scale the interviewer pool and, and, and, and reduce the load on the behavioral interviewers, just because I think this one is such a, there's a judgment and a wisdom element that's required in this. And you just have to have lived some life in order to do this well. Now, Austin, what is the main flavor of behavioral interview that is used for engineers at, at Meta? Just to, I'm realizing I actually don't, don't know. Is there one? I mean, it's called the real interview. Yes, there is one. And it's typically built around, um, uh, four or five different signal areas that they have identified. And the, uh, these are typically assessed via tell me about a timestamp question. So now, as you go up in seniority, as you get into the very high level ICs principle and above, or if you get into the, um, uh, leadership rounds, of course, there are additional types of interviews that they give you. Cross-functional, project deep dive, like these are the two different types that are generally added. And then there, I think you will see more assessment around hypotheticals. You'll see more kind of like tell me about your leadership philosophy, like these kinds of, uh, more generalized philosophical questions start to approach or start to appear in those interviews that don't appear in the IC interviews. Makes sense. And yeah, definitely want to get into some like tangible kind of wisdom and advice for people. But before we do that, one thing that came to mind is like, I think your point about not letting someone who doesn't have a lot of experience and wisdom, not run the behavioral interviews makes a ton of sense. And, you know, I think Ben and I have been coming across like stories where just not great things happen when there's a mishmash of experience. Like I think someone might not be able to realize, Hey, this person might be too senior for this role or this level. Right. Or, or even like, it just feels weird, right? Like someone who's doing a cultural interview that's like clearly doesn't have that much experience. So I'm curious, like if you find yourself in an interview where that is the case, is there anything you can do? Like, can you like be like, Hey, this, this feels a little bit off, like it is without backfiring. Cause like, you know, you can come across as like, Oh, I'm too good for this. Or I'm, you know, like, or I'm like, I think I'm, you know, I know better than you guys, but yeah, that's all that I've just been thinking a lot about is like, is there anything that you can do to avoid the situation? Yeah. Let's, let's talk about what your role as a candidate is. As a candidate, your job is to guide the interviewer towards the parts of your career that provide the most signal to allow them to predict how you will perform inside of the job. That's your, that's your, that's your job. Your job is not to answer the questions. Okay. That's people's mindset. It's a big mindset failure, right? I'm just going to go in and answer the question. The question is about a time when I had a conflict with a product manager. I'm going to find a time when I had a conflict with a product manager. I'm gonna give it to them and that's what I'm going to do. And then as long as I answer the questions, I'm good, right? I think that is a common failure mode that even senior candidates can get into. And really your job as an, as a candidate is to guide people towards the most useful signal. So for you to look into the question, I call it decode, select, and then, uh, and deliver, that's my little framework for, for how to, your little loop, little internal loop that you're running. And when you're in a candidate inside of behavioral interview, so you need to decode the question. What is the question about? Okay. This question is about conflict resolution. This question is also about conflict resolution with somebody that might be different from you. Right. And maybe you do have a story with a product manager. Maybe you don't. Right. Um, and then the idea is that you can, might be able to deliver the story that you don't have, that you didn't have a conflict with a product manager. Maybe that's a great story because it, it, it still demonstrates the same kind of signal that the interview is looking for. So how do you apply this kind of thinking to a situation where you might have an interviewer that's less experienced or first off, how would you know that? Well, uh, you know, of course you can look at their past experience, right? Maybe you know something about their profile. The other thing is inside the interview. I would typically say that an interviewer who is inexperienced is going to be somebody who's going to asking a lot of like very specific questions, going down a list, like I got a list of questions and I got to go down their list. I'm not going to ask a lot of followups, right? They're just going to sort of go check. They have a little checklist that they're working through. That's super common for, for early behavioral interviewers in their career. And so for you, if you notice that you're in this kind of interview, then your job is to try to expand the conversation, to share a little bit more about your past experience, share more about that particular project, to give them more notes, basically, that they can write down for this particular question. So if someone asks me, if I'm noticed, I'm just getting a bunch of questions that are very tactical or very specific. And they asked me this question about conflict. I might try to provide more context about this project if I haven't had a chance and say like, oh, this project has like lots of different places where I was able to move the needle, able to align stakeholders, a lot of interesting conversation there, able to solve some hard technical problems, you know, able to, to lead cross-functionally here with this team, with that team. And then there was this interesting conflict that I had with the product manager and answer their question, right? Because they are looking for some kind of specific thing, but try to entice them and try. a specific thing, but try to entice them and try to guide them more towards this other parts of your career and other parts of the stories that might give them a lot of signal. That's one thing to do. I think the other thing to do is like you said, or like you were hinting at, do talk to the recruiter afterwards and say like, oh, I feel like this conversation didn't go super deep. I feel like I didn't get a chance to share this, this, and this, and this, and this, and try to provide that context to the recruiter. And hopefully the recruiter will give you an opportunity if they see a challenge with that round, give you an opportunity for a follow up. And I think if you express that, oftentimes the recruiter will try to find somebody else to give you a more in depth. And certainly hiring committees, we would look for that. We look for opportunities to do follow ups, to fill gaps that the interviewer had. I kind of like advocating for yourself is what I'm hearing is like, make sure you get a fair shake is almost like, you know, it's not going to get you then the passing score for the interview, but at least it'll give you your day in court to kind of tell your story in a way that is received, well, be able to generate the signals that you think are important. Right, right. Your job, again, is to provide that signal. And ideally, once all of your career is on display in front of the hiring committee, then they'll make a decision whether or not this is the best, you know, you're the best fit for this particular role. If they were able to watch you, you know, do your job for a few years, that would