Behavioral Interview Questions Flashcards
Behavioral questions (66%)
Tell me about a time where you needed information from someone who wasn’t very responsive
There was an instance when I reached out to a member of the SRE team about getting and understanding of the process to move data from a particular machine. Unfortunately, there wasn’t any documentation so this person proved to be single point of failure. The first time that I reached out this person via email I didn’t get a response. Not being sure of the best way to reach this person, I followed up with an email and a slack message explaining what I was asking of them which was getting details of the process but also the value proposition which was that I would take over doing the process to speed up the acquisiton of data. On the second time reaching out they responded rather quickly. I learned in that instance that in my communication I should not only communicate what I’m asking from someone but also the value proposition if there is one.
We all make mistakes, tell me about a time when you wish you would have handled things differently with a colleague?
Early on in my career, I built a tool that would inform the members of Duo’s customer success and sales organizations of how they were using our product. This tool proved to be very successful and helped me develop relationships with individuals on that team. Members of the sales organization would ask for me to help with particular analysis going into sales calls. There was a particular individual that would prove to be very demanding in that they would make these data requests and say that they needed to be done in a relatively short amount of time and using relatively aggressive language. Since they were an enterprise sales person these deals tended to be very larger. Wanting to be a team player I would do my best to give them the numbers. After a while, I realized that this wasn’t a healthy approach. I needed to set boundaries on what I could help with and under which conditions. So I met with the sales rep and relayed that I wanted to help them close as many deals as possible but that I would need a larger heads up concerning the data requests and when reaching out that there language was aggressive. After having this conversation, the sales person began to be less aggresive in their language and started providing the data requests with at least 72 hours notice.
Tell me about a time that you had to explain a complex topic to someone who knew very little about it
Earlier this year, my team added a new person to the team. This person had never worked in a healthcare function before but was a solid engineer. She was set to work on the project that I was leading which involved using various cloud resources and specifically distributed computing.
She hadn’t worked on any projects that leveraged TLS, HL7, or FHIR specifically. This proved to be a great opportunity to refine my understanding of these frameworks to help her get up to speed.
I started by trying to build a shared vocabulary and getting and understanding of what she already knew. With those building blocks, I was able to start to layer on different topics such as explaining what these protocols were was based on her knowledge.
Along the way in making these explanations, I tried to provide as many resources as possible and even created PowerPoints with graphics that connected the legal requirements with technical requirements.
She would pick up on these things very quickly and after long she was able to contribute to larger and larger tasks.
Tell me about a time where you went above and beyond.
I was tasked with building out a new data pipeline that was going to replace our older system. The reason that it was important to replace this system was that it wasn’t reliable, well tested and relied on operations critical resource. When the project was originally discussed among our team, the thought process was to simply recreate the old system with new AWS cloud services.
While we did in fact use AWS, I pushed for us to think about how we could make the system scale to our future needs and specifically help us learn about our data. Specifically, I set out to build a set of configuration files to be used about our system that would define each an every column of each database table. While this would be a somewhat ardurous task on the front end we would in the process create an auditable trail when adding new data and also learn the semantics of the data in the various data stores. This decision has proven to pay off more than I even expected. It has provided a better data story when it comes to working with stakeholders in Legal but it has also served as the basis of a data discovery tool that we deployed.
How have you challenged the status quo?
HIPAA Compliance
How have you helped teammates stretch themselves?
Helping Kentrell do work in javascript
Tell us about a time you received critical feedback?
My manager provided some feedback that my writing could be more concise and that by improving my storytelling that I could get more buy in on the plans that I proposed.
I agreed with that advice and did my best to take steps to improve in that area.
I picked up a book called Writing Science. In that book, it provides a series of exercises on how to write better technical documents while also weaving a narrative.
Since reading that book. I’ve had the opportunity to write a lot more and I’ve gotten some good feedback from that same manager about my storytelling and presenting just the right amount of information.
What are your top three values and how do you bring those to work?
I think the three values that I try to bring to work are integrity, empathy, and quality.
In terms of quality, I always strive for my work to be the best that it can be. There will be time constraints which affect this but I try to insist on having a high standard around things that I product.
