Most candidates in the Leopard network underestimate and under-explain their achievements. At Leopard, we recommend you actively avoid impostor syndrome by writing down a big list of talking points, rather than answering completely off the cuff. This post is more about phrasing your experience, and then we also have ChatGPT prompts if you forget what you worked on and need to jog your memory 🤣
A Note from Leopard’s CEO Lexi 💜…
"I really believe that the antidote to impostor syndrome isn’t empty confidence; it’s being thorough, detailed, and specific about everything you’ve seen (not just working on yourself). We’re all a composite of our experiences, whether that’s our early-stage experience, scaling experience, or seeing world-class engineering in action. If you can paint the picture of what you’ve learned and seen, then you make it easier for an employer to envision how you can uniquely help their company grow and scale. And in today’s job market, that is basically the only/best way to get ahead of your competition and land the job you want."
📝 "Can you walk me through your resume?"
✅ DO: Provide a DETAILED but CONCISE overview of your path.
Examples:
Talk through the early experiences and how they shaped your career. Ex: In my first engineering role, I got hired at an early-stage fintech startup via a referral. The founders had built a payments company before, so it was a great opportunity to build a product from scratch but also to build something that reached product market fit within the first 18 months ✅
Talk about how your roles evolved and showed that you learned quickly: Ex: My role involved building the web app from scratch using JavaScript and React, and then later building out mobile web and teaching myself React Native ✅
When explaining why you left a job, pick a neutral reason. Ex: After 3 years there I wanted to move closer to family so I joined Airtable so I could work remotely, I also wanted to learn more about building high-growth startups and felt drawn to the future of work / low code tools ✅
Tell a story about the products you worked on whenever possible. Ex: I joined the new AI Assistant team, where I led the backend development of the core product using Node.js and some Go because there was a large amount of data being processed every day (1B per minute) ✅
Show how your career progressed through specific role jumps. Ex: And then my friend started an AI startup, and asked if I could help given my depth of experience specifically implementing some of the trickier ML parts. So I joined Centered.AI last February -- we shipped a great product and got over 1m users, but unfortunately, we couldn’t get our next round of funding so now I’m seeing what’s out there ✅
❌ DON'T: Neglect the context that makes your journey engaging, or degrade your experience as you explain it.
Examples:
Don’t focus on your lack of traditional degrees or starting points. Ex: I’ve been in software engineering for a few years now, but I started in a boot camp so I don’t have a traditional computer science background ❌
Don’t be demeaning of your story! If you got more technical over time, be proud of that journey. Ex: At my first job after college, I started in support, and then I was always good with HTML so they let me work on internal tools ❌
Don’t forget to paint a picture of what you worked on: Ex: Then, I went to Company X, where I mostly worked on the backend ❌
Don’t be dismissive of what you’ve worked on generally! Ex: This last job was a good learning experience, but I didn’t work on any large-scale features for our customers or build any features from scratch, I know you all want that so wanted to be upfront ❌
🏆 "What was your biggest achievement in [specific role]?"
✅ DO: Choose an accomplishment with a significant impact on the business and product. You don’t have to know every number -- but be prepared to describe impact in as many ways as possible, even if they don’t seem engineering-focused:
Example: In my role as a Senior Software Engineer at Airtable, my most significant achievement was leading the development and launch of our real-time analytics feature, which directly addressed a critical user need for instant data insights using Python and a React-based frontend. We shipped the feature in Q1 2021 and iterated until 25% of premium users were integrating analytics into their core product usage. While I am not positive what the overall impact was on subscriber retention or new user onboarding, I remember that Sales would often lose deals to our competitor Retool about analytics specifically, and now analytics is on the main page of the paid landing page. There is also now a whole ecosystem of users showing how they used analytics to build their own businesses, including teams at Adobe and Spotify ✅
❌ DON'T: Minimize your success or impact by being too vague/generic.
Example: I was involved in a project at Airtable where we developed a backend feature related to analytics. The main technologies we used were Python for the backend and React for any front-end integration. I don’t know any more specific metrics though, that data lived with the product team ❌
🔦 "Describe what you focused on in your most recent position."
✅ DO: Offer an overview that includes your daily tasks, workload management, and cross-functional team interactions.
Example: On Airtable’s backend team, I worked on scaling the backend services that supported real-time collaboration for millions of users. My team worked on improving Airtable's database performance (we were crashing a lot when I joined in 2021, less later on) through effective indexing, query optimization, and caching. I also collaborated closely with Product to roll out 2 features that were highly requested by power SMB users: advanced data filtering and sorting capabilities within interfaces ✅
❌ DON'T: Isolate your role from the broader organizational context.
Example: I worked on backend services, improving performance and efficiency. I worked mostly with the backend team and didn’t have much interaction with the product, infrastructure, or integration teams. I would love to be on a more collaborative team in the future, our organizations were very siloed and my manager didn’t keep me posted about what was going on ❌
🔥"Tell me about a challenging project and how you managed it."
✅ DO: Select a project with actual business and customer stakes, preferably one where you’re pushing a fix rather than an optimization.
Example:
"In my second month at Airtable, we encountered a significant backend outage that impacted approximately 20% of our paid customers, who relied heavily on Airtable for their daily business operations. It was really bad; there were big Twitter & Reddit threads with panicked customers talking about alternative platforms to switch to, etc.
