just wrapped a Nike loop for a senior ops/program manager role and the behavioral round was the most distinctive part of the process. sharing what i saw and what seemed to land.
Nike has specific cultural values they lean on: "Be a Sore Loser", "Be on the Offense Always", innovation, teamwork -- they're on the website but more importantly the interviewers literally reference them by name. this isn't performative. they asked about almost every question through one of these lenses.
Questions i got (behavioral round, ~45 min, 2 interviewers): tell me about a time you had to push through a setback to meet a goal. ("sore loser" value directly) describe a project where you had to build something new with minimal precedent. (innovation) tell me about a time you had to influence without authority to move a cross-functional initiative. what does winning look like to you in a work context? tell me about a conflict with a peer and how you resolved it.
that last one had a brief follow-up: "did you win the argument or did you reach the right answer?" which i thought was a good nuance.
What landed: concrete outcomes. numbers, timelines, delivery. not just "we collaborated and it went well." showing you actually care about the thing you worked on. Nike is a product and culture company at its core; if you sound transactional about your work that reads as a mismatch. being honest about the sore loser stuff. i talked about a project that failed and what i did after. they responded really well to that.
What didn't land (in a separate loop i heard about secondhand): vague team-wins. "we were able to deliver" with no ownership signal. they want to know what YOU specifically did.
prep 5-6 strong STAR stories and map them to Nike's listed values before you go in. it's worth 20 minutes of work.