Communication and the inverted triangle

Learnings from an EM interview at a big tech company

“What are some challenges you faced?”

I was asked this at an interview for a big tech company. After having gone through rounds of interviews being grilled by senior engineers, engineering managers, PMs and the hiring manager, I had cleared the bar. Hooray! I had managed to get through and could breathe a sigh of relief.

Then, a last minute email saying “we have a final informal chat scheduled with our new senior director” slid into my inbox. The director, who had a stern personality and a stellar resume, had just taken over the division. I had a lump in my throat. Something told me this “informal chat” was not going to be so informal, and I was right.

The call started with the usual intros and jumped straight into “tell me about your experience”. I did a quick elevator pitch, glossing over a lot of detail. A few questions later, I was asked:

“So, what are some challenges you faced?”

I had answered this question plenty of times in the prior rounds, but I was totally stumped this time. A flash of thoughts flooded my mind as words refused to leave the tip of my tongue. After what felt like an eternity, I verbalized some hyper-summarized answer like “Oh, I had to hire a whole team from scratch, coordinate across departments to build out an MVP, navigate legal constraints and deliver in a short timeline”. I stopped at this assuming I had hit a home run. I stared at the director, who stared back at me.

His expression was saying “is that it?”. My mind went straight into defense-mode. “Is he being serious?” I thought. “Doesn’t he realize how challenging that was?”. Another moment passed by and he responded saying “what else?”. I spoke a little bit about how I helped the recruiting team with the take-home interview assignment, established cross-team demo processes, etc, thinking this addition would definitely do the trick.

No surprise, I didn’t get this role (though I did match with another team at that company). Ultimately, I accepted an offer at another company and put this experience behind me — but this question lingered on in my mind.

Burden of communication

I had seriously undersold myself and under-represented the challenges I had to overcome. My answer didn’t provide the details that could’ve made me a perfect match.

Upon reflecting I concluded that the burden of communication was on me (seems obvious in hindsight). How could the director have known about how I drafted up a provocative (borderline controversial) technical document, and got it approved by a bunch of senior engineering leaders (including the CTO) at the company over the winter just in time for the spring sale season? How could he have known that I had to hire over a dozen engineers rapidly and set up onboarding processes in parallel to helping define a long-term vision, and a short-term plan? How could he have known that amidst all of this I had to navigate substantial org changes with my manager changing? How could he have known that I became a first-time parent right around then and was barely sleeping?

It was my opportunity to provide these details. The director was out of context, and I made the assumption (see the third agreement) that he would ask for the details. He was a senior executive, and was expected me to take the lead on guiding the conversation as I’d have to that in the role. Maybe if I had followed the inverted pyramid I could’ve achieved a different outcome. Maybe if I had realized that so much of communication is body language and that his expression was saying “I’m just trying to understand further” I could’ve allowed him to make the decision with more clarity.