be like the best behavioral interview possible. And but we can't do that. It's not possible. So paint that picture in a really efficient and effective way of what all those things, those places where I have done, done things in the past that I could do in the future. That's your job as a candidate. Yeah. Yeah. And what I really love. Go ahead, Mark. Yeah. No, I'm just gonna make like a closing remark is that I think, to me, the really powerful message there is that I think candidates have more agency over their process and over their interviews that they might think, I think a lot of them, they're like, oh, this happened. I'm screwed. Right. So there's so many, even if like, you know, like a great candidate that knows and understands how to play the game, you know, would kind of realize they have agency even at different points of the interview. Right. Like in the beginning, there'll be like, hey, like, even though this candidate or this interviewer might not be super experienced, I have the agency to almost decide how I conduct myself in this interview to help them, help them help me basically. Right. And then also you have the agency after the interview to like, be like, hey, by the way, like, just, you might want to know this, like, this happened and I, and it also shows self-awareness too. Right. So like, and I think a lot of times people just kind of let them put themselves as a passenger of the process without thinking that they can do anything about it. Yeah. It's why we spend so much time as coaches on. No, no, go ahead. Go ahead. I said, it's why we spend so much time on tell me about yourself, right? It's going to be a trite kind of thing. Oh yeah, of course. Like a behavioral interview coach is going to spend the time on telling about yourself. Why is that? It's the first thing out of your mouth. Right. And then you got, you're going to set, plant some flags in the interview and where you want to go. And especially a junior interview, they might jump on those flags. Oh, sounds like great projects to talk about. Let's talk about those projects. Right. So the fact that you have thought about that and you've thought about what you want the, what you want the interviewer to take away from the interview after you're done and you're planning those flags in the very beginning of that time about yourself, that means you're going to be able to provide that kind of a signal by the end of your time to get this. So yeah. So super important. Yeah. Yeah. Plus one, the agency thing recently had a very impressive person that I know go through interviews and I'm getting the job offer and I was debriefing and they told me that they were asked, you know, there's an area, this company, and they're like, tell me how you built this, this team in the past and like one of her past experiences. And instead of like, that's so easy, just, okay, I can just tell them about how I built that team. This candidate flipped to your point, said, why don't I just, I can tell you about that, like, why don't I tell you how I built this team? Right. Cause like, you know, she's so stout, like they're trying to figure out how can I, well, how would I approach this? Like, well, why don't we just talk about this and I've given it a lot of thought. And I, I was really impressed cause honestly, sorry, as a candidate, that sounds kind of scary to like, it's a big, it's a big risk, but it kind of, it was one of those things where my light bulb as she was telling me the story is like, Hmm, I wonder if anyone's ever done that and that with that interviewer, right? It's so it's like an immediately a way that like, Oh, something's different about this person. But then also obviously if you have the quality of thinking to back it up, so you take this, this calculated risk and then you steer the conversation towards how you built this particular team and you have good ideas and stuff, it shows you've thought about it a lot. It's almost like the upside of that is higher. You've created a higher ceiling for how, how well you could do in that interview than having just answered. No, no. Even with a 10 out of 10 answer for like the past, you know, the past, the past, you'll never have had that high of a, of a score in that interview as if you steered it. And you killed two birds with one stone. Yeah. Right. I will drop in. Not that I, not that I think this tactic, this tactic works really well, especially in our culture, like our Silicon Valley kind of tech culture where we are expecting people to grab the bull by the horns, you know, go for it, do it, right. Change the, change the brain, you know, be different, right. Think different, right. This is like our favorite, everybody's favorite, uh, you know, advertising campaign. So I think that that works really well in our, in our industry. I will say that scientifically the hypothetical question, so if you're an interviewer and you're asking someone, what do I, do I choose to ask about the past or do I choose to ask about some hypothetical future? It is slightly more predictive to ask about the past. And I think that you get a little bit less kind of like BS book smarts kind of interview kind of signal on somebody when you ask about what they've actually done in the past and why. I think it is harder for people to kind of, um, you know, lead you along as if they're more competent than they really are when they have to tell a story about the past. So, but I, I mean, I love this tactic of the interviewer. I don't want to take away from that. And I do think that that is what the interviewer wants to see in that situation. They are using your response to predict how you'll do in the future. Um, but yes, as just as an interviewer, sometimes it can be more predictive to look at the past and then look at the future. The other thing that I've heard too, like another reason why to anchor it in the past is then you can also use references to like check, right? Like whether that or that's not. And I think it's way harder to do that in a hypothetical, right? Yeah. But this leadership signal where you are thinking, you're coming into the interview thinking about how you will do the job. I really recommend that for any, any candidate who's out there. Big coaching moment for a lot of my candidates that I'm, I'm, I'm working with a lot of my clients I'm working with is, is helping them think about how will you do this job once you're on the other side, right? Spend a little bit of time thinking about that. There may be an opportunity inside of the process for you to, to share that. And then that is, that is a great signal, right? For that, that's ownership we're talking about earlier, earlier, you're taking ownership over the role even before you show up. That's great. Yeah. What, I mean, Ben, I'm not sure if you had a direction in mind here, but I think one thing that it's very clear at the start of this conversation is that, you know, like probably behavioral interviews are like, kind of like the most common type of interviews. And I think they're like, you know, like in the world for sure in the world. Right. And I think also even in tech, right? Like there's all these different points where it's actually like a flavor of behavioral interviews. So, and given how universal they are, right? Like I'm wondering if it might be helpful and Austin, feel free to like steer us one way or the other of like, what are some basic things that everyone should do that will like put them ahead of the curve and to prepare for these things. And I'm not sure if it's like helpful to answer this as a generalized one, or maybe like it's better to separate it into like buckets. No, for sure. Well, I