Three years at a service company and every product interview asks why my work sounds so generic
Most of what I've done is maintenance on a client's codebase, tickets scoped by someone else, no say in any of it. Product companies keep asking what I owned and I don't have a clean answer. Has anyone actually made this jump? Did you have to build side projects to prove you can think past a ticket, or is there a way to frame client work that doesn't sound like I just followed instructions for three years?
2 comments
- 0
AnonymousAnon Mild counterpoint — I stopped apologising for the service background entirely. Ownership isn't only "I chose the architecture", it's also "I kept this alive for 40,000 users with no docs and a client who changed their mind weekly". Also worth filtering which product companies you chase: mid-size ones read consultancy experience completely differently to the ones that only ever hire from other product companies.
- 0
AnonymousAnon Made this jump last year. What worked was reframing it from "I fixed client tickets" to the decisions I made inside them — why I picked an approach, what I pushed back on, what broke and how I tracked it down. Interviewers don't really care that the codebase belonged to someone else, they care whether you were thinking or just typing. One well-told bug hunt did more for me than any side project did.