How to Answer: Talk about a time when you failed to reach a work-related goal. How did you react?
Advice and answer examples written specifically for an Amazon job interview.
3. Talk about a time when you failed to reach a work-related goal. How did you react?
How to Answer
Workplace goals, targets, and deadlines are not always met due to a variety of circumstances. The interviewer wants to know about such a time and, most importantly, how you reacted when the situation does not entirely go your way.
When answering this behavioral interview question, be ready to incorporate a specific story example rather than giving a general response to how you react to failure. This story-based approach can be achieved using the STAR answer method. STAR is an acronym for Situation, Task, Action, Result.
- Situation: Set the stage with the background information your interviewer needs to make sense of your story.
- Task: Continuing to set the stage, give the interviewer an idea of your role and responsibilities in this story.
- Action: Next, offer a detailed description of the steps you took after you failed to reach your goal.
- Result: Last, talk about what you learned and how you transformed the situation into something positive.
You want to be honest about when you failed, but you also don't want to give such an extreme example that the interviewer determines you are not well-suited for a job at Amazon. To find a good balance, talk about a time when you failed to reach a goal but transformed the circumstance into a positive situation.
Answer Example
"(Situation) Earlier in my Product Management career with Company XYZ, my team was offered control of a unique product feature. (Task) As the PM, it was my job to calculate an appropriate project timeline before communicating a firm delivery date to the stakeholders. However, I succumbed to pressure from my leadership team to overshoot the delivery date and please the stakeholders. (Action) I convinced myself that we had enough developers to keep momentum on other projects while tacking this new product feature. I underestimated the depth of the work, and our team missed the deadline for the new feature by two weeks. Although the product feature launch was successful, I was ashamed of how the timeline panned out. I was so eager to prove myself as a new PM that I put the entire team's credibility at risk. (Result) I consider failure an important source for learning and gathering deeper insights. In this instance, I learned to become better at project estimates and make room for hiccups along the way. I learned to be a PM that does not go into a project overconfident on the timeline, causing the team to miss targets. Now, I am honest with my leadership team if I believe their expectations are too aggressive. If I see a project slipping, I express my concern to the development team right away and come up with a plan for us to stay on track. I am happy that I learned this lesson so early in my career. As a result, I am much more careful when giving project estimates, ensuring that my team meets their mark every time."