2 min lesson
Build each story this way
Rebuild the sequence in "Build each story this way" from memory, ending with the check that proves the outcome.
Step 1 of 2
Build each story this way
- 1Situation + Task, in two sentences. Just enough context to make the stakes legible. Don't narrate the org chart.
- 2Action, in the first person. What you did, the decisions you made, the tradeoff you chose. This is 60% of the airtime.
- 3Result, with a number. Latency dropped, adoption rose, the migration covered N files, the eval pass rate moved from X to Y.
- 4The honest coda. One sentence on what went wrong or what you'd do differently. This is the part that makes the rest believable.
"The migration was stuck: a three-week manual job across our payments service that kept slipping because no one owned it end to end. I took it. I mapped the one repeating pattern, ran Cursor's Agent through the mechanical edits a few files at a time, and reviewed every diff myself - I rejected the changes that broke our error handling and hand-wrote those, then added a smoke test before letting it touch the next set. It shipped in two days instead of three weeks, and the eval pass rate on the touched files held at 100%. What I'd do differently: I let one silent logging regression through, so now I write the test that fails on a swallowed error before I start, not after."
One story in the bank must answer "how did you know it worked?" with a concrete metric. That's the eval signal and it's the question that most directly mirrors the job. If your best result is "the customer was happy," rebuild it around something you measured.
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Advanced table
Tag every story so you can deploy on demand
Tag every story so you can deploy on demand
- Story
- Shipped the migration tool
- Primary value
- Bias to ship
- Result you'll cite
- Cut a 3-week manual job to 2 days
- Story
- Salvaged the stalled rollout
- Primary value
- Recovering from failure
- Result you'll cite
- Got adoption from 12% to 70%
- Story
- Scoped the vague brief
- Primary value
- Navigating ambiguity
- Result you'll cite
- Found the real bottleneck in week one
- Story
- Told the client no
- Primary value
- Holding a boundary
- Result you'll cite
- Preserved the relationship and the deadline
- Story
- Proved the workflow worked
- Primary value
- Eval rigor
- Result you'll cite
- Lifted eval pass rate 64% to 91%
| Story | Primary value | Result you'll cite |
|---|---|---|
| Shipped the migration tool | Bias to ship | Cut a 3-week manual job to 2 days |
| Salvaged the stalled rollout | Recovering from failure | Got adoption from 12% to 70% |
| Scoped the vague brief | Navigating ambiguity | Found the real bottleneck in week one |
| Told the client no | Holding a boundary | Preserved the relationship and the deadline |
| Proved the workflow worked | Eval rigor | Lifted eval pass rate 64% to 91% |
When a story involves a team, still say "I." Not to erase teammates, but because the interviewer is grading your contribution. "I noticed the index was stale, I wrote the reindex job, I shipped it Friday" is what they need to hear. "We decided" hides exactly the signal they're after.
A failure story with no real failure is a tell. "My weakness is I care too much" fails the truth-seeking screen instantly. Pick a real mistake, own the cost honestly and show the change you made because of it.
QWhy does Cursor want your STAR stories told in the first person singular and what does the metric in the Result actually signal?