Three Sentences, No Title: What Actually Happens When You Try It.
What three sentences reveal about how much your title was carrying.
Introducing Colette Molteni.
A few weeks ago, I wrote about my profession restructuring under me. One reader pulled out the question I hadn’t actually answered: when the floor plan keeps changing, how do you tell someone what you do in three sentences?
That reader is Colette Molteni.
Colette is the founder of Empathy Elevated, a newsletter for engineers, data scientists, analysts, and PMs that bridges technical work and human skills. She works in Analytics as a Process Manager and has spent over a decade in tech, beginning her career in product management.
Her angle is specific. Empathy as a learnable craft. Curiosity as a tool. The kind of thing that doesn’t get written about much because it’s hard to write about without sounding soft.
The post below is her direct response to mine. She picked up the closing prompt and ran with it.
Three Sentences, No Title: What Actually Happens When You Try It.
Back in April, I reached out to Mike after reading his post, Your profession isn’t gone. It’s restructuring, and I’ve been thinking about what I actually do versus what my title says I do. He ended his piece with three behaviors.
The first one was to write what you do, but without your title, company, or level.
It shouldn’t have stumped me, but it did — and there’s a reason. Being conditioned to think of our titles can make it challenging to break past them. It is the prerequisite for the other two behaviors, yet it is the one most often skipped.
People often skip it because it exposes the weight that your title was carrying.
It’s worth the pause.
Here’s what actually happens when you try.
The Title Was Carrying More Weight Than You Thought.
Most professionals can describe what they do in twenty minutes.
They struggle to do so in three sentences. It’s not a writing problem, though.
The title, the company, and the level were not just decorative; they were doing the heavy lifting of explaining your work to you.
You remove them, and you find out how much of your identity was scaffolding versus structure.
I sat with this myself, deeply pondering what to write. What came out immediately was not “the right answer.” It was what survived three drafts of editing:
I work with technically minded people on the problems their training didn’t cover. The misread room. The rollout with perfect logic and no buy-in. The feedback that arrived without a framework. I do this inside sales operations, where I design the processes, data standards, and decision structures that make AI adoption actually land. What I’m best at is naming what’s happening in the gap between what got built and what gets used.
The first draft was all wrong. I included a job title and a company name, without much thought. I knew both would have to come out.
The middle sentence took the longest. The temptation was to list everything I touch. The constraint forced me to pick one container.
The third sentence was the one that did the real work in getting to this paragraph: I help people communicate better. The specific version: I name what’s happening in the gap.
One I could write on autopilot. The other I had to mean.
When Your Three Sentences Don’t Match Your Title.
Just slightly over a year ago, my title was “Senior Process Analyst”. I was leading several aspects of a product deployment in one of our business verticals. People on and off the team referred to me as a team lead. The work was there, but the official title had not yet caught up.
If I’d had to answer “What do you do?” honestly in that period, Senior Process Analyst would’ve been technically accurate but substantively wrong.
The three-sentence exercise would have forced me to either underclaim the work or describe what I was actually doing. There is no third option. That’s the point.
When your three sentences don’t sound like your title, you are not doing the exercise wrong. You are doing the exercise with empathy for yourself, figuring out where the gap is rather than papering over it. The gap is the most useful information you have right now, especially in this rapidly restructuring job market, where container placements are rapidly changing.
You can’t help one specific person until you can describe what you do specifically enough for them to recognize they need it. You cannot build something on your own terms until you know what your terms are.
The three sentences are the prerequisite, not the alternative.
In a stable job market, you can skip this exercise, and your title will carry the work. In a restructuring market, the title follows the org chart. The three sentences stay with you and are yours.
Final thoughts
The title was the container. The three sentences are the contents. One of these is portable.
I’m grateful to Mike Watson for writing the post that pushed me into this. The instruction was small. The exercise wasn’t.
Mike’s instruction was simple: write it and keep editing it until it feels right. Most people will probably read that and not try. The ones who do find something will eventually be asked for it by the market anyway. Why not get ahead of it!
From Mike
Thank you for sharing your experience, Colette Molteni. I know Product Party readers will love reading about your experience as well as your Substack.
Find Colette at Empathy Elevated, where she publishes multiple times a week on emotional intelligence, stoicism, and human-AI partnership for engineers, data scientists, analysts, and PMs.
Until next week,
Mike Watson @ Product Party
P.S. Want to connect? Send me a message on LinkedIn, Bluesky, Threads, or Instagram.
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Loved this, Collette and Mike, thanks for sharing. I rewrite what I do many times as I find myself explaining it to people in different words. My goal is to get to one sentence, pause, wait for them to think about it, and ask questions. Otherwise, I’m losing most of them. I guess I follow the 5-sec elevator pitch formula 😅.