I want to share something with this group before I talk about it anywhere else. If you have ever gotten "be more strategic" in a review, you know how useless it is as feedback. I heard it handed to clients for years and I could never tell them what to actually do with it, because it is an adjective, and you cannot practice an adjective. So I started keeping track of what the PMs with real pull in their orgs were doing differently. It eventually settled into five behaviors. They propose a direction before anyone hands them one, even when they might be wrong. They change how the room sees the problem instead of just answering the question as asked. They say what they are choosing against out loud, before someone makes them. They hold engineering, design, sales, and finance in one plan instead of winning each conversation separately and hoping it adds up. And their framing is simple enough that it travels without them in the room. I ended up calling it ORBIT (Orient, Reframe, Balance, Integrate, Transmit). I have been using it privately in coaching for a while, and today I am starting to write about it publicly. Here is the thing I keep noticing, though. Almost everyone is naturally strong on one or two of these, and blind to at least one. And the blind spot is usually there because nobody ever told you that part was your job too. So this week's question: which of the five is your weakest right now? Proposing a direction, reframing the problem, naming your trade-offs, holding the functions in one plan, or making your framing travel. And what did it cost you the last time it mattered? Specific stories beat agreement. I will go first in the comments.

Are you running mock interviews with a peer or a coach? Have you honed in on the companies you really want to work for? If not, why? How are you connecting with your network?