The goal of what started as a little writeup and ended up as a full post is to explain when you probably want to pause, and when you probably want to brainstorm out loud instead.

I recommend pausing for questions where the answer is subjectively based on your life, and brainstorming out loud when answers are making a claim about what’s objectively right.

When to pause

By pausing, I mean politely asking your interviewer for some time, thinking of a sensible answer, and then starting. For example, I might reply to a question saying “That’s an excellent question! I’d like to take 20 seconds to structure my answer. Is that OK?”

Example questions based on your life would be questions like “What qualities does your ideal boss have?” or anything from the “Tell me about a time you…” family. These are based on your life experience, and the interviewer is in no position to argue with what you’ve experienced in your life.

The goal in pausing is to allow you time to think of an excellent, structured answer, which you might not be able to do if you start talking right away. If a great answer occurs to you right away, by all means skip the pause.

When to brainstorm out loud

By brainstorming, I mean sharing multiple possible answers out loud as you think of them, explaining to the interviewer why each is good or bad, and then selecting one response. This is similar to what happens in your head during a pause, but you’re showing that process to the interviewer in this case.

An example questions that forces you to make claim about what’s right would be “What quality is most important in a product manager?” Unlike the previous question, the interviewer can absolutely disagree with you here. Other questions, like “Design a better elevator for the blind”, still force you to make a claim about what’s right – there are many good answers to these design questions, but on some level your answer has to clearly be right for other people, not just yourself.

If you make a claim about what’s right, and it doesn’t make sense to the interviewer, they’ll usually think less of you. This is why you brainstorm out loud. If you walk the interviewer through your thought process, two great things happen.

First, by showing the interviewer the logic behind how you’re thinking, they’re less likely to disagree with your eventual answer. For example, if someone asks me “What quality is most important in a product manager?” and strongly believes the answer is “user empathy”, than if I simply state “prioritization”, the interviewer is less likely to agree with the answer. However, if I instead said “There are a lot of key qualities that initially come to mind, so I’m going to brainstorm a few and then pick one”, then in the process of my exploring those options the interviewer would see why prioritization is so important to me relative to other goals.

Second, you can show useful skills along the way by brainstorming. By giving a good out-loud brainstorm, I can demonstrate creativity and an ability to think about trade-offs, which are great qualities for most tech jobs.