📣 You already have PM experience. You just don't know what to call it.

👋 Hey Friends!

Let me tell you about someone I'm working with right now.

Seven years as a Business Analyst. She owned a digital tool that helped double her company's revenue in four years. She got laid off, started applying to PM roles, and kept getting passed over.

When I asked how she was describing that project on her resume, she sent me this:

"Supporting digital transformation initiatives."

She wasn't lying. She was just describing seven years of real, measurable work in a way that made it completely invisible.

That bullet is why she wasn't getting calls.

The experience is there. It's almost always there. The problem isn't what people have done, it's how they're describing it.

PM hiring managers are pattern-matching. They're scanning for five things:

If your work touched any of those things and you're not naming them, especially the metrics, you're invisible.

I know this because I lived it. Before I had the PM title, I spent years in customer-facing roles. I had strong opinions about the product. I was pulling feedback from customers constantly. I was informally advocating for changes that eventually got built. When I finally learned to describe that work in PM language, it reframed everything.

The work hadn't changed. The story had.

1. Find the ownership moments

The question isn't "did I manage a product?" It's "was there something that would have gone differently if I hadn't been there?" A process you redesigned. A tool you championed. A decision you drove. That's ownership, name it that way.

2. Find the customer signal

Did you talk to customers, users, or anyone who used a product you touched? Tickets, calls, onboarding sessions, feedback reviews all of it counts. PMs are paid to understand users. If you've been doing that without the title, say so explicitly.

3. Find the metric

What got better because you were there? Even roughly. Revenue, retention, time saved, adoption, error rate, NPS. You don't need to have run an A/B test. You need to have cared about an outcome and done something about it.

4. Find the cross-functional moment

Did you ever coordinate between two teams? Translate something technical for a non-technical audience? Manage a deadline across functions? That's the job. PMs live in the gap between engineering, design, business, and customers. If you've worked in that gap, you've been doing PM work.

Pull up your last performance review, an old job description, or a project you led; anything from the last two years. Look for moments where you owned something, talked to users, moved a metric, or bridged two teams.

Rewrite one bullet using PM language. Just one.

Then reply and send it to me. I'll tell you if it's landing.

The person I'm mentoring is reframing seven years of real work right now. When she gets the role, it won't be because she did something new, it'll be because she finally learned to tell the story that was already true.

That same story exists in your work history. You just have to go find it.

See you next week!

- Stef

P.S. If you want to do this live, bring me one bullet from your resume and 30 minutes. I'll show you exactly how to translate it. I run free 1:1 sessions and I cap them at 5 per week because I actually want to give each one real time. If you want a spot, grab it below.