Should I be proactive or reactive in interviews?

If it's a company that values putting the customer first, you're going to get a question about previous experience where maybe there was a bit of tension between what the customer wanted, and what you felt was maybe better, and how you might compromise around that. Maybe there's a value of forgiveness over permission or something like that, which kind of speaks to whether you move forward independently versus kind of building consensus before you move forward with something. In both cases, or in any of these cases, you can think about some examples from your past that you can have at the ready if the question is asked.

But even better is to actually bring them forward before you're asked. I can think again of my own experience as an interviewer, where I have been most excited by a candidate is when I've got this mental checklist of some values that I want to have demonstrated. I have maybe some questions that would probe around them. But if somebody's already jumping in and demonstrating that... in the last couple of years, there's a couple of examples like that that I can think of, that I almost just wanted to go, "Screw the rest of the process. Fuck it. You're the person. You're hired, on the spot."