The translation gap

I've spent the last few months in deep conversations with people in active career transitions. Senior PMs, operations leaders, mid-career executives, founders pivoting back to operating roles. Different industries, different stages, different reasons for moving.

One pattern keeps showing up in every single conversation. It's not the one most career advice is built around.

It's not a skills gap. It's not missing certifications. It's not a weak resume.

It's translation.

A customer success lead who spent seven years onboarding enterprise clients for a SaaS company? On paper, they write "managed customer relationships and renewals." To a hiring manager in product or strategy, that reads like account management. But what they actually did was diagnose product gaps across dozens of customer contexts, translate technical limitations into business impact for executive sponsors, and quietly shape product roadmaps without owning them.

Same person. Same experience. Completely different story depending on who's telling it.

I've been sitting with this since Tuesday's reference check post. The signals are broken the same way on both sides.

Managers give vague feedback when they mean something specific. References communicate through subtext. And candidates describe their experience in the vocabulary of where they've been instead of where they're going. Nobody is saying what they actually mean.

I've been watching this play out in the data from Grapevines too. When someone comes through and we ask them to describe what they do, the first version is almost always the job description version. The version their current employer would recognize.

The version that matters for what's next is usually two or three conversations deeper. It's the version where they stop listing tasks and start explaining decisions. Where they went from "I managed a team" to "I rebuilt how we allocated resources after I realized we were losing 30% of capacity to a handoff problem nobody had named yet."

That second version isn't embellishment. It's accuracy. The first version was the abbreviation.

If you're mid-search and struggling to get traction, before you tweak the format or add another cert, try this: describe your last role to someone who's never worked in your industry. Not what you were called. What you actually solved. The gap between those two descriptions is usually where the opportunity is hiding.

And if you're hiring and someone's resume reads flat, consider that you might be looking at an abbreviation, not the full person. The best hire I ever made came from a resume that undersold them by about 80%. I almost passed on it. The conversation was what changed my mind, and that's a problem, because most hiring processes don't leave room for that conversation to happen.

What's the worst translation gap you've seen from either side? The pattern is always the same. The industries are wildly different.