How you speak about the most impactful project

“Tell me about the most impactful project you’ve delivered.” I start all my interviews using the same question. My focus is usually on the Deliver Results. But I can guide the conversation to Dive Deep, Bias For Action or whatever I need to collect data points for. I make clear I’d like to hear details, quantities, their individual contributions, hard decisions and stakeholders’ feedbacks. I’ve been doing some mock interviews for folks impacted by layoff recently. There are some common pitfalls I observed from their story tellings that might help interested readers. 1. Leave the quantified result at the end. Interviews are not for detective stories. You don’t want the listeners to waste their cognitive power on guessing the size of your impact - articulate the measured result upfront. 2. Measurement not meaningful to the listeners. For example, a candidate said “I launched a project that reduced 6% of the oncall tickets monthly.” But 6% of what? It turns out he cut down 1800 tickets every month. That is impressive, so how about “I launched a project that reduced 1800 oncall tickets monthly, that is 6% of the total tickets!” 3. Numbers don’t add up. In the previous example, my followed up question was “how many oncall’s engineer/hour did you save from this project?” “I am not sure…” he said. “Then how much time does it usually take to process one tickets?” “1 hour”, said he. “Really?! 1800 hours saved per month? That is 225 work days a month. This can’t be right!” 4. Too much time on what “my team” did, not enough on what “I” did. You team is not looking for a job, you do. So spend less than 20% of your time on the background of your project, 80% on your specific contributions. 5. Too much obvious stuff. A candidate told his story like this “I took the assignment from my manager. I clarified the requirements. I wrote design and got it signed off. I implemented the design. I worked with QA for testing …” But these are obvious stuff for any software projects. What is unique about your story? 6. Don’t make your story a juxtapose of technical buzzwords. A candidate described his project like this: “I designed a pipeline to write to DynamoDB, trigger event on SNS, excute method on Lambda …” All I heard were a bunch of AWS service names. I had no idea what he did. 7. Don’t quote trivial measurements. A candidate told a story how he redesigned a data pipeline that reduced the monthly cost by 5 times. I was like “whoa! what was the dollar value of the cost reduction?” It turned out it was from 80 dollars monthly cost to 15 dollars and they have only two pipelines. So really, 130 dollars per month saving for a two month project? Are you kidding me?How to