Situation - The interviewer wants you to present a recent challenge and situation which you found yourself in
Task - What were you required to achieve? The interviewer will be looking to see what you were trying to achieve from the situation. Some performance development methods use “Target” rather than “Task”. Job interview candidates who describe a "Target" they set themselves instead of an externally imposed “Task” emphasize their own intrinsic motivation to perform and to develop their performance
Action - What did you do? The interviewer will be looking for information on what you did, why you did it, and what the alternatives were
Results - What was the outcome of your actions? What did you achieve through your actions and what did you learn? What steps did you take to improve after the experience?
Started Web Dev in 2013, after years as research assistant for Johns Hopkins University.
A "self-taught" dev who had the pleasure to work with great colleagues
Developed iPad apps using PhoneGap, HTML, CSS, and JS
Began at Phillips as a contractor to develop a payment platform for a special "online-only" sale. This consisted of using BackboneJS, Authorize.Net, and StripeAPI later on.
After successful launch, I had to justify the company keeping me on, even though I was the only FE dev, so I took the initiative to implement responsive design for Phillips to improve its mobile presence. I used layout stylesheets from Bootstrap to accomodate our page, making layout decisions based on existing layout.
Migrated project from Backbone to React to leverage reusable components for the website and respective cms
Currently creating personal website to enhance brand and marketability to employers. Using new Tech stack includes TypeScript, PostgresSQL, Docker, Cloud deployment, NextJS, NodeJS
I am looking to join a more established organization that allows for more internal growth and the opportunity to work with newer technologies. And what better way to do that than join a Fortune 25 company.
I look forward to working where there's more opportunity for me to showcase my talents at a major company
More importantly, I will be also working with different peers that have their own diverse input and expertise in the e-commerce dev perspective.
At my previous employer I worked with a small development team and gained great experience on a global scope. I learned a lot from the experience, on project management, product development cycles, and code maintenance.
Code-wise, as I was lead, I really loved the fact that I got to write code, AND refactor that code for a better product.
I'm passionate about problem solving and researching software design patterns.
Unfortunately, as the years went on, I felt I have grown out of the position at my last employer, and am looking for more challenges with a bigger and diverse team.
I want to work for a company that shows strong appreciation and support for their tech team. Having led a small FE tech team, there have been times where resources have stretched thin between maintenance tasks, feature development, and last-minute project requests.
I want to work at place where I can continue develop my eCommerce industry development. I was privileged to gain so much experience working for a global company and their web exposure, and now I want to broaden my skillset by working with more brilliant minds at Insert Company Here, offering my expertise, while also taking in all the great knowledge your team has collected over the years.
Iron sharpens Iron, as they say.
Leadership:
Learned to listen and empathize with different viewpoints.
Values:
Strive to uphold accessibility, data security, and user experience standards that Insert Company Here holds as a company.
Experience:
eCommerce CLIENT FACING expertise
Commercial, Global, Enterprise experience in developing React/Redux web applications.
Many years of researching bugs.
I can offer an experienced POV.
Passion:
Love code discovery, reading code, and improving code.
What I enjoy so much about refactoring is that while the goal has already been accomplished, within reason, the journey is to be re-written for business, performance, or security reasons.
For my next role, I’m looking to round out my software dev knowledge by learning more about API dev/design, Simple Database Setup, and cloud deployment using Docker and Kubernetes. Speak about the website setup
Initiating, prototyping, and implementing responsive build for phillips.com. Why?
Validation of initiating and deploying a product cycle
Showed initiative to understand the need for one at the time.
Developing a prototype to show proof-of-concept in feasibility.
Implemented a column layout system to allow for ease of future development
Delivered on business goal for deploying before most important sale of season.
Able to follow thru product lifecycle End to end
Migration from BackboneJS to ReactJS
Before we started to work on the redesign project, the UX team showed us an extensive Figma prototype of proposed changes to the Sale and Lot page. They were excited about rolling about these updates before a certain sale was to go live, which was about 6 months. They decided they wanted to roll out various updates all at once, ideally 4-6 weeks before sale day.
