1 min lesson
Match altitude to audience
Use "Altitude is how high you fly over the detail" to say what you would do next.
Step 1 of 2
Match altitude to audiencethe move interviewers grade
Altitude is how high you fly over the detail. An exec wants the view from 40,000 feet - impact, ask, done. An engineer wants ground level - the exact repro and the stack trace. Handing an exec the stack trace or an engineer a vague "users are unhappy," is the most common failure and it reads as not knowing who you're writing for.
“Agent is overwriting whole files on single-function edits. That's 38 users this week, three of them Enterprise accounts worth ~$120k ARR and reports doubled since the last release. My recommendation: treat it as a P1 regression and take it this sprint. Full repro and logs are in the appendix.”
Have one real example of each document ready to show or describe - a brief you wrote, a ticket an engineer thanked you for, a reply that calmed an angry user. The take-home and onsite test this directly and walking in with proof beats describing the skill in the abstract.
If a take-home gives you one bug and one audience, write that document tightly, then add two lines: "Here's how I'd reframe this for the other two audiences." It signals range without padding the deliverable and range is exactly what this role rewards.