Brian Rella

Get off the DREADMILL and into a Career that inspires you | Executive Career Coaching | Career Development | Job Search Strategies

Most senior leaders don’t feel lost.
They feel constrained.

On paper, things look good.
In reality, the role no longer fits, the organization feels limiting, and the next level isn’t obvious from where you’re currently sitting.

That’s the moment I work in.

I advise experienced leaders who are at a career or leadership inflection point. When the role they’re in no longer matches their capability, and the next chapter requires more than incremental change.

This work is not about performance optimization or job search mechanics.

It’s about:

• Moving beyond roles that underuse your experience and judgment
• Understanding your real scope and authority
• Making clean decisions about where and how you lead next
• Stepping into roles, ownership, or influence that fully match who you’ve become

I work best with leaders who are:

• Already successful, but operating below their real level
• Trusted operators ready to step into real authority
• Weighing decisions like staying vs. leaving, or influence vs. freedom
• Unwilling to spend the next decade constrained by roles that no longer fit

My role is not to tell you what to do.

My role is to help you see clearly, challenge the assumptions you’re operating inside of, and guide you through the shift required to lead at your next level with alignment and sovereignty.

This is selective, high-trust work.

If you’re looking for surface-level improvement, resume support, or a lateral move, this won’t be the right fit.

If this reflects where you are, your next step is obvious. 

CEO and Head Coach

Career coach and job search strategist helping executives get the career they want 🎯

Nils Davis

I help product managers ramp up their confidence and impact. Start with one free call! | secretsofpm.com/free-call

I’ve reviewed hundreds of resumes, and in just one call I can show you why yours isn’t getting interviews - and how to fix it.
Book *your* review using the “Make your resume amazing!” link in my profile.

If you are having problems getting interviews when you apply to jobs, it's not you. It's your resume and your LinkedIn presence. 

I help amazing people like you *sound* amazing in your resume and your LinkedIn profile. 

Most resumes are terrible - and I've seen a lot of them!

* They're boring.
* They all sound the same.
* They are hard to read.
* And most importantly: They don't show the real impact you've had.

If your resume is boring and doesn't show how amazing you are - you won't get the interview.

WHAT OTHERS SAY:

* "Nils turned my overlooked skills into impactful stories and helped me land my next role." (Brenna B.)
* "He pushed me to tell outcome-driven stories—now my resume finally feels like me." (Summer H.)
* "Nils brought out the business value of my achievements—I got multiple interviews and an offer." (Sifat R.)

ABOUT ME: Nearly 30 years in enterprise software product management, discovering market problems, creating innovative solutions, and helping sales and marketing teams succeed. I thrive on new challenges, cross-disciplinary insights, and finding solutions where others see roadblocks.

Senior Product Manager

Ensuring our customers' first experience with TriNet technology is stellar by curating their onboarding process from signed contract through first payroll.

I just reviewed a resume from someone with 8 years as a Google product manager - who's not getting interviews

When I looked at it, I spotted the problem in 2 seconds.

It wasn't their experience. It was a communication breakdown.

The job posting said "Senior Product Manager."
Their resume said "Product Strategist & Innovation Lead."

Same thing? To the candidate, yes.

But the hiring manager's brain had to translate it. And when people have to work to understand your resume, they don't.

They just move to the next one.

Your resume isn't failing because you're not qualified.

It's failing because you're not obviously the right fit in the first 5 seconds.

Two things that fix this immediately:

• Match their exact title - If they want a "Senior Product Manager," that's what you call yourself. Not "Product Visionary" or "PM Leader."
• Be clear on your years of experience - don't make them guess. (If they can't see you have enough experience you'll be instantly disqualified.)

Now they might keep reading for another few seconds - giving you long enough to hook them with a differentiator. (That's a topic for another post.)

===
I've helped 100s of people fix this exact problem. Many started getting callbacks within days.

Want me to look at yours?

I'm offering free 15-minute resume reviews this week. I'll tell you exactly what's making hiring managers bounce—and how to fix it.

Link in my profile (or comment "REVIEW" and I'll send it to you).

Resume and LinkedIn coach | 25+ yrs of enterprise software product management | perfectpmresume.com | Resume, LinkedIn, and interview coaching for product managers and professionals seeking $150K-$300K+ roles.

Most of the product managers who come to me aren’t early in their careers.

They’re skilled at product management - totally qualified for the roles they are going after

They’re not trying to pull the wool over the hiring manager’s eyes.

They’ve built real things. Shipped real products. Solved problems that mattered.