mean, a lot of, a lot of things you can do. So certainly the most important thing is to, for you to understand who you are and for you to spend your time going through your past, your past career, building a set of stories that really represent you. I think oftentimes people will start with like, okay, I'm going to go online, chat GBT, you know, Claude, kind of generate a bunch of questions, answer a bunch of questions. Right. That has some value, honestly. It's not like it has no value. But I think that is not. I wouldn't start there. I wouldn't start there. No, no. In fact, that's kind of like the middle of most of my clients process when they're getting ready. The beginning is typically understanding who you are, finding out what are those core stories that you really want to tell. Hey, it's a 45 minute behavioral interview. At the end, if you have told, you know, this X number of stories, you would feel like you've given the interviewer the best opportunity for them to see who you are and to be able to predict how you'll perform in the role. That's the first thing. And then we can talk about how to structure those things and how to talk about each one of those things. But that's the most important thing. After that, to get to our, like, you know, Claude, the question thing, oftentimes we do need to look at question lists and see, all right, is there any question or any area of that the interviewer is going to assess? And oftentimes the recruiter gives you a set of a rubric or a set of signal areas that they collect, or you can find them on the internet. Then what kind of questions would I get for those signal areas? And making sure that you can either pair them with one of your existing stories, or maybe you need to do some additional brainstorm. So I say, got to have a corpus of core stories and these additional stories to map to these long tail questions. And then it's a matter of practicing those two other skills, select and deliver, right? So given a question, how do I choose which one? And we can talk about, oh, like, you should probably choose the one with the highest scope. That's probably the most interesting one to choose. Make sure you get those core stories out before the end of the interview, but also thinking about relevance and how do you think about old stories versus new stories and lots of conversation about that. And then there's some kind of deliver tactics. How do we go about structuring these stories? And the biggest thing for probably for your audience who are typically maybe product managers, they're more senior, they have long stories, right, is finding a way to structure those core stories in a way where the takeaways are really obvious. So build a table of contents where each chapter is something about something the interviewer can take away about you. Hey, you know, in this part of the story, I'm going to tell you about how I, you know, worked with stakeholders to generate alignment across this, you know, a large organization, right? Okay, cool, interesting. Generated, you know, generated alignment across large organizations, right? That's what the interviewer is writing down. So you need to come across, you need to identify what are those key inflection points where you made the difference and you contributed to the project in a way that's relevant for the interviewers. And then being able to tell that story and practice telling that story, you know, from start to finish. And then, you know, after that, I think we can talk about how to structure other stories. And especially there's nuance around like telling conflict stories and what are the specific signals that people want to hear? To hear out of conflict stories, or maybe it's practicing those technical stories. This is more for engineers, but it oftentimes we do need to practice this kind of like, hey, what, how do you describe this caching problem in a way that doesn't, you know, overwhelm the listener because they have no contact. So a lot of things to do and to check out. I mean, I have a whole book on it. Like you said, go check it out. I have a bunch of sub stack articles you can read all about it. But yeah, a lot of things to do. I want to take a moment before we get back to the episode to tell you about Insider Loops. This is a company that Mark and I started because we just believe this should exist. Companies should be offering candidates the best possible preparation for their loops. Yet what they give them is vague and often not very actionable. So we took the matter into our own hands. We've put together well researched and continuously updated guides for PMs interviewing at companies like Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Stripe, DoorDash, and more. If you're getting ready for PM interviews at those companies, go over to insiderloops.com and learn more. It's a lonely time to be a product leader. The role keeps changing. There's AI hype everywhere and people look to you for answers. And that's why I created Supra, an invite only community for senior product leaders and the partner of this podcast. And fun fact, I met Ben when he joined Supra. When you join, we match you with seven peers at your level on company stage. You can be honest about the problems you're facing and learn from people who've handled similar challenges in a fully confidential space. That can help you get to a solution much faster. Learn more at joinsupra.com. Now back to the episode. Yeah, no, I think that and we'll link to all those in the show notes for sure. One thing I love about what you just said is that it starts with like, you know, know thyself. That's kind of like the most important starting point for these interviews. And then I think building out your story bank, I kind of tell people if they're not sure how to build a story bank, like basically like look at your LinkedIn, create a chronological timeline from like when you graduated to like when you're where you are today. Like almost like little boxes around each chapter, like key chapter. And then the kind of things to get the juice flowing, or I think it's really important to understand why you made different transitions. So like, why did I go from this job to this job? Why did I go from this job to this job? You might not get asked about that, but it's really important to be able to tell me like why you made, why you went from this to the next one. Ideally you do so in a way that has some kind of theme, thematic continuity to it. Right, even if the theme is like back applied, you know, you're like, well, yeah, that's okay too. Yeah, totally. Totally. I mean, again, this is, and this is the storytelling art, right? Like you're taking control of your story. Like what happened? I'm not saying lie, but I'm saying is like, and this is actually teeing me up to my question for you is one of the things that I've learned putting together our Insider Loops guides, for example, is how each company really does have its own unique culture and kind of like values. And therefore, even though you might be telling, like if someone, if someone buys, you know, all eight of our guides, for example, and they're going to interview with all eight companies, it's not that I would tell them to change necessarily which conflict story they use or which difficult thing or which thing you're proud of story they use. But the way that they present that story, I think is generally it's, it's important to keep in mind the culture of the company that you're interviewing at, because some companies might, you know, value we statements, and some companies, some companies might penalize we statements, and some companies might really want to hear the I