How You Communicate Signals Your Seniority

Three sentences in, I will likely have judged whether you are a good leader. 3 common pitfalls to avoid sounding more junior than you are.

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(I’m the Queen, Teddy the corgi, San Francisco, CA)

Client: I know I have the skills to do product management at the senior or leadership level. However, whenever I talk with a hiring manager, I get down-leveled after the conversation. They don’t view me as a leader. What did I do wrong?

Consider the following two responses to the popular interview question: “Tell me about yourself.”

Example 1: I am an expert in product road mapping throughout the product development lifecycle. I have extensive experience growing product teams, clarifying product vision, converting opportunities into strategy, and building cohesive plans. I have experience in documenting and evaluating decisions and running daily standups and agile release meetings.

Example 2: I am a product leader with 10+ years of experience at consumer and Saas companies. I launched and grew a new product from 100 to 10,000 users, managing a team of PMs and 80+ xfn partners. I opened a new office for the company in New York, grew it to 40 PMs, Designers, and Engineers, and then opened another new office in Dubai. I partnered with our CPO to draft our team values, iterate on the recruiting funnel, and standardize operational forums like product and design reviews.

Based purely on the responses, who would you hire? Who would you consider for a manager role? Do you even believe this is the same person?

The altitude of your communication signals your seniority and experience. Over and over, I see candidates focus on the wrong parts of an experience to highlight in their resume or initial phone screen when they have great relevant experiences for the role.

Talk about the outcome and why, not the input.

Leaders focus on the outcome and impact delivered of the work they do, not how it is done. Hiring managers want to know what business impact you delivered for the company, not that you know how to do sprint planning and make presentations. So focus your precious time or space on describing the outcome. It sounds something like the following:

I was at Thumbtack for 5 years leading the supply side of the marketplace. In my time where, we grew the supply 20X from 5,000 to 100,000 small businesses — the largest platform of SMBs for services in the US.

When I was at Meta, we shipped a set of updates to how small businesses set budgets and targeting for their ads. This increased campaign start conversion by 15%, leading to $20M increase in revenue globally.

When I was Instagram, we redesigned the Profile tab to better accommodate new features like IGTV, Shopping, and Reels. This led to 50% more engagement on IGTV and 100% more engagement in Shopping, key initiatives for the company at the time.

I led a project to refactor the core code base and make performance improvements which accelerated development speed by 30% and decreased app size by 50%, leading to 10% in app installs.

(please note all numbers are illustrative)

Particularly for product leaders, your role is directly tied to the outcome of the business. If you launched product features but cannot describe the impact it had on the business, then why did we spend precious engineering and design resources on it?

Some projects may be more straightforward to measure impact than others. In general, if you want to progress in your career, it’s important to be staffed to projects that tie closely to business metrics (see. previous post “When in doubt, chase a number”. While it may be “useful” to do that refactor or redesign, or work on an annoying bug, if it doesn’t have high impact, it is not going to get you further in your career. As you can see above, even redesigns and performance improvements can and should tie to a business case.

The more you describe the “How”, the more Junior I think you are.