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👋 Hey friends,
Let me ask you something.
When you think about your upcoming interviews, what's the thing that keeps you up at night?
I'm going to guess it's not the behavioural questions. It's not the product sense prompts. It's something quieter than that.
It's the moment someone asks you to go deep on your experience, and you're not sure the honest answer is going to be enough.
Maybe you have genuinely impressive work on your resume but when someone asks about it in detail, you feel yourself shrink. You qualify it. You hedge. You say "we" when you mean "I."
Or maybe you've been in a role for a while, you have a PM title, but the environment was constrained. You didn't get full scope. The work wasn't "by the book." And you're terrified that the moment you're honest about that, you've disqualified yourself.
Both of those feelings are real. And they're far more common than anyone admits out loud.
But here's what I want you to hear: the interview isn't a test of whether your experience was perfect.
It's a test of whether you understand your own work well enough to talk about it clearly.
💡 Insight: Confidence in interviews doesn't come from having an impressive title or a flawless background. It comes from knowing exactly what you did, why you made the decisions you made, and what you learned. The candidates who struggle aren't always the ones with the weakest experience. They're the ones who haven't learned to own what they actually have.
The gap most candidates don't see
Here's what I observe in almost every mentorship session I run.
Someone comes in with real work behind them. Real decisions made. Real problems solved. Sometimes genuinely impressive results.
And they describe it like it barely counts.
They bury the win that proves their point. They lead with the constraint instead of what they did within it. They use "we" for everything, including the things they personally drove.
And when I ask them to walk me through a specific decision, they go vague. Not because they don't know. Because they've never had to say it out loud in a way that sounds like they own it.
That's the gap. Not the experience. The ownership of it.
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How to close it
1. Know exactly what you did, not just what happened
Write down the specific things you personally contributed to your last big project. Not what the team did. Not what got shipped. What did you specifically do, decide, or drive?
If you can't name five specific decisions you made, you haven't prepared to talk about it yet.
🧠 If your environment was constrained: the constraint is context, not a disqualifier. "I had limited scope, and within that I noticed X and did Y about it" is a complete, honest, confident answer. The thinking within the constraint is still your thinking.
2. Prepare the "why," not just the "what"
Anyone can describe what happened. Very few candidates can clearly explain the reasoning behind their calls.
"We launched the feature" is a what.
"I pushed to prioritize that feature because our support data was showing a pattern nobody else had connected to churn yet" is a why.
The why is where your PM thinking lives. It's also what an interviewer remembers after ten back-to-back calls.
🔧 Go back through your key projects and ask: what information did I have at each step, and what did I decide to do with it? Write those down. Those are your answers.
3. Be honest about gaps without making them the headline
Every PM has gaps. Every single one. Nobody has done everything.
The candidates who handle this well don't hide the gaps. They name them briefly and redirect.
"I haven't led a 0-1 build from scratch. What I have done is take an ambiguous problem space, run structured discovery, and build toward something testable. Here's an example."
Honest. Specific. Forward-moving.
💡 Don't lead with what you haven't done. Acknowledge it if it comes up, then immediately pivot to what you bring.
4. Say it out loud before you say it in the room
Written confidence and spoken confidence are different skills.
Most people can write a strong bullet point. Far fewer can say the same thing in a conversation without softening it in real time. "I ran the research... well, I mean it was kind of a group thing... I helped with it."
The downgrade happens because you haven't said the accurate version enough times for it to feel normal.
Say it out loud. To a friend, in a practice session, to yourself in the car. Until the honest, specific version stops feeling like you're overselling yourself and starts feeling like you're just describing what happened.
Because that's all it is. What happened. You're allowed to say it clearly.
If you're an aspiring PM job searching alone, this is for you.
You're applying to roles. Getting ghosted. Wondering if your experience is good enough. Rewriting your resume for the 11th time with nobody to tell you if it's actually better.
That's not a you problem.
The Stef The PM Skool community is live.
Inside you get: a community of PMs at the same stage, weekly job search accountability, real feedback on your applications and stories, and direct access to me.
No recycled LinkedIn advice. Just people doing the work, together.
The job search is hard enough. Stop doing it alone.
Bottom line
The interview isn't looking for a perfect background.
It's looking for someone who knows their own work well enough to talk about it clearly, honestly, and without shrinking.
You don't need to hide the constraints. You don't need to inflate the wins.
You just need to understand what you actually did, and say it like you mean it.
See you next week
- Stef
P.S. If you're not sure how to talk about your experience in a way that feels both confident and honest, that's exactly what we work through in my free 30-minute ADPList sessions. Bring your story. We'll find the language together. Book a slot here