statements, right? And other way around, or, you know, some companies might really reward someone who's great at working horizontally and getting a lot of teams on the same page versus other companies might be like, you're too collaborative. We need people that just kind of go at it, you know? So I think, yeah. And then also, can I add something there too, like there's, I mean, I think there's the nuance of the company culture, but also the nuance of your story, right? For example, like a common story that we see a lot is someone who used to be a people leader that now is going into an IC role, right? Like, I think companies are going to be extra receptive for like, you know, what have you executed versus what has your team executed, right? So like, there's all these, there's almost like you need to know yourself, but you also need to like have full radical empathy for what the concerns that the company has and who the company is, and then kind of like, use those two things, which I think is like a really kind of interesting dance. And I think this is really, you know, not to plug ourselves for a minute here, but I think this is why engaging with experts about these different companies and engaging with behavioral interview experts in particular is really valuable. So like this Insider Loops product that you guys have, I've used it, it's good. They're not paying me to say this. But like, I think that you do need to have this kind of insight on and compare this with your past experience in order to be able to answer those questions. So I know a super common one that maybe we haven't thought about very much because, you know, maybe these traditional big tech FANG jobs have been the destination for a lot of people. And so we have thought maybe in the past about the difference between a traditional enterprise, like a bank and a FANG company. And maybe a bank is very structured and, you know, very compliant oriented. And then a FANG maybe move fast and break things kind of kind of vibe. Right. And people are familiar with that kind of cultural change. But then when you start talking about the Frontier Labs, I think that's another change, right? Another cultural change. So one of those is going to be about this flattening of the organization. And so when we have these conversations about, I have these conversations with engineers and they're very senior, you know, principal level engineers. They're going to tell me about all this like three year project that they worked on at this big tech company and how they aligned all the things and they think this is a great story and they think it's communicating great signal. And it is for that kind of role. But then I have to remind them like, you know what, this project took longer than this company that you're applying for. It doesn't even existed. So I'm not sure that this is like the best story or the best way to present this story. You definitely want to lean into the like amount of time that it took in order to accomplish this task. Right. And so I think that it's almost like the clock speed of your story has to match the clock speed of the company that you're interviewing at in a way. Exactly. Yes. And the kinds of words. Right. And this is where it can be really difficult for people who are outside, let's say outside Silicon Valley, to break into a Silicon Valley company because of the, you know, procurement or whatever, not procurement, that process doesn't exist inside of these companies. And so I think that those kinds of subtle cultural signals are reasons to engage in either a podcast like this one where you talk to people who are in the industry, you listen to podcasts who are leaders at the company or you're targeting and then engaging in this kind of like, you know, professionally curated content like all of us have. Yeah. So, OK, so going back, so we talked about kind of like know thyself, create a story bank, map out your past experiences and your transitions, hit on, I tell people like the key kind of like wins or accomplishments in each of those chapters, as well as maybe like the most challenging parts of it or the most difficult things. I also like to throw in there from a personal reflection perspective for people, especially if they're trying to figure out what they want to do next. What did I enjoy the most? Like what was the most fun part of each job for me and what was the most kind of like pain in the ass part of each job that felt like it was draining my life energy out of me? Because I would, you know, if you find a great job that pays you a lot of money, but you're miserable, like I think we'd all generally agree that's probably not a win depending again, depending on your goals. But for most people, I'd say like that's not that's not a huge win. They want the money and they want to love what they do. So and then, Austin, do you like to. So once people have all of that figured out and then they have all that almost like documented or written down, is that kind of do you think a good moment to start to maybe reach out to a coach and kind of figure out like should they already have the interviews on the books before they come to someone like like like a behavioral interview coach or do you think it's good for them to come before? Yeah, so I think that having that coming in is really helpful and a number of my clients do. I would say that there are some clients who actually need help producing that. They don't oftentimes those are very senior clients. They don't know which projects are the most relevant for the company that they're targeting. So a little bit of conversation about that, even to to maybe to to rank the stories within their their their like story bank. But yes, I think that's a really good starting place in terms of when to come in. Honestly, most people, I'll tell you, most will come in when they have a scheduled interview and it's in the next two weeks. And I think that that is a mistake. So I can help them. That's when people come to me too. Yeah, we help them. I'm able to help them out. But sometimes there's a lot of scrambling there at the end. And I think especially if you are applying for one of these companies where culture is a really important part, certainly Anthropic, where this culture round requires you to know who you are and go journal by a lake about your like time when you had to make a tough moral choice. That is not something that you can just pop out in the interview on the fly. So I think that to me, working for about a month or a month or two is generally good for people who are in that like senior to staff range. I think if you're in the principal and above, usually you're preparing for multiple rounds here. So you're not just this hiring manager round, but this cross-functional round, like we talked about or this deep dive round. And here you are, you're going to need usually at least one time just to practice it all the way through kind of a mock session and then probably some kind of strategy session before that. So here we are looking at like three or four interviews. Here we are looking at, you know, six to eight sessions. So it doesn't matter how hard you want to work between these sessions. Plus the fact that we all know that for engineers, of course, and for product managers and for designers for any of these roles, there are technical rounds or there are skill oriented rounds, right, specific skill rounds that you're also preparing for at the same time. And so I think that having multiple months is really the people who had the most success. You know, they start pretty early. So even if you are in a role right now and you're thinking, I might interview, I