And yet - when they try to explain that work on a resume, in an interview, or on LinkedIn - it somehow comes out smaller than it actually was.

Not because they lack confidence.

Not because they’re bad communicators.

But because they’re describing their work in the “wrong unit."

Their resumes are full of 𝘵𝘢𝘴𝘬 𝘭𝘢𝘯𝘨𝘶𝘢𝘨𝘦:

• “I built X.” 
• “I led Y.” 
• “I worked closely with Z.”

That’s accurate. But it shows up on 100s of other resumes. You and all the other qualified candidates blend together.

Tasks describe activity. And we all do the same things. 

So people come to me confused: “I’ve followed all of the Internet’s advice on my resume - I know I did meaningful work… but it doesn’t 𝘴𝘰𝘶𝘯𝘥 like it. And I’m not getting interviews.”

Because hiring managers are looking for 𝘪𝘮𝘱𝘢𝘤𝘵.

That gap isn’t a confidence issue. It’s a translation problem.

𝗛𝗼𝘄 𝗜 𝗵𝗲𝗹𝗽.

Across four 1-on-1 sessions, I work with folks to do something very specific.

We surface your strongest stories, and transform them from “task language” into “impact language.” You get: 

• Resume bullets that actually show the impact you had.
• A bank of interview-ready stories
• And a differentiator that actually fits you

Not by inventing anything. 

But by articulating the stories into causal shape: the problem, the difficulty, the change that occurred.

Yes, you end up with a transformed resume and LinkedIn profile (and more interviews).

• Cleaner structure.
• Tighter language.
• Much stronger signal.

But the real transformation is that your internal model of your own work has transformed. 

People don’t leave thinking, “I did a lot of things.”

They leave thinking, “I consistently solve meaningful, expensive problems to transform the business.”

Same experience. Different level of abstraction.

This is all 100% 1-on-1 with me. (My own PM experience is a definite asset here!)

Every session is recorded and shared with you (recording + AI summary), so nothing gets lost and you can reuse the thinking later.

It’s not motivation (although the experience 𝘪𝘴 motivational). 

It’s not document editing (although your resume 𝘭𝘰𝘰𝘬𝘴 good when we’re finished). 

It’s sense-making - and then encoding that sense into language the market understands. 

Which generates a lot more interviews. 

DM me to learn more.

Most of the senior PMs I work with can't see their own accomplishments.
 
Not because they haven't done impressive things. They have. The impact is real. 

But the stories - they aren't there.
 
They've spent years describing their work in the language of activity. 

• Managed the backlog. 
• Ran sprint planning. 
• Coordinated with stakeholders. 

That's the vocabulary the job trained them to use - in Jira, in performance reviews, in standups - and it's the vocabulary that ends up on the resume.
 
When I help them surface the story behind what they actually did - the problem that existed, what they figured out, what changed because of them - they're amazed. 

And they're impressed! (With themselves.)
 
I hear things like, "I have never talked about my experience this clearly."

The stories were always there. They just couldn't see them anymore.
 
My job (literally): Take people who've done extraordinary things and give them the language to finally sound like it.

You're applying to a job and trying to "match your resume to the JD." But that's not what gets interviews. 

The hiring manager has a problem to be solved and some outcomes they've promised to leadership based on this hire. 

They want to find the person who's most likely to solve those problems and deliver those outcomes. 

• But the problem they need solved is not on the JD.
• And the outcomes they promised are not on the JD.

So, how can you persuade them you can do it? 

Your only option is to show how you solved similar problems in the past, and delivered meaningful outcomes. 

Not that you "did your job." No one cares (much) about your qualifications. (There are 100s of qualified candidates.)

They want to know "can you make a difference for me?" 

Does your resume answer that question?

PMs don't do enough strategy. We all know this. And not just feature factory PMs. 

How often do you actually write down a clear hypothesis about why a feature is worth building, tie it back to real discovery, and later validate whether you were right?
 
We know we should. We just don't, because the day-to-day eats us alive.
 
LLMs change that equation. Strategic thinking used to be expensive - it required time, meetings, cognitive energy you've usually run out of already. Now it's cheap. 

I call it "vibe strategizing."  It's the AI skill that will actually make you more valuable  -- and it nothing to do with building AI products. 
 
A few (easy) examples of what it looks like:
 
• A user story lands in your queue. Before you write acceptance criteria, you spend 5 minutes with Claude exploring what business problem is actually behind it, and what you'd expect to happen when it ships. Developers get better context. You get a hypothesis you can test later.
 
