The most common thing I see PM candidates missing in mock interviews is storytelling.

I’ve been doing mock interviews for senior or principal PM candidates over the last few months to help them prepare for the real thing.

These folks are good. They know their stuff. They’re experienced! But it’s hard to condense all that experience into a 45- or 60-minute interview.

So, what’s a common way to structure one’s answer in an interview? A framework! If candidates use a framework like SWOT or Porter’s Five Forces or CIRCLES it’ll be fine, right?

Not quite. While frameworks are great for structuring an interview answer, adding storytelling gives candidates three big advantages:

1. Focus on what matters: a story guides the listener to what’s important. It connects the dots between a premise, setup, and outcome. And it leaves other information out.

Let’s say you’re asked about big product decisions you’ve made and you bring up how you scoped an MVP. A dry framework walkthrough will lay out all the facts (picking a customer segment, prioritizing solutions, shipping on time). Shipping software rarely goes by the books, though. A story can add these things:

a) what was hard about picking and prioritizing an MVP (emphasizes pushing through ambiguity)

b) how you rallied the team to launch and the road bumps along the way (emphasizes quick decision-making and team morale)

c) how you reacted to customers’ initial MVP response (emphasizes metrics and customer-centeredness).

2. Highlight your communication skills: how you tell stories with your interviewer is how you’ll tell stories with your team and executives, too. They won’t want a detailed framework. They’ll be thinking, “What’s the point? What should I care about? Is this the right path forward?”. Stories can get them there.

3. Guide the interview: when the question is ambiguous, a story lets you guide the interview to where you’ll shine. If you’re doing a case study about growing LinkedIn Video adoption, say, and you have zero experience with video or social, you can instead tell a story about how you’ve grown adoption for an unrelated product to highlight strategies you’ve used, techniques that worked, and the parallels to the original premise. That story will highlight your strengths, not get you mired in your lack of experience.

In the end, frameworks organize your thoughts, but compelling storytelling brings them to life. When you weave facts, experience, and empathy into a cohesive narrative, you transform a routine answer into an engaging, memorable conversation—ultimately setting yourself apart from other candidates.