When it comes to empathy, I think this is the most important values. We don’t know what anyone is dealing with and what they are carrying to work. I think it’s important to be kind and try to understand people.
That goes not just for my coworkers but also customers or users. The only way to build a great product is to have empathy.
Last, I think it’s important to always treat people fairly and to do the right thing no matter how hard it is or the cost. That means that recognizing my biases and how that can affect decision making.
Give me an example of a risk you took
I think the biggest risk that I’ve taken involves leaving my job to work on a project “Digital ID”.
It was the first time in my life that I had really quit something in the middle and I was really worried about the perception of doing so.
Before making the jump, I had a lot of information about the product and it’s trajectory but there was still that unknown. I’m glad that I made the decision and believe that it was the right one to make.
Give me an example of a time when you had to pitch an idea to gain someone’s commitment.
After attending a conference on usable security, I had the idea that we could do a research project concerning the usability of a new set of authentication standard.
As a company we had made large investments into the passwordless space but we hand’t actually investigated what users perceptions were of these standard. I thought this was a huge gap; so, I proposed to our team that we take on this project. I wrote a project plan and delivered a presentation that outlined the benefits of doing this work as well as the risks.
Ultimately, i was able to take on this project and was even able to help hire an intern to conduct the user study. The findings of this work was later used by product in terms of informing them about potential barriers to adoption.
Why Google?
Google has publicly committed to including all voices, advancing sustainability, and protecting its users. I think each of those commitments is extremely important. The commitment to protecting its users is the one that resonates the most with me. I’m very passionate about security but also making it accessible and easy to use. I think Google has done that with its wide variety of products in its portfolio and I’d love to be apart of that work.
What’s your greatest strength? And weakness?
I think one of my greatest strengths is identifying how the work my team is doing or my team’s capabilities can assist other functions. I think its my ability to connect the dots. I’ve been able to leverage that more as my tenure has gone along. I think that also leads into my weakness of stretching myself thin trying to help a lot of different people. I think I’ve gotten better about balancing the building of relationships with other teams without taking on more work than I can.
Tell me about a time when you were not able to meet a time commitment. What prevented you from meeting it? What was the outcome and what did you learn from it?
In a recent project, that centered around creating a new ETL pipeline for research data it was originally a quarterly OKR. In the plans that I had done before the quarter, I tried to push back on the idea that this work could be done in a quarter if we were going to do it correctly considering the parties and work involved. I did my best to make as much progress as possible and got to a MVP state. At the end of the quarter during the retro, I spoke to the progress that was made but all of the things outstanding. I think not advocating for resources and pushing back on the expected timelines and deliverables. At the end of that quarter. I laid out a 9 month plan to deploy things in a scalable and secure way. This project taught me a lot managing up and balancing working with the available resources and realizing when you need more help.
Can you provide an example of when you put the user first?
I think one of my best examples of putting the user first came about from some data analysis from the authentication policies. I noticed that certain companies were setting policies that at least from the user interface could give off that they could block users given certain device characterists. We never want to give users a false sense of security or bring about any confusion. Our documentation had outlined that setting a policy for these applications wouldn’t have an effect but our product still allowed it. I handed this analysis to our product team and advocated on disallowing adminstrators from setting these options and giving a warning for policies already in place. In a few sprints we were able to deploy this change and help inform our users.
What is your best example of leadership?
I think my best example leadership has to deal with both project/technical leadership and people leadership. I have a passion for usable security and I believe it to be on of the key differentiators for a security company. The best place is to provide a great UX while keeping your users safe. I believe the way to do that is by having an understanding of what your users are doing and making decisions based on data. One way of doing this is through experimentation. Realizing that we weren’t doing enough or really anything in that space. I started by drafting a vision doument that laid out where we could potentially be in a few years and the benefits of making an investment in this space. I shared this document with the Data Science, Product Design, and SRE teams and got buy in on what the goals for this program should be. From there I started laying out a multi-year plan with milestones along the way. This included improving our deployment cycle, having foundational metrics about product usage, etc. We are just at the beginning of this plan but this was my first opportunity to steer our organization in a direction that I think will be very beneficial