• You have a folder of customer interview transcripts nobody has looked at holistically. You run them through an LLM and ask it to surface the weak signals — the patterns that don't show up in any single interview but quietly repeat across all of them. Humans are terrible at this. LLMs are surprisingly good at it.
 
• You want to find the revenue opportunities you're missing - right now, not in the next planning cycle. Use the AI to help analyze whether your marketing is using the language your customers actually use. Or, are there adjacent segments who could use what you've already built - or who might already be using it?
 
This is fundamentally different from using AI to write PRDs faster. That's just accelerating one of the least strategic things we do.
 
Here's the paradox: a PM who vibe strategizes regularly is more likely to find a genuinely good AI integration in their product than one who was handed an "add AI to this" mandate from above. Because they've already done the thinking.
 
Want to try this today?

Next time you write a user story (or get one thrown over the wall), paste it into an LLM with this prompt:
 
"𝘞𝘩𝘢𝘵 𝘣𝘶𝘴𝘪𝘯𝘦𝘴𝘴 𝘱𝘳𝘰𝘣𝘭𝘦𝘮 𝘪𝘴 𝘭𝘪𝘬𝘦𝘭𝘺 𝘣𝘦𝘩𝘪𝘯𝘥 𝘵𝘩𝘪𝘴 𝘳𝘦𝘲𝘶𝘦𝘴𝘵? 𝘞𝘩𝘢𝘵 𝘸𝘰𝘶𝘭𝘥 𝘸𝘦 𝘦𝘹𝘱𝘦𝘤𝘵 𝘵𝘰 𝘩𝘢𝘱𝘱𝘦𝘯 𝘸𝘩𝘦𝘯 𝘪𝘵 𝘴𝘩𝘪𝘱𝘴? 𝘏𝘰𝘸 𝘸𝘰𝘶𝘭𝘥 𝘸𝘦 𝘬𝘯𝘰𝘸 𝘪𝘧 𝘪𝘵 𝘸𝘰𝘳𝘬𝘦𝘥?"
 
Read what comes back. Refine it. Add it to the ticket. If it doesn't seem right, you have some work to do. But now you know where to focus your attention.
 
That's it. Five minutes. You just did more strategy than most PMs do in a month.

In the past year, multiple founders and senior PMs came to me because they needed to polish their resumes. 
 
Not because they'd failed. Because their company was failing - even though their product was working.
 
Happy customers. Real traction. Legitimate product.
 
And somehow, still not growing.
 
These folks were making contingency plans, just in case.
 
Here's what gets me about this: losing to a better product is hard, but it's honorable. You fought, they won, the best solution prevailed.
 
But these were a different kind of failure. The product is good. Customers love it. And the company is dying anyway - because they're showing up to the wrong stadium, on the wrong day, with the wrong uniform and the wrong ball. The game is happening somewhere else and they don't know it.
 
They don't have a product problem. They have a clarity problem. About who it's really for, how to talk about it, and why the right prospects should care.
 
I've started to wonder how common this actually is.
 
If you've seen this — or been in it — I'd genuinely like to hear about it. DM me or drop a comment.

People often tell me they hate "blowing their own horn" or "sounding too braggy" on their resumes. 

Of course, this means they don't get many interviews. Not ideal!

I realized early on that that "ethical sales" is not an oxymoron. 

People genuinely need what you have to offer, but they often need help seeing that it exists, how it can help them, and why choosing it is their best decision at the time.

The same applies to your resume. 

Hiring managers and recruiters need you – but they need help understanding why. 

They need to see the kind of impact you can have, grounded in the impact you’ve had in the past. 

They need to see the disasters you averted. The transformations you enabled. The chaos you tamed. 

If your resume just says, “I did my job,” how are they supposed to see the difference you could make for them?

Transforming your resume into a "sales page" isn’t bragging. 

It’s being clear and confident in showcasing your signature achievements - so the hiring manager can see the problems you tackled, the solutions you delivered, and the meaningful results you achieved for your company and customers.

Most resumes fall short - and don't generate interviews. 

But here’s what I’ve validated time and again: it’s 𝘯𝘦𝘷𝘦𝘳 because people don’t have amazing stories. It's because they lack the skills to tell the right stories in a compelling way.

I know 𝘺𝘰𝘶 have powerful stories of accomplishments. Stories that, if told well on the page, would make hiring managers want to interview you.

But they aren't visible on your resume. (Sometimes there's a 𝘭𝘪𝘵𝘵𝘭𝘦 hint - but almost never anything concrete.)

Let your impact shine. Not to brag, but to help others see why you’re exactly the person they need.

