Leadership Principles, Behavioral and Project specific questions

What are Leadership Principles, Behavioral and Project specific question rounds?

A common round of questions in a Data Science, DE or Analytics interview is deep dives into your past projects. The questions are posed with the objective of either finding if you’re a good fit for the company values, have alignment with the mission, or just to get to see how you handle scrutiny and follow ups to your answers.

The interviewer is trying to judge you on these major areas:

-       Structure in answers

-       Clear Communication

-       Depth and details provided

-       Completeness of the answer

The questions will be usually posed like:

-       Tell me about a time when you went above and beyond for a customer

-       Give me an example of a time when you were able to deliver an important project under a tight deadline.

-       Tell me about a situation that required you to dig deep to get to the root cause

-       Give me an example of a tough or critical piece of feedback you received

-       Describe a time when you took an unpopular stance in a meeting with your peers

 Okay, so how do I answer them?

All answers are different and might not follow this approach, but the standard methodology to answer these questions is called ‘STAR’. It stands for:

• Situation

• Task

• Action

• Result

It sounds banal but it’ quite effective in ensuring your answer is holistic. To elaborate,

• You want to start your answer by giving some background, that typically forms the Situation

  • I worked in Product Analytics team for Facebook stories for North America and where we track our major metrics at a weekly basis

• Next comes in adding some details about the problem or the Task you had to solve. Add as mch context as possible.

  • We had to identify the root cause of a drop in our product’s ad revenue which had fallen 20% in the current week compared to YoY.

• Laying out the problem leads you to your Action or how you went about solving it, the more details you provide the better.

  • I looked at various associated metrics that also changed during that timeframe, like DAU, Time spent/user but isolated the dip to a decrease in #Advertisers/week bidding for stories in the period.

• Finally, you’ve come to the eventual Result, which should culminate into the outcome of your action. It’s always helpful to add a long-term solution as well if you had something similar

  • The dip was eventually attributed to advertisers’ move to Instagram stories due to a promotion there, causing them to stop bidding on our platform, hence causing a revenue dip. Post this we made this specific ‘Cannibalization’ event into an SOP to be used for future investigations.

Follow Ups

Even if you give a holistic answer, there are bound to be lots of follow ups with that, deep diving into either the problem, your contribution or the result. Questions like “How would you do things differently now”, “How did the leadership/stakeholders react to your actions” and “What did you learn from this project” are common, so it’s important to be very thorough with your project and to expect such counter questions.

Wait, so I need to prepare All my past projects like this?

All these various questions are typically trying to gauge one ‘value’ or ‘trait’ from your background, such as accuracy, proficiency, timeliness, can do attitude etc.

In a behavioral interview focusing on past experience, candidates are asked 2-3 such questions. If there are multiple interviewers, that can increase to 5-7 questions.

Having said that, one project or answer can cover multiple traits, as you’ll likely use most or all in your important projects. So choose your top 4-5 projects that are the most impactful and/or are the most interesting, and focus on them rather than all. A good idea is to keep some notes handy for an interview, where you list the major projects and the major bullets points of each of them.

Happy interviewing!

That concludes our guide on how to answer leadership principles, behavioral and past project related questions for Data science interviews.

We discussed a specific example above on dip in ad revenue, to understand how to answer those kind of questions, use this guide :https://www.insider-training.co/guides/customer-funnel-interview-data-science