Mapping Stories to Principles
A candidate tells you a story. Your job is to hear which principles that story demonstrates — and which it doesn't. This is the core skill of principles-based evaluation.
Four universal evaluation principles
In Section 1 you identified your organization's principles. For this workshop, we'll use four that appear — in some form — across nearly every company's framework:
| Principle | What it means | Signal in a STAR answer |
|---|---|---|
| Ownership | Taking responsibility beyond your immediate scope; acting like it's your company | "I noticed the problem wasn't assigned to anyone, so I took it on" rather than "I was told to fix it" |
| Customer Focus | Decisions driven by impact on the end user, not internal convenience | The candidate explains who was affected and how their actions improved the user experience |
| Collaboration | Working across teams, navigating disagreements, building alignment | Evidence of influencing without authority, resolving conflicts, or bringing others along |
| Bias for Action | Moving forward with imperfect information; calculated speed over analysis paralysis | The candidate made a decision and course-corrected, rather than waiting for perfect data |
These four principles give you broad coverage of how someone thinks (Customer Focus), acts (Ownership, Bias for Action), and works with others (Collaboration).
How to listen for principles in a story
When a candidate tells a STAR story, you're not just listening to what happened. You're listening for evidence of specific principles in action.
The mapping process
- Listen to the full story first — don't try to categorize while they're still talking
- Identify the key decisions — what did the candidate choose to do and why?
- Map decisions to principles — which principles drove those decisions?
- Note what's missing — a great story about ownership might show zero collaboration. That's data too.
One story, multiple principles
A single STAR answer often demonstrates 2-3 principles simultaneously. Your job is to pull them apart:
Example story excerpt:
"Our biggest customer was about to churn because of a performance issue in a service owned by another team. I could have filed a ticket and waited, but instead I reached out directly to that team's tech lead, proposed a joint debugging session, and we found the root cause in two days. The customer renewed their contract."
Principle mapping:
- ✅ Ownership — took action on a problem outside their direct responsibility
- ✅ Customer Focus — motivated by customer impact, not internal process
- ✅ Collaboration — reached across team boundaries, proposed joint work
- ✅ Bias for Action — chose to act immediately rather than file a ticket and wait
Watch for "borrowed" stories
Sometimes a candidate tells a story where the principle-driven decisions were made by someone else: "My manager decided to..." or "The team chose to..." That's a flag — you need to probe deeper (we'll cover this in Section 3).
Exercise: Map these stories to principles
Read each STAR story excerpt and identify which of the four principles (Ownership, Customer Focus, Collaboration, Bias for Action) are demonstrated. A story may show multiple principles, or none at all.
Story A:
"We were three weeks from launch and discovered a data migration bug that would corrupt about 5% of user records. The bug was in a module maintained by another team. I spent the weekend writing a migration fix, got it reviewed by their tech lead on Monday, and we shipped the patch before any users were affected."
→ Ownership — fixed a bug in another team's code without being asked. → Bias for Action — spent the weekend on it rather than waiting for the other team's sprint cycle. → Customer Focus — motivated by protecting users from data corruption. → Collaboration — got the other team's tech lead to review the fix rather than merging unilaterally.
All four principles are present in this story. That's strong signal.
Story B:
"My manager asked me to improve the onboarding flow. I ran some A/B tests, and the results showed a 15% improvement. I presented the results at our team meeting."
→ Customer Focus — weak signal. The improvement helps users, but the motivation described is task completion ("my manager asked me"), not user empathy. → Ownership — absent. The candidate executed an assignment; they didn't identify the problem or expand the scope. → Collaboration — absent. No evidence of cross-team work. → Bias for Action — absent. The candidate followed a standard process (A/B test → present results).
This story is competent execution, but shows limited principle-driven behavior. That's useful data for your evaluation.
Story C:
"Two engineering teams were arguing over the API contract for a new integration. Each team wanted the other to do the heavy lifting. I set up a design review with both tech leads, proposed a compromise that split the work based on each team's strengths, and documented the agreement so we could hold each other accountable. We shipped on time."
→ Collaboration — strong signal. The candidate navigated a cross-team conflict and built alignment. → Ownership — the candidate stepped in to resolve a blocker they could have ignored. → Bias for Action — organized the review proactively rather than waiting for management to intervene. → Customer Focus — not directly present. The focus was on internal team dynamics, not user impact.
Three of four principles — and the absent one (Customer Focus) is informative. You might probe: "What was the user impact of shipping on time versus the delay?"
A candidate says: 'My manager asked me to look into the issue, so I ran the diagnostics she suggested and reported back.' Which principle is LEAST demonstrated?
A STAR story demonstrates strong Collaboration and Bias for Action, but no Customer Focus. What should you do?
Why is it important to listen to the FULL story before mapping it to principles?