Good news: I have a five-part template you can use for job interviews to answer the most dreaded of interview questions as well as networking and promotion conversations. Caution: don’t skip the story because it’s by far the most important and influential and valuable step.

1. Start with Your One-Liner:

I’m a product manager with 10 years experience helping teams overdeliver.

2. Add Your Superpowers:

I lean on three strengths that show up repeatedly in my work: I love solving complex problems, building cross-functional relationships, and growing depth and mastery in people.

3. Add a Pain Story:

This is an example that connects all your superpowers, and maps to the most important elements of the job description or goals/challenges of the company

In my role as X, we we’re running into trouble shipping new features on a product designed to do Y. We realized that marketing and engineering weren’t speaking the same language, so we organized a “listening” session to hear people out and get to the bottom of their frustrations. Unexpectedly, it was an assistant on the onboarding team who described the problem from the customer’s perspective, and that gave us the human side of the data that helped us design a solution.

4. Add a Lesson Learned:

My takeaway from that experience is that the best solutions come when you give people an opportunity to contribute, and that means listening more than you speak.

5. Add What’s in it for Them:

And when I consider the challenges you are facing in expanding into a new market and building and executing a strategy by the end of Q4, you need someone who understands how all the dots connect and can build influence with stakeholders quickly.

Okay...substitute your details and you’re off and running.

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