The Two Introductions
What your friends know about you that your resume doesn't
read time 3.5 minutes
I’ve been mentoring and reviewing resumes for aspiring PMs recently. The resumes are fine: internships, coursework, degrees, projects. Solid on paper. But the most important part is almost always missing: two or three sentences at the top explaining who this person actually is and why someone should hire them specifically. The reason you’d genuinely remember them, and not just their accomplishments.
When I give that feedback, something interesting happens. They come back with every other edit done - reformatted bullets, stronger verbs, cleaner layout - but those sentences either summarize everything already on the page or are still blank.
The problem? Students genuinely don’t know how to put their personality on a professional document. Those two versions of themselves live in separate rooms.
Work is about output - what I can do, what I’ve shipped, what I’m capable of. Then there’s the real them - curious, warm, the person their friends describe as someone who lights up a room or connects with a stranger in two minutes. They can’t put the second person on a resume because nobody told them that person belongs at work.
There's something deeper happening here. A resume isn't just a document, it's a system. And the system teaches you what counts: bullet points, action verbs, quantified impact. Over time, by writing yourself in outputs, you start seeing yourself that way. The format shapes the identity. I studied this in college through a lens called humanomics - the idea that the systems we build quietly shape the humans inside them. Resumes are a perfect example. They compress a whole person into a market-legible signal, and somewhere in the compression, the most interesting parts get lost.
I recognized this pattern because I lived it.
When I first became a PM and joined Walmart, I went all in on output. More hours, more work, more shipping. I thought that was the game. And the work did matter, but what actually helped me grow was how I showed up. How I made the team laugh on hard days. How people wanted to work with me because I cared about the problem and the people around it. I didn’t plan that, I just couldn’t help being myself eventually, and the career responded.
When I was in my job transition, it was who I truly was that resonated with the person on the other side of the screen. The way I told my story, thought about problems, and the energy I brought. That’s what made me memorable and that’s what got me hired.
So this time around at Adobe, I’ve gone personality first. I bring my curiosity, my humanomics lens, my creative instincts, my humor - all the things I used to think were separate from being a PM, and it works. Primarily because I’ve stopped splitting myself in two.
AI continues making execution cheaper by the day. The ability to write code, analyze data, generate content, build prototypes - is being commoditized fast. Which means “I’m a fast learner who delivers quality work” is no longer a differentiator, it’s the baseline. The traits these students are reserving for their “friend self” - how they think, how they connect, how they see the world - are becoming the most valuable professional skills they have.
And yet we’re still training people to split themselves. Work mode from 9 to 5. Real self on evenings and weekends. Grind through the week, escape on Saturday. Five days of performing a role to earn two days of being yourself.
There’s a show called Severance where employees literally have their work memories separated from their personal ones. Two selves, cleanly divided. It’s dystopian on screen. Most people are doing a softer version of that every day and then wondering why they feel unfulfilled.
The push I’m making — to the people I mentor, to myself, to anyone reading this — is to stop treating your personality as something you pack away at 9 AM and unpack at 6 PM. The curiosity, the honesty, the way you connect with people, the weird intersection of interests that makes you you, that’s not a distraction from your career. It can become the foundation for it.
Those blank sentences at the top of the resume? They’re blank because we’ve been taught that work is about output and everything else is personal. Over time, I’ve realized those two things aren’t separate. They never were. So write the personality sentences. Build the artifacts that show your taste - a website, a video, a portfolio, a newsletter. Let people discover who you are, not just what you’ve done.
The person your friends would describe is the one your career is waiting for.
— Akash