think that was a good time to start with a behavioral interview coach, especially since those kinds of artifacts that you're generating, that kind of skill that you're building there, that will last. It ages well, right? Like the stories that you build now, you can use those stories months from now, once you get to the rounds. Plus, like we talked about before, there are these very, they can come very fast. These early rounds, time with the recruiter when you talk about your past and make sure that you compare what's in the job description and what the company wants with what you see, right? Then oftentimes right after that, they'll schedule a screen with the hiring manager. And here you are, you're on, right? Here's the behavioral interview. So if you haven't done this work over the past few months, you can't just wait until the onsites are scheduled. So yeah, do it, do it early. Because I think if we can think even earlier, right, like if someone is listening to this podcast and they're currently happy at their job, but they know that they will probably not be there forever, like what should anyone be doing on a day-to-day basis to make sure that they have good stuff to show for when they need it? It's one of those things that like, you know, you're like, oh shit, I wish I had documented that better. Like, I'm like, what should they do? Exactly, right. And that's exactly, that's exactly it. So take your time once a month or whatever it is, whatever cadence you want to do it. Write down someplace that's not stored on the company servers, since we know that that can disappear at any moment. Write down this thing that where, where you were, you know, contributions, what you've what you've done, what your bright spots were, what your failures were, right? Don't forget about those as well. The challenges, the difficulties, because a number of this, of this, of this, a big chunk of this preparation time is just remembering, you know, what, what are these things from the past and, and what were the important parts and what were the numbers and all those things. I would highly recommend you also save your performance, any kind of performance review information, anything that the company gives you. Oftentimes that's stuck within. company gives you, oftentimes that's stuck within their servers, right? So if you were laid off, um, you know, God forbid that wouldn't go away immediately, right? So make sure that you're saving those things and having that regular kind of the way that I, that it's been called a number of things, but the one that I like the best is the yay me file. Yay me, here's this file. I'm going to write down all the things I did. Maybe that helps you as well. Of course, for, you know, performance seasons coming around for most people in a couple of months here. So you start getting ready for that and it's just pre-writing for that. So it's beneficial all around. Go ahead and do it. Yeah. I think it's a good question, Mark, because like in this market, a lot of the, I think we've talked in some previous episodes about there's like a tale of two cities. There's like a bunch of people that are struggling to get offers. And there's like a very small percentage of the talent pool. That's like, you know, they can dictate their own terms right now. Um, a lot of the people that are somewhere towards the top end of that distribution and attractiveness in the market may find themselves getting a, uh, ping from a recruiter from a, not looking to interview, but they get a ping from a recruiter. And before you know it, they're like, if I want to go forward, I got to be ready in like two weeks. So same, same, you know, it's, it's, it's very stressful for people that have basically not done any, any of this prep when that happens, because they have a great opportunity, um, available and they're basically completely ill-equipped to get started on that timeline. I think it's worth jumping in here, right? So I think there's some aspects of behavioral interviews that are changing and that we haven't talked about yet. Right. And then some, if you haven't interviewed for a while, you might be somewhat surprised, so we've talked about these additional rounds. And one thing I didn't say explicitly, but, uh, is that, uh, especially for engineers, I don't know about product management, I'd be curious to see what you guys think, but for engineers, some of these, um, uh, what I would typically consider more advanced behavioral interviews, like project deep dive in particular, we would only give this at Meta to, um, you know, senior staff and above kind of folks. Wouldn't give it to senior folks, wouldn't give it to like mid-level folks, but we're seeing companies push this interview into their process. And again, it goes back to what we talked about before, where this is what the job is now, it's more system design oriented, it's more ownership oriented, they want to collect more of those signals in the interviews. So Anthropic, OpenAI, for example, have this, uh, uh, project deep dive. And so the more you can collect about the projects that you've done, it's better prepared to be for that. Another big change that you're going to see is that of course, um, you know, in this tale of two cities, the market, the recruiting market is flooded with very, very, um, experienced candidates. We understand that. And a lot of, of, of layoffs, tough situation out there. So the volume of candidates is very high. And so some companies are turning more towards automated screens, right? And they look like a couple of different things. Probably the biggest one that most of our audience might encounter would be the, um, Google hiring assessment, which is a kind of situational judgment test, like a formal word for like a, um, selection science thing, like a, uh, a way to give an interview, right? And it's an online assessment where you answer a bunch of questions. The way that I've heard it described by someone is like kind of HR questions. Like, would you, if, if ever, you know, if someone came to you and they offered to share this confidential full, you know, file for XYZ, like what would you do? Right. And I think, um, that can be a little disconcerting for most, um, especially if you're in a, in a position where you've been highly sought after in the past, like an engineer or product manager or designer, any, any of this, um, you know, multi-legged stool that we talk about on product teams. We were used to being in demand, right? And that has been our, our, our persona in the past. Um, but you need to be ready for some of these, um, more automated experiences and make sure that you research the, the, um, the process, the hiring process and go, and I don't just go in and do it, but go look on Reddit, you know, go check out some of the resources that we have, and, um, that'll really help you with those kinds of experiences. Um, so those, those sorts of changes are things to be, you know, be aware of as you're, as you're about to go through the process. Yeah. So the two big ones sounds like kind of like more retrospectives on previous projects and being able to like go deep into decisions, go deep into like things that you would have done differently, almost like being able to like, remember like key moments and kind of explain, be able to explain why the things went that way. Right. And then the other one is like, almost like this new medium of interviews that are maybe a little bit unique. Yeah, be ready for scaled interviews. Exactly. And I forgot one, I forgot one. This is the reason, actually the reason why I came up with this was for this particular one, which is because of, uh, because of AI, right? So