After coaching thousands of product managers, I have developed a list of seven elements you typically include in good PM stories. It works during interviews and at work.

Including all these seven elements in your story introduction (introclusion) shows that you are focused on the user, understand the business, can identify the correct problems to solve, are data-driven, and you have a growth mindset. If you can do this in a few sentences before diving in, executives will love you for removing the cognitive load on them. And it buys you wiggle room if you ramble a touch because they know where you are headed.

What seven elements can accomplish this in just a few sentences?

1. Company

2. Product

3. User

4. Problem

5. Solution

6. Results

7. Learnings

Let’s dive into each one.

For each element, I list what an interviewer will read from that simple word or short description.

1. Company name (or description, if a start-up).

   • Scale

   • Specialization

   • Exposure

     • i.e. If you start with: While at Amazon… immediately I know e-commerce, large scale, PM best practices, general scope, etc.

2. Product name (or description, if cute internal name)

   • High-Level Problem

   • Ownership

3. User Description

   • Who they solved for

   • Product Type: Consumer vs. Business Product

   • Frontend/Backend Tech

4. Problem Description

   • Problem-Focused Solutions

   • Related with User fills out the story of what they tackled.

5. Solution

   • Level of complexity

   • Level of Creativity

   • Technical Acumen

   • Problem-Solution pairing

   • Strategic Decision-Making

6. Results description with some measure of success.

   • Metrics-Driven

   • Knows work well enough to remember impact

   • Goal Driven

7. Learnings

   • Growth Mindset

   • Learns from any experiences.

   • Learns from mistakes

   • Developing intuition from the experiences

If you have read my previous work, you know I talk a lot about only being able to remember three things, so it is rare for me to suggest seven things, but any good product manager should naturally remember all of these elements for the vast majority of stories they want to tell.

If you want to learn more about how to put this into practice, take my course on the introclusion.