Most people think they don’t have good stories for their resumes. They do — they just haven’t pulled them out yet.
That’s where story elicitation comes in.
The goal is to capture the raw material of your success stories in a simple story outline: Problem → Solution → Transformation. From there, you can expand or compress the story depending on how you’ll use it.
Here’s how it works.
Step 1: Outline the Problem
Ask yourself:
- Why was this worth doing? What was going wrong? Who was impacted?
- How did it affect revenue, sales, costs, customer satisfaction, or quality?
- What was at stake if it wasn’t solved?
- What were competitors doing?
- What had been tried (and failed) before?
The worse the problem sounds, the stronger the story becomes.
Step 2: Capture the Solution
It’s not just what you did but also:
- How you figured out what to do.
- How you got permission to move forward.
- How you built buy-in and went to market.
This shows your problem-solving process, not just your output.
Step 3: Spell Out the Transformation
Here you echo the problems — and show how they disappeared:
- How did the results change the business?
- Did you get recognition from leaders or stakeholders?
- Was your approach reused by others?
- Did your reputation grow?
Numbers help — but don’t worry if you don’t have them. A credible story of change is often enough.
Step 4: Turn the Outline Into Usable Stories
Once you have a strong outline, you can adapt it into different formats:
- Interview answer (200 words): Expand the story into a narrative that lasts 1–2 minutes out loud.
- Resume mini-story (≈45 words): Compress it into a single bullet for your resume, showing problem, action, and transformation.
This is where AI can help. Some people can riff directly from their outline, but they often:
- Stray into too much detail about what they did (a technologist’s trap).
- Miss the right length (too long, or too short).
- Resist actually writing it down — which is a critical step.
AI is great at this. You provide the outline, and prompt it like this:
Prompt 1: Please write a 200-word narrative story from this outline:
[Paste your outline here]
Prompt 2: Now write a 45-word version, using the problem–solution–transformation structure.
I usually ask for multiple versions of the 45-word mini-story and then choose the best — or even stitch together a new version from the best parts.
Example: Tropic Metadata Project
This is a portion of the story outline we elicited. The full outline was more than 30 lines of raw notes, and it took about 20 minutes of back-and-forth to draw it out.
👉 Rule of thumb: If your story outline is less than 20+ lines, it’s too short. Keep digging, keep asking “what was worse about this?” until you surface the real stakes.
- Problem: Tropic’s manual metadata process was slow, error-prone, and risky, causing customer frustration, compliance exposure, and expensive third-party workarounds.
- Solution: I led discovery with customers, partners, and internal teams, redesigned the UX, and implemented a hybrid LLM/OCR solution. Secured buy-in from finance and CTO, rolled out pilots in six weeks, launched in six months.
- Transformation: 10x accuracy, 2x speed, 50% cost reduction, legal and audit risk minimized, customers happier, reputation strengthened.
👉 Interview Answer (200 words): A full narrative version for storytelling in interviews.
👉 Resume Mini-Story (45 words): Our manual contract metadata process created delays, errors, and compliance risk. I led end-to-end discovery, redesigned the UX, and implemented a hybrid LLM/OCR solution. The result: 10x accuracy, 2x speed, 50% cost reduction, and dramatically improved onboarding.
Why This Process Works
- It makes your hidden impact visible. Most people forget the stakes and the transformation unless prompted.
- It creates flexible assets. One story can feed both your resume and your interview prep.
- It builds confidence. Clients consistently tell me that going through this process changes not just their resume, but how they see themselves.
- It takes practice. Don’t expect to nail a great story on the first try. Most people don’t. Even after watching me do it live with their own material, they need practice, iteration, and often feedback to surface the real impact. That’s normal — and it’s why this process is so powerful once mastered.