in the past, you, you know, five years ago, three years ago, maybe the last time you interviewed, you were not going to be asked questions like, how have you been leveraging AI in your role? But you will definitely be asked this question, uh, throughout multiple, you know, multiple rounds. So having a clear picture of how you are delivering, um, things that you haven't been able to deliver before via AI, how you've been able to build trust with AI products that you've, that you've been working with and where are the boundaries and of course that's always changing, right? So you have to be able to have some sense of how you're keeping up with, um, you know, the latest developments in AI, what does that look like for you? Have you been trying things, you know, have you been reading stuff, whatever? And then ideally you're, you're able to talk about, um, you know, how you've been improving your AI process over time, right? And then, and then even for senior folks, especially how you've been able to, to scale that kind of AI, uh, experience to people around you, right? So how have, how have you gone beyond your own self to training the team or, you know, guiding the folks around you to, to improve their effectiveness at using AI? So this whole like talk about AI thing is, um, you know, again, we talked to in the past, but don't prepare for specific questions, but it's very likely you're going to get questions about AI. So that one, I think I would put some time into. Can I ask a follow-up here? Um, because, or yeah, it sounds like, so from what we're seeing on the product site, and I'm curious, Ben, if you agree, is that I think we're probably thinking about the same, the same follow-up here. Yeah. Like we, we're not really seeing that many PMs getting asked how you use AI. Um, and in fact, what we're seeing that's really interesting is that take-homes are almost becoming in, in a way, the way people test how you're using AI. And because of that, that's also becoming like a behavioral interview in a way. Cause like, you can really learn a lot about someone, about how they, um, how much agency they take, how well they, they use this tools, like how deep they go into things, like, are they really just letting, are they like accepting the slop that AI is putting, or are they really getting behind what they do? Uh, like seeing that dissonance. And so, so I think that's, that's really interesting. I do think that, I think that almost helps answer like how proficient you are with AI and, and how like resourceful and how much leverage you get out of it. But I think that the part of that feels missing in some PM interviews, and I think maybe that's gets covered in some of the leadership rounds is like, how good are you at change management? Cause I think like any day, like AI implementation is just like a new flavor of change management and, and that's really just the hard part about it. Yeah. It's not like, yeah, I would say a couple of things. Oh, go ahead. Go ahead, Ben. No, no, I agree with Mark. I think it's like the, the single player mode version of using AI to do great work that's defensible and, um, you know, logical and rational and such, uh, while showing obviously like fluency of the tools is I think what comes through the take home, we recently had an episode with, uh, Eric Pozen, who's a member of the Supra community who talked about, you know, he got three offers in, uh, six weeks and out of the seven companies that he interviewed with, none of them had an explicit AI fluency evaluation round, which even though many of them would, you know, basically consider themselves AI native, you know, or AI fluid kind of companies. And so I, I think Mark and I are, are, have been formulating this hypothesis of the take home is kind of like where that's getting evaluated, but what's different about engineering, which might explain, and then Austin, I'll tee you up to say whatever you're going to say after this, uh, is like maybe in engineering, um, there's almost like something that's like inherently like, it's, it's like, we know for sure that engineers need to very specifically have opinions on how they work with AI because the AI is replacing so much of the engineer's job where I would say maybe this is hubris, but I think for most PMs, we would say that the PM job, it's like large parts of the PM job have not necessarily been so clearly displaced by AI as they have for engineering. So maybe that's why like we're seeing in engineering interviews. Yeah. That would be my thought. Yeah, that would be my thought. And I would say that the, essentially they use the word thing, single player, because I think more engineering teams are moving towards a single player model in some ways where the engineer owns, you know, or whoever the builder, right. Owns more and more vertical context. I mean, I heard about medium sized companies where the fan out reporting fan out is like 200 people underneath this VP, right? Like one layer of 200 people, right. And that has its own problems. We're going to talk about whether or not you can really get rid of managers. But I think this, at least as the ethos though, that is the wave that we're, we're riding. And so, yes, I do think that, that of course we do have take homes, right. Or even AI debugging rounds. That's really common right now. Like at Anthropic where you're given a bunch of AI generated pull requests and you're asked to assess them and they're here, they're assessing on the ground, you know, whether you're able to work with AI generated output and how you use the chatbot in order to, to help you with that super, super, super relevant. The other thing I would call out is, I mean, the, I don't know if you guys have seen this on the PM side is that the, there is now people starting to collect some product oriented signal from engineers via various rounds. So like even having a DoorDash is like a product design kind of round where there's a conversation about, you know, what would you do, how would you advance this particular product, right? And here you are leveraging these product skills that have traditionally been siloed in the PM function. And I, I think I know, I know PMs as well have been, there's a building round, right, where you're having to build something on the other side. And the idea is to demonstrate your product sense, right, and your ability to move the product forward. But here you are actually producing some engineering artifact in order to do that. So I think that, of course, this is just further evidence that the, the, the roles are convolving. Yeah. I mean, we are seeing, we are seeing, well, it's interesting. Like we're seeing, there's, I'm just thinking of for some reason, like the product sense with, I guess they called it initially product sense with vibe coding. I think I just saw a guy that calls it product sense with prototyping, which is the product management interview at MetaNow, like one of the new ones they're testing as part of the central products loop, and we're seeing Instagram, people going for Instagram, like product staff roles at a certain level are now having to also go through that even though Instagram is not in central products. So I think that's a predictor of where like large, like the, the whole body of interviews at Meta is probably heading. And in that interview, you know, you're, you're given kind of like the loaded gun. It's, it's, it's put on the table at the beginning of the interview. You know, here's AI, right? You still have a clock and, you know, they're trying to get through a whole classic product sense interview, but they're telling you, you could choose to reach for the