--- 
Drop an "Invisible" in the comments, or connect with and DM me, and I'll send you my new PDF called "Why Most Resumes Don’t Generate Interviews."

Everyone's using AI to "optimize" their resume.
And it's working perfectly. Not!

Your resume has to pass two gates before you get an interview:
 
𝗚𝗮𝘁𝗲 𝟭 — 𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗿𝗲𝗰𝗿𝘂𝗶𝘁𝗲𝗿. They're using the job description as their reference, but they're not playing keyword bingo. They're reading for meaning - strong signals that you've had real impact, that you can think, that you make things better. 

They'll disqualify fast, but not because you missed a keyword. They'll disqualify because nothing on your resume made them stop.
 
They like metrics, but only when the metrics tell a story on their own. "20% improvement" makes them work too hard - 20% of what, starting from where, and is that even good? They'd rather see a number that needs no footnote.
 
And here's the thing: they genuinely want to find great people. That's the job. 

They want to walk into a hiring meeting and say "you need to talk to this person."
 
The catch: they're now reading hundreds of resumes that look almost identical, thanks to AI. 

zSame structure. Same action verbs. Same decontextualized percentages. 

All "AI-optimized" for the same job description.
 
When everything looks the same, nothing stands out. Your "optimized" resume is now just noise — and you've made their job harder, not easier.
 
𝗚𝗮𝘁𝗲 𝟮 — 𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗵𝗶𝗿𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗺𝗮𝗻𝗮𝗴𝗲𝗿. They ask one question: 

• "𝘊𝘢𝘯 𝘵𝘩𝘪𝘴 𝘱𝘦𝘳𝘴𝘰𝘯 𝘴𝘰𝘭𝘷𝘦 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘴𝘱𝘦𝘤𝘪𝘧𝘪𝘤 𝘣𝘶𝘴𝘪𝘯𝘦𝘴𝘴 𝘱𝘳𝘰𝘣𝘭𝘦𝘮 𝘐'𝘮 𝘴𝘵𝘳𝘶𝘨𝘨𝘭𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘸𝘪𝘵𝘩 𝘳𝘪𝘨𝘩𝘵 𝘯𝘰𝘸?"
 
The job description isn't that problem. It's their best attempt to describe someone who might solve it.
 
So when you paste your resume into ChatGPT and say "optimize this for this job description," here's what happens:
 
→ Gate 1: You sound like everyone else. 
→ Gate 2: You're answering the wrong question.
 
AI is great at matching your resume to a job description. But a job description isn't the recruiter's gut reaction, and it isn't the hiring manager's actual problem.
 
The resumes that get interviews make one thing unmistakably clear: 𝘵𝘩𝘪𝘴 𝘱𝘦𝘳𝘴𝘰𝘯 𝘩𝘢𝘴 𝘴𝘰𝘭𝘷𝘦𝘥 𝘩𝘢𝘳𝘥 𝘱𝘳𝘰𝘣𝘭𝘦𝘮𝘴 - 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘪𝘳 𝘳𝘦𝘴𝘶𝘮𝘦 𝘢𝘤𝘵𝘶𝘢𝘭𝘭𝘺 𝘴𝘩𝘰𝘸𝘴 𝘪𝘵.
 
AI can't write that. It doesn't know what makes you 𝘺𝘰𝘶. It only knows the job description.
 
And the job description isn't the point.
 
𝗥𝗲𝗰𝗿𝘂𝗶𝘁𝗲𝗿𝘀 - Am I describing your experience right? Are you seeing this in the resumes coming across your desk?

How to read a job description...

Hiring manager's internal monologue:  I need someone who will help make my team better, who will make my life better, and who can solve the problems I and the business are facing.

(What they write down on the JD) I think people who can do this have this title <title> and this set of skills <boilerplate for the role>. 

I have three specific things that are critical to success:
* Thing one
* Thing two
* Thing three

(Narrator: None of them is actually critical to success.)

Your resume should be focused on their internal monologue, not on their half-hearted attempt to capture that in a non-commital job description.

taplio

The Battle

Brian Rella

Nils Davis

Followers

Posts

Engagements

Likes

Performance ScoreNils Davis's LinkedIn Performance

Ready to grow your LinkedIn presence?

taplio

The Battle

Brian Rella

Nils Davis

Followers

Posts

Engagements

Likes

Performance Score.css-goub6s{font-size:var(--chakra-fontSizes-md);font-weight:500;color:var(--chakra-colors-gray-600);display:block;margin-top:var(--chakra-space-1);}Nils Davis's LinkedIn Performance

Ready to grow your LinkedIn presence?

Performance ScoreNils Davis's LinkedIn Performance