After the prototype demo, the task at hand was to roll out the two most important pages on our website during sale season. The prototype had various “skin-job” implementation of existing components, coupled with minor data updates.
Break down figma prototype and create epics and sprint features to update on a module basis.
Discuss with Experience team and Business Analyst to understand new data points and where they would be coming from (which other internal app?), new component transitions, QA, UAT, and deployment milestones.
Upon hearing these discussions, I promoted an interative dev and deployment approach for the two pages. This will allow us to focus on the individual components and test its implementation for not just the two updated pages, but also other pages, like homepage. I also proposed component milestones and page layout milestones to divide the work within the team.
The Experience team initially were open to iterative deployment. However, after another discussion that I was not part of, the final decision was to revert to waterfall approach. The UX team felt that since the redesign wasn't a feature that had a hard deadline, the UX team felt more comfortable rolling out these updates all at once to mimic a Grand "ReOpening". Result: It's still not up.
My last project at Phillips, I was leading our redesign project
our developer was finding inconsistencies with her dev build and Figma design files after initial design-freeze.
These inconsistencies would also be brought up during status meetings.
It turns out that the designer was still making minor tweaks after the initial designs have been submitted to begin development.
As the FE lead, I had to minimize scope creep on a major project for a Developer, as they may not notice subtle differences in Figma due to scope of project while empathizing with designer’s potential request to change on Figma.
Explain to designer why minor updates increases deadlines
Explain to developer that these minor updates may happen, and we should acknowledge how to account for them within our workflow.
Spoke to designer to ask why he was making these changes after design freeze. He said that he wanted to adhere to best practices and standards, and found that there were inconsistencies in design for the same components in different pages. He also told us that as he was doing more research, he found that he had to update some of the user journeys.
I explained to him that these updates weren't being noticed by the developer and she felt overwhelmed by the updates as she's finding updates to components she thought she had completed.
He agreed to better document his changes and let us know when such changes are mad. He will also respect the design freeze and discuss with us if there's a design update that he felt passionate about implementing.
We, the developer team, agreed to scope out his changes and come back with a decision to whether delay the update to phase two, or agree to the updates as long as stakeholders were aware that this would further push out the project.
The devteam were notified when more minor updates came, and we were able to discuss openly about how to implement the changes, whether they'll go in with the initial launch or it will be part of Phase 2.
Situation: Prior to my MBA, I worked as a consultant at Deloitte. During that time, I experienced conflict with one of my co-consultants when we were staffed on a rapid turnaround study for a struggling retail player. Specifically, we disagreed with the course of action the retailer should take. While I thought the retailer should have prioritized action items that would boost its profitability in the next 1-2 quarters, the other consultant thought the retailer should focus on actions that would set it up for long-term success.
Tasks: At the end of the day, I knew that the other consultant and I both wanted what’s best for the client. In addition, I recognized that given the client was in such a dire situation, they may react negatively to longer-term strategy recommendations given without strong actions in the next 2 quarters, the client may not need the longer-term strategy work (e.g., if they were sold to a strategic buyer). However, I also saw where my co-worker was coming from, and realized that my recommendation may not have explicitly addressed that any actions done should hopefully bring the client closer towards achieving their long-term vision.
Action: After reflecting on the situation, I went to talk with my co-worker around the areas of focus for the client. As such, when talking with the co-worker, I first admitted what I may have overlooked. Then, I discussed why I felt it was more important to focus on the near-term actions, bringing in specific quotes the client previously said as support. Throughout the discussion, I continued to use how our work could enable the client’s success as the “guidepost,” as I knew the co-worker and I had similar objectives.
Results: We focused our work on near-term objectives the client should take and called out that the near-term objectives should ensure the near-term work set them up for its long-term ambitions. The client was very happy, and once it got its bearing, re-engaged Deloitte for longer-term strategy work.