gun, you know, reach for the AI. If the gun analogy sucks here, sorry, I'm not trying to trigger anyone. But like, you know, you shouldn't use the AI for every step of the interview. You gotta be really careful. And, you know, so everyone has to figure out like, when do I reach for it and how? And then obviously they're leaving time at the end for the prototyping portion. Now, I think within the product world, like if someone shows me they can whip up a prototype, maybe two years ago, I'd be like, whoa, right? Like, that's so cool. And now I'm like, okay, like, you know, I could make a couple, it would take me longer to make a cup of coffee than it would make for someone to like whip up a prototype of an idea right now. So I think maybe that's kind of like the thing that is a little different in the PM world is like, we, we, we view the prototype as almost like an easy deliverable in the context. Like in a lot of these interviews, it's something I'd say, like link out to your prototype and what you present in your take home or whatever, but like, don't be like, look how dope this prototype is. You know, it seems to me like if anything, the pendulum is swinging upstream and what's being evaluated, which is your ability to do the, do, do the right thinking about who you're going to go after, why you're going to go after that versus other audiences, and then how you're going to choose which specific opportunity or which specific problem you're going to try to solve for that audience and why versus the other options. And this wording of like, versus the alternative keep keeps coming up in these like take home assignment prompts. And so I think it's really kind of like this, um, the, the product role and the product competency that seems more valuable than ever and just increasing in value is this ability to, in a world of abundant opportunities where like you could, it's like shooting fish in a barrel. You can aim in any direction. How do you actually choose which one to go after and why, and then to tell a compelling story about that and then back it up with like prototype maybe. I think this is really where this, this larger theme of, of deepening the seniority of each role. It's almost like what you're telling me is that, is that as we're going upstream with the signal, really what you want is you want at the same level. Now we have expectations of, of, of the, of the higher level in the past. And of course that's happening at engineering as well, which is why, you know, in the past we wouldn't give junior engineers system design interviews. It just didn't make sense. Like you're never designing a system. So why am I interviewing them with this task? But now it's not true. So now we, there are a number of companies that are now starting to work some system design elements into their junior interviews, same kind of thing. It's like the expectation is, is right, is rising. And we all have to perform at a, at a more senior level than we had in the past. I'm really curious about one thing I wanted to ask this question, because I have this, I have this theory that, you know, people continue to ask about conflict resolution in behavioral interviews. And they think that this is, you know, part of what you're supposed to assess. But if teams are flattening and you're working more independently, is conflict resolutions, are conflict resolution skills more important or less important? Like in the future. What do you guys think about this from a PM perspective? Mark, I'm happy to go first. If you want to piggyback. Yeah, go. At the risk of, of, of biasing you with my take. Um, okay. So first of all, we're, we're definitely seeing it continue to ever to be present. I don't think it's going away. I think one of the reasons is that product has been always, and I suspect we'll continue to be sitting at the crux of where a lot of different business functions meet, so like incentives kind of ultimately drive people's behavior. And I think where, um, the role that is almost like confronted with a bunch of different people's, like the largest number of different people's behavior, in my opinion, is product. So I think even though we're expecting product people to move up the seniority or the leverage stack, um, that's actually, you couldn't make the case. Executives are the best at conflict resolution, you know, and they have to be the best at resolution because there's a bunch of very other executives who are like heavy hitters in their other domains and like the marketing people have a different agenda than like, you know, et cetera. So I think that's one reason why I think it's still important. And then I think on a more day-to-day basis, what's happening, at least I'm observing this and I'm not even in a company, in a corporation right now. Uh, but I even see it like Mark and I see this with each other is because the clock speed is so much faster on how quickly you can turn around work. I think your ability to, um, kind of like respond in a creative, in productive ways to other people in a world where like the amount of things you could chime in on is growing, like your ability to chime in on things thoughtfully, um, like, for example, like one thing, I don't see this with Mark, but like something we hear in the community is like, some people work in environments where people are, there's like slop storms, you know, like people are just starting to like, look at this, look at this, look at this, here's a proposal. Here's a, and so like, some people are like, I'm tired of it. I don't like that. That's not how I want to work. So it's like, that's a, that's conflict, right? Like there's someone who's using AI in a way that's pissing you off and it feels like it's lazy or whatever. And like, you're trying to show up productively. So my guess is your ability to navigate this change, this moment, like to Mark's point, like change management, probably have to lean into some discomfort and conflict. So I, I personally think it's going to, it's still super important. Yeah, I would say it's like, I'd say it's even more important than ever. Like, I think it's like more important now than it was, especially for product, right? Like, cause I think in product and you know, you had to be really good at like prioritizing things and because you, it was, if you didn't prioritize the right things, right? Like it was really expensive, right? Because you know, you would have like a team of like five engineers working on the wrong thing. Right. And now I think it's like important in a different direction. Like now that like building is cheaper, like I think the trap that a lot of companies get into is like, they end up doing too many things poorly and they lose focus. And then it's just like, they ended up with like a lot of average things. And I think like the best product teams and the best products and companies in general are super focused. And the only way you can be focused is by saying no to things. And in order to say no to things, you need to be extremely good at conflict resolution and communicating and doing that in a way that, you know, you can still rally people and you can, because I think, you know, I think that the challenge that product is having is like, you need to say no to things, but also you also want ideas to come from anywhere. Because like, I think that's how you end up with the best ideas. I think like you have to navigate conflict in a way that also doesn't repel people. And I think, so I think almost feel like it's more important than ever. That's kind of my, my take. Fascinating. Fascinating. I think in my, in the past I had this theory that, well, if the technical parts of