"Tell me about a time" is a request for a story, and a story in an interview has four parts: the situation, the task, what you did, and what changed. The shape has a name, STAR, and the name does not matter. What matters is that the first two parts take twenty seconds, the third takes a minute, and the fourth has a number in it. Most answers fail by spending a minute on the situation and ten seconds on what the person did, which is the one part the interviewer wanted.
Key points
- Four parts: situation, task, action, result. Twenty seconds, ten, sixty, twenty.
- The action is the answer. It is what you did, in the first person, with verbs.
- The result has a number. If it has no number, it has a before and an after.
- Five stories cover most questions. Prepare five, and map the questions to them.
- Out loud, timed, twice, the day before. A story that was only thought does not come out.
The four parts
| Part | What it is | How long | The failure |
|---|---|---|---|
| Situation | Where, when, what was going on | 15 to 20 seconds | A minute of backstory |
| Task | What you had to do, or chose to | 10 seconds | Skipped, so the action has no frame |
| Action | What you did. First person. Verbs. | 45 to 60 seconds | "We" throughout, so nobody knows what you did |
| Result | What changed, with a number | 15 to 20 seconds | "It went well" |
Twenty seconds of setup. A minute of what you did. A number at the end.
The action is the answer
"We" is the common failure. "We decided to rebuild the pipeline" tells the interviewer a team did something and you were near it. "I proposed rebuilding the pipeline, got the lead's sign-off, and wrote the first two stages myself while two colleagues did the rest" tells them what you did. The interviewer is hiring you, not the team. Say "I" for what you did and "we" for what the team did, and keep them separate.
Verbs, in order. Proposed, got sign-off, wrote, tested, shipped. A list of verbs is a story. A list of nouns is a resume.
The result has a number
A number makes the story checkable and makes it land. Time saved, money, users, errors, a rate before and after. If the work had no number, it had a before and an after: "the release that had been slipping for three months went out in six weeks". If it failed, the result is what you learned and what you did differently next time, and the failure story is one of the five.
The five stories
Prepare five, chosen so that together they cover the posting's must-haves and the common question types:
- A hard problem you solved. Technical or not. The one with the biggest number.
- A conflict. A disagreement with a colleague, a manager or a client, and how it resolved. The action is what you said and did, not who was right.
- A failure. Real, yours, with what changed after.
- Something you led or drove without being asked. Initiative. The action is the asking and the organising.
- Something you learned fast. A tool, a domain, a role, under pressure, with the result.
Each one is two minutes, out loud. The guide on common interview questions maps the twelve questions onto these five.
Two examples
Conflict. "Last year the design lead and I disagreed about whether to ship the new checkout before the holiday. She wanted to wait for the redesign. I thought the old one was costing us. (Situation and task, twenty seconds.) I pulled the drop-off data for the current checkout, which showed 38 percent abandonment at the address step, and brought it to her with a proposal: ship the fix for that one step now, and the redesign in January. She agreed, with one change to the copy. I made the change and we shipped on the Tuesday. (Action.) Abandonment at that step went to 22 percent over the holiday, and the redesign went out in January as planned. (Result.)"
Failure. "At my previous company I owned the migration to the new email provider. (Situation.) I set the cutover for a Friday afternoon, which was my mistake. (Task, and the admission.) The DNS change propagated slower than the vendor's estimate, and about 4,000 customers did not get their order emails for six hours. I wrote the status update myself, ran the resend when the records settled, and sent a personal note to the support team with what to say. (Action.) We had under 40 complaints. Since then every cutover I run is on a Tuesday morning with a rollback written first, and I put that rule in the team runbook. (Result and what changed.)"
Practice, on this site
Practice asks a behavioural question, takes your answer, and grades it on the four parts: did the situation stay short, was there an action in the first person, was there a result with a number. It says which part was missing. Run each of the five stories through it once, fix the part it flagged, and run it again.
Questions
What if the question asks about something I have never done?
Say so in a sentence, then tell the closest story. "I have not managed a budget. The closest is the vendor negotiation where I owned a 40,000 contract, and here is how that went."
Do I use the words situation, task, action, result?
No. They are the structure, not the script. The interviewer hears a story. You know it has four parts.
How many stories do I need for a full loop of interviews?
Five, and a sixth if the role is senior. Interviewers in a loop share notes, so a story told twice to two people is noticed. Five stories across four interviews is fine if each interviewer hears a different pair.
What if the result was bad?
Then the story is the failure story, and the result is what changed. One failure story per loop is expected. Two is a pattern.
How do I keep it under two minutes?
Say it out loud with a timer. Cut the situation first. It is always the part that is too long.