I’m prepping for some PM interviews at tech companies and I’m running into a specific friction point. When I talk about my consulting experience, I have these rich projects with real complexity, trade-offs, and learning. But the way I naturally describe them—the client context, the constraints, the executive stakeholder management—comes across as very “consultant-y.” Interviewers sometimes give me that face that suggests they’re hearing a pitch or a sales story rather than authentic product thinking.
I’ve tried different framings but I’m struggling to find the right translation. If I strip out too much context, the story loses impact. If I keep it all, it sounds like I’m selling something rather than showing how I’d think about a problem.
I’m curious how others who made this jump handled this. How do you translate consulting case work into PM interview language without losing credibility or the substance of what you did? Are there specific things you deliberately stopped saying or started emphasizing instead?
This requires a deliberate reframe of your narrative structure. In consulting, you lead with the business context and executive recommendation. In PM interviews, lead with the user or product problem instead. For example: instead of ‘We advised a Fortune 500 company on their go-to-market strategy,’ try ‘I worked on understanding why a specific customer segment wasn’t adopting a product feature, and what that revealed about our positioning.’ Emphasize the discovery process and ambiguity you navigated rather than the final recommendation. PMs care about how you think through constraints, gather data, and iterate—not about the prestige of the client or the polish of the final recommendation. Also, when you reference your consulting work, use humble language: ‘I was part of a team that explored…’ rather than ‘I led…’ This subtle shift signals collaboration over individual heroics, which reads better to tech teams.
stop describing ur consulting work at all tbh. they dont care that u did work for a big client. they care if u understand how to prioritize, handle ambiguity, and think like a builder. when u catch urself saying client name or going into the business case, just pivot. say something like ‘what mattered was understanding what the actual user needed vs what the stakeholder wanted’ and move on. literally every consultant makes this mistake—theyre proud of the work so they over-index on the client prestige. nobody at a tech company cares.
The most effective translation emphasizes decision-making under uncertainty and data-driven prioritization. When you reference consulting projects in PM interviews, structure responses around these elements: 1) The core problem you were solving, 2) What signals or data you gathered, 3) Trade-offs you evaluated, 4) How you’d approach the same problem differently now. This framework automatically filters out the ‘pitch’ elements and focuses on PM-relevant thinking. Consulting projects often involve stakeholder management and influence without authority—that’s actually highly relevant to product work, but frame it as ‘navigating competing priorities’ rather than ‘managing executives.’ The shift from consultant narrative (what we recommended) to PM narrative (how I’d build this) is critical for credibility.
I remember doing a practice interview where my coach actually stopped me mid-story and said, ‘You sound like you’re selling me. What were you actually uncertain about?’ That question changed everything for me. I started leading with the hard part—what I didn’t know and how I figured it out—instead of leading with the outcome. When I tried that in real interviews, people actually leaned in more. They wanted to hear how I thought when things were messy, not how I cleaned them up for an executive.
You’ve got great raw material in those consulting projects—just reframe them around the problem-solving process rather than the deliverable. Interviewers will respond to that authenticity!
yeah i’d focus on the decisions u made, not the client name or the final recommendation. that’s what pm interviewers actually want to hear abt