Details on the #1 behavioural interview question

I think the wording of those items is a little hard to understand. Here's how I would translate these into plain language:

• What did your team and organization look like? Were you working with one team or multiple? Who did you have to influence to make progress?
• What were your contributions? What role did you play specifically? Focus on the most impactful items first. E.g. if you were the team lead, lead with that rather than the lines of code you wrote.
• How was the project delivered? Were there delays? Were there challenges you had to overcome? What was the quality of the deliverable itself? Did it trigger a bunch of high-severity events?

A different perspective on behavioral interviews

In my experience with doing over 300 interviews at Amazon, it's inefficient to ask open-ended questions like "Tell me about the most challenging project you've worked on".

As an interviewer, my goal was to get specific data points. Generic questions may or may not get the data I need.

So, good interviewers will ask more pointed questions like "Tell me about a project you had to deliver against a tight deadline" and focus on specific soft skills like "delivery" and "ownership".

The following is the formula I recommend for behavioral questions:

Soft skills + scope + impact + relevance = yes!

Soft skills - demonstrate the soft skill the interviewer is interested in. In other words: first, answer their question. Then, weave in the other aspects below.

Scope (used for leveling) - show that your work was at the right scope/complexity. This includes technical and non-technical complexity (e.g. dependencies, influencing decisions, etc.)

Impact (used for leveling) - show that your work had the right impact. This could be team, business or customer impact (e.g. a tool used by 10 developers vs a feature used by 100,000 customers)

Relevance - make your examples relevant to the role you're applying for. Frame your experience to showcase the value and impact you can bring to the new employer (e.g. if you've only developed mobile apps but the job is backend development, focus on transferrable skills and aspects of your projects).

I recommend writing down your answer for this question into the STAR format first and then adding in those details from there. When it comes to tech in general, it's better to just bias towards action and get some rough initial glob out there that you quickly refine over time.

Tactically, the attributes you mentioned are most likely going to live in the A(ction) section as they refer to overall execution impressiveness. In the Showreel Native example I go through in the course, here's roughly how I would weave them into my response:

• Organizational complexity: "I had to align 15+ engineers across 3 different teams spanning Menlo Park, New York, and London."
• Depth of contribution: "I was the mobile lead facilitating communication, planning, and alignment across all 3 teams. I set up a weekly meeting, analyzed the performance data, and onboarded multiple engineers into the workstream. When the Android side was hit with a nasty performance regression across low-end Android, I spearheaded the effort to find it by securing an infra engineer loan from Instagram New York and setting up a team-wide situation room to find the bug."
• Quality of delivery: "We shipped the project on-time despite the complicated performance regression with 0 production issues after 100% rollout. We added $50M+ in additional revenue to Instagram Story Ads."

I don't have anything for attribution as Showreel Native wasn't my idea at all 😅. It was able to be a senior/staff project due to its sheer organizational and technical complexity.