They Said She Needed More Experience. That Wasn’t the Problem.

(The feedback sounded reasonable, but it didn’t explain what was actually missing.)

She had been at the company for six years. Led a product launch that brought in $4M in new revenue. Managed a cross-functional team through a reorg without losing a single person.

And when she asked about moving into the VP conversation, the answer came back: “You need more experience.”

She didn’t push back. She didn’t ask what that meant. She did what most high performers do. She took on another initiative. Volunteered for another committee. Started showing up earlier and staying later, trying to close a gap no one had actually defined.

Six months of that, and nothing changed. Not the feedback. Not the trajectory. The only thing that changed was how she felt about the work. The launches she used to get energy from started feeling like obligations. The extra hours stopped