the job are shrinking or becoming less of your focus, then there'll be more time for the people parts of your job. But then that was tempered by the fact that like, well, there are less people around for a lot of these, these places like less. And then, but you're saying, well, but then maybe the pace is increasing. So maybe the total amount of conflicts are staying the same. And I agree that the more thing we produce, the more opportunity there is for conflict or for, for misalignment or, or you know, some kind of need for judgment calls in the middle. So I don't know, maybe all these things result in, in, in a continued focus on conflict resolution, even for engineers. So we'll see, see what happens. Can I ask a little bit of like a random philosophical questions around like behavioral interviews, unless Ben, you were going to do a follow-up. I had one follow-up on the conflict thing and then go for, go there. But like, um, Austin, one thing that was coming to mind to me is just like in the spirit of kind of like, we talked a bit about what we've seen in product. I'm curious in engineering. So like, I remember for call it like the 10 years leading up to the, like the AI wave, I very rarely heard like engineers kind of like complaining to me about other engineers for being too prolific or something. But like now there's this, you know, because it's so easy to, it's so easy to ship code. There's like, and I'm using nice language here. Um, but like a lot of engineers are kind of like ticked off by all, like there's basically this crazy increase in the number of lines of code or like the number of PRs that have to get reviewed. And that tends to fall on kind of very senior people. And sure, there's some AI solutions that can be created to, you know, use AI to review PRs and give feedback on PRs and stuff, but all things equal. Like it seems to me like the, um, quote unquote soft skills of the most senior engineers in an organization who typically tend to be the ones who are tasked with like, you know, reviewing all, you know, maintaining the quality bar for the code base or whatever. My guess is like, you probably want, they probably find themselves in unexpectedly people territory now where they're having to kind of spend a lot of time with the people who are maybe more junior developers is where that's mostly like the problem, but like trying to show them what's okay, you know, and what's not okay. I would say, I would say this has been the conversation, at least the conversation I'm a part of and the conversation I'm around is more around what you said earlier around how can we enable this kind of velocity via tooling, via, you know, CICD pipelines, via automated checks. That tends to be more of the conversation versus like, how do I have this conversation with engineers about changing what they produce? It's more of an enablement versus a constraining. I guess that's tends to be more of the, because, and I think because the volume that of which we're talking about is just, it's an insane, there's no, like a slight adjustment, you know, if you just maybe like a couple less PRs or lines of code per day, we will be cool. It's, it's like an order of magnitude, multiple orders of magnitude, like a number of, of, and they just can't tamp that down without also tamping down the velocity. I do think soft skills are, are more important because, but the reason that I've often said is because they're required to understand more of the, of the product stack, like more of the motivations, more of the business context, more of the understanding of the customers. And they have more of those tools at their, at their disposal. They can access the data themselves. They can build tests and gather data themselves. So in that sense, they're, they need to acquire more of the, of those kind of guidance skills that, that traditionally has been part of product in order to be successful. And that is a soft skill in a sense, but I haven't, I haven't, yeah, it's interesting. I have to talk to some friends and see if, if, if that is a big source of conflict and they're spending a lot of time on that particular conflict. Also keeping an eye on the clock for a second, I'm realizing we're, this went by really fast. Um, Mark, you have a hard stop, um, in four minutes. Yeah. Yeah, I do too. Let's start wrapping and we'll, we'll leave, we'll leave the philosophical question for our part two, which I think it will happen, uh, either way. And, but anyways, two, two last questions for you, uh, Austin, before our, uh, exciting, um, brought you to the corner. One is, you know, uh, where can people learn more about what you do, your work? And then two, how can our audience be useful to you? Right. Yeah, for sure. Thanks. So like if I'm on LinkedIn, I have a sub stack, free sub stack all about behavioral interviews. Cause I have a book mastering behavioral interviews. You can check out on Amazon. We leave some links there. Um, I'll have to do coaching, uh, mostly for, uh, senior folks. So if you're senior and above a really good opportunity to work with me as a coach, um, and, uh, yeah, I'm sure we'll leave some links in description for all those things. We will definitely do that. Amazing. Awesome. And then I'll ask our exciting and final question, which is you've had an awesome journey, Austin. Um, what. Austin. What we like to do is finish with some gratitude. You can name one or multiple people who have played a special role in your journey that you just want to take a chance to say thank you. Oh yeah, I'll stay focused on this last part of my journey where doing behavioral interview conversations and coaching and writing. The first person is my wife, Cokeb. She blazed a trail in our home, first person to publish a book. She's got six books now. And the first person to be a private coach. She's an amazing coach for other occupational therapists, working with special needs kids, really making a huge difference in the world. And I've both been inspired by her and gotten a lot of bravery from watching her do this experience. I was never wanting to be an entrepreneur, you know, personally myself, but seeing her do it has really given me a lot of confidence and tactics and skills that I wouldn't have had otherwise. So I'm really grateful for her. And then I'm grateful to Henry Chung because he's a design leader that I worked with during my last few years there at Metta. But I'm grateful because of his engagement after our time together. We stayed friends, we continued to connect. And there was a time in which I was sort of kicking around the idea of working on behavioral interviews and writing a book, but had not committed to it. And he really came in and said, you know, I think you have something really unique to offer the world. And I think you can do a lot of good. And it took somebody communicating what value they saw in me in order to spur me on to committing myself to write the book, and writing it and publishing it. And I really appreciate that kind of belief. And I seek to be that kind of person. And hopefully the audience can be too, right? Find that people in your life, where you can communicate that belief and really help them see what they could do in the future with their potential. Beautiful. Thank you. I love it. Thanks, Austin. I can't wait to have you back on again. And thanks for everything you're doing for the community through your work and your writing. It's making a big difference on people. Thanks. Thanks. I appreciate that. And it's been great to be here. It's awesome to have a conversation. I hope to come back. We'll definitely make it happen. Okay, everyone. That's a wrap. Bye-bye.