Why Should You Make A List Of Past Projects and Challenges To Present In Interviews?
““Talk to someone about themselves and they'll listen for hours.”
– Dale Carnegie
This exercise is one of the most important things you can do to ace interviews.
To help you answer interview questions with ease, make a list of projects or major challenges you worked on in your past roles. Putting this list together will help you come up with examples of interview questions much more easily and quickly.
I call this the Project Registry. It essentially holds all the projects and problems I worked on in my past roles. This is another section that gets added to the Interview Success Document that we discussed in an earlier chapter. Also, we will be using the information you build in your Project Registry as a part of the exercises in other chapters.
When I was doing interviews in my career, this was a very effective practice that helped me prepare and come up with examples to back up my answers during the interview quickly and easily.
Here are the four steps I used to come up with projects and their details:
1. Brainstorm major projects or problems you worked on
Think about major projects and problems you managed in your past roles and write them down.
It could be doing marketing campaigns, developing software, managing a project, implementing software, helping people with specific issues, or doing a certain number of things. For example, this could be something such as sell x amount, solve x number of issues, help a certain number of people, create specific content (book, articles, course), solve a certain number of issues, build a certain number of units etc.
Interviewers love to hear about stories where you had to overcome professional challenges.
Here are some examples:
Worked on a project that implemented marketing automation software
Managed a project that built new software to help farmers manage crops
Solved 2000 support cases for users
If you didn’t work on specific projects directly but worked on various problems instead, you can list the common sets of problems you dealt with on a day to day basis as the project you worked on.
For example, if you worked as a Customer Service Specialist, and you need to help customers with specific software problems on a day-to-day basis, you can say that you “worked on a project that helped clients solve issues with software.” Then, you can identify all the actions you took to help them with the software.
2. List out all the actions and tasks you took to manage the project or challenge
Now write down what types of actions and tasks you took to accomplish the project and solve the problem in your past roles. Write them for each project or problem you worked on.
Here are some examples:
Audited the company’s existing system
Created a roadmap for the implementation
Created a work backlog
Implemented training programs for new users
Negotiated contracts with vendors
Created knowledge-based articles to help answer key questions
Created a welcome campaign
Migrated 100,000 email subscribers to a new platform
Built relationships with five key vendors
Managed a team of email developers
Managed backlog and delegated tasks
Interviewed 30 users and to get feedback on the product and analyzed results
3. List out the results of the projects
Lastly, write down what sort of results you had with the project.
Here are some examples:
Increase sales by 50%
Closed 1000 cases successfully
Sold $1 million worth of services through email
Client was very happy because we delivered a high-quality product on time
The stakeholders and the team were very happy because we were able to complete the project stress-free
Use the Interview Success Document to organize the projects you come up with in one place. Come up with one at a time and grow this list over time. It’s work, but it has a huge payoff if you want to do well in interviews.
Continuously update this section in the Interview Success Document as your career progresses.
That’s it for now!
Much love!
