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.

Happy New Year! I’ve started a series of daily career tips on LinkedIn to usher in the new year. I plan to echo them here on my blog after finishing it, but for now check out my LinkedIn page to read them.

Here’s to a great year filled with health, happiness, and success for all!

People on my team and those I mentor often ask me what the difference is between junior versus senior product managers.

I think it revolves around two things: handling ambiguity, and dealing with scope.

Scope

A junior PM works on an individual feature. A senior PM works on a feature area, which involves multiple features. A principal / lead PM works on an entire product comprised of multiple feature areas, or even a suite of products.

Ambiguity

A junior PM can be given a clear problem and clear solution and execute it well. It doesn’t mean the work is easy, but it’s clear.

A senior PM can be given a clear problem with an _unclear_ solution. Here, the ambiguity is in figuring out the right solution and why it’s the right solution before executing it well.

A principal / lead PM can be given an unclear problem _and_ an unclear solution. They first need to figure out which problem is the right one to solve before figuring out which is the right solution and why, before executing it well.

When you combine the two, you get a sense of the differences between levels. On the one end we have junior PMs who work on clear problems/solutions on one or more individual features. On the other we have principal / lead PMs who can define product strategies and steer an entire product towards the right outcomes for both customers and the business.

There are surely other ways to define the roles, but I’ve found scope and ambiguity to be the two most consistent ways across companies and industries.