The outage was traced back to a scalability issue in our database architecture, where a recent surge in user activity had overwhelmed our data handling capacities, leading to system-wide slowdowns and, eventually, partial service failures. The root cause was identified as a bottleneck in our distributed database system, which was not efficiently balancing the load across its nodes, causing delays in data retrieval and updates which cascaded into the outage.
We implemented a series of hotfixes to redistribute the load more evenly across the database nodes and optimized several high-latency queries that were exacerbating the problem. We also developed a more robust load-balancing mechanism that could dynamically adjust resources based on real-time demand, ensuring that sudden spikes in usage would not lead to similar outages in the future
I learned a lot from our Tech Lead & CTO about debugging and rapid incident response. They both took a methodical approach to dissecting system outages, which I think improved my troubleshooting skills. I also learned a lot about the importance of detailed log analysis and proactive monitoring in maintaining system reliability. They also jumped right in on the twitter & Reddit threads and talked to customers directly, which showed me the value of talking directly to your customers to make them feel valued & supported" ✅
❌ DON'T: Choose a project that is too small scale, purely interpersonal or boring.
Example: I was responsible for maintaining our integration with Salesforce, which was a challenging and thankless job. The API was difficult to work with, and our sales team didn’t use it properly and constantly wanted changes. I learned a lot about collaborating with stakeholders in Sales Ops and making sure things ran smoothly ❌
👋 "Why are you leaving your job?"
✅ DO: Focus on the positives of seeking new challenges, and integrate high-level market trends if you need something to blame 🤣
Example: I really appreciated the opportunity to large-scale web platforms at Airtable, and the team is amazing. But after 4 years, I'm looking for a new challenge and probably an earlier-stage environment. I am really excited how AI can be integrated into b2b work tools, as I think it’s where things are headed.
While I’ve loved working at Airtable, the recent shifts in the funding landscape have put a lot of pressure on continuing to deliver COVID-level growth despite our customers trying to cut costs. I think I’m just more excited about a new challenge, and also building new products that use AI to help SMBs ✅
❌ DON'T: Make the whole answer critical of individuals or the poor management of the company -- it just gives the tone a negative vibe, even if it’s true.
Example: I'm leaving my current job because the management, especially the leadership team, just doesn't know what they're doing. They've missed so many obvious opportunities and made some really poor choices that have put the company in a bad position. It's frustrating to work in an environment where your efforts are undermined by poor decision-making at the top. Plus, the overall negativity and lack of direction have made it a really toxic place to work ❌
⁉️ "Tell me about disagreements/conflicts you’ve faced at work and how you handled them."
✅ DO: “Unemotional’ answers that are proactive empathetic & include the customer/ business generally land better than purely interpersonal answers
Example: At Centered, there was a pretty significant disconnect in priorities between the growth team and my team, who were handling most of the bug support. We found it frustrating that the growth team would launch experiments (ex: mostly emails that were right on the line of spam) that confused some of our most active users (which led to more tickets for us). They also would ignore our customers’ biggest requests that we would receive daily -- sending their clients resources via web links, not just via their therapy portal app -- which required engineering but was highly requested and would be highly appreciated.
Overall, I totally understood their motivations and goals, and in retrospect, I probably could’ve done a better job clearly quantifying how frequent certain requests were to help justify product resources. But sometimes, I felt like I couldn’t win, so I just focused on my own work instead of proactively chatting with them about my frustration. The next time I’m in a similar situation with conflicting priorities, I’ll try to do my research on quantifying impact for product teams, and then write my observations down clearly and share them with the team sooner. Since we all had a shared mission and goal to help therapists better support their patients, I think I probably could’ve reached more consensus and helped our product team prioritize better ✅
❌ DON'T: Blaming individuals can come off as stubborn and negative, even if that person was totally in the wrong; better to pick a less charged answer with clearer tradeoffs
Example: I had a disagreement with my manager about how we rolled out new features. I believed in a more complex, scalable approach for the backend, but my manager the CTO wanted to go in a hackier direction. I tried to explain the benefits of my plan, but we ended up going with his approach. Later, the feature had a ton of bugs and problems, which I felt could have been avoided with my original plan. Honestly, I felt not listened to and unable to make changes, so my plan was to find a more supportive environment but then I was part of a RIF which accelerated my search process ❌
💡 "What is something impactful you learned in your most recent role?"
✅ DO: Choose a setback or error with business impact & how you showed resilience
Example: In my most recent role at a fintech startup, one impactful learning experience was when I was working on optimizing our payment processing system. Initially, I focused solely on improving the speed of transactions but overlooked the importance of fraud detection. This led to a spike in fraudulent activities, which was a significant setback.
However, this mistake taught me the critical balance between efficiency and security in financial systems. I learned to integrate robust fraud detection mechanisms into our processes, which not only improved security but also built trust with our customers. This experience highlighted the importance of considering all aspects of a system rather than just one metric ✅
❌ DON'T: Concentrate too much on the interpersonal learnings or chaotic environment without integrating something more high level, it is just not a strong enough answer
Example: In my most recent role, I learned a lot about working with startup founders, especially when dealing with my manager, Centered’s CEO Carolina. I was excited because the mission was big and important to me (mental health), but I learned that having a founder as your manager is chaotic. I felt that we had constantly changing priorities, were always scrambling/panicking, and it felt like there was no clear plan or vision. In the future, I’ll probably want to work for a bigger company where my objectives are clearer, and my manager’s job is to support me and answer my questions ❌
