Make it personal

I was doing a mock interview for a Sr. Engineer I met in Grace Hopper Conference. “Can you tell me the most impactful or challenging work you’ve done in your career?” She went like: “That was when I was in company xxx. We needed to design a system to do … we did this, we did that, I led the data plane design … and it was launched, we could handle 2 millions ingress transactions per second…” “But what was the challenging part of your work?” “I guess it was the scalability.” “What was so challenging about the scalability of the product? Any specific customer event you needed to handle?” “We had a large customer that spiked their traffic 5x suddenly. It caused outage on the whole service. We had to move the customer to their own dedicated servers…” “You ‘sharded’ the customer’s traffic to a cluster dedicated to them so you can control the ‘blast radius’ of the ‘noisy neighbor’, a common headache for multi-tenant cloud service. Is it correct? “Yes!”, she said. Let’s summarize what she did well and not so well in her story. The good: 1. She did give some context of the project. 2. I heard company xxx - a big deal Internet company and two million transactions per second- impressive number! The bad: 1. The context was too long. “We” did a lot things. “I” was mentioned only once: something about data plane. 2. Were there anything hard, challenging, novel or even ground breaking? I had to dig hard to get the interesting details. So what is a good story? To me, the most important property of a good story is its details that are personal, yet trigger universal emotions. In a good story, the story teller’s struggle and agony become the listeners’ struggle and agony. We all love underdog, don’t we? So when you are asked to tell a story about the most impressive work you’ve done, 1. Start with a summary of your work’s result and impact. If you saved xxx millions dollars for your company, articulate it out at the beginning. This is not a detective story, audiences don’t want to wait for the results until the end. 2. Give some context: team size, time spent and your role. You need this to get the story going, but don’t spend more than 20% of your time on the context. 3. This is the most important part: give the juicy details of the challenge “you” overcame, the agony “you” had to endure, not “we”. Were you under tight deadline, short on resources, or ran into technical problems nobody in your organization had answers? How did “you” solve them? 4. Close with a punch line: reconfirm your effort’s impact and results, and why they mattered to your customers. In case you are wondering, this structure is essentially the STAR (Situation, Task, Action and Result) style with (1) result upfront and (2) a strong emphasis on your personal experience. If there is one thing you want to remember from this post about story telling, it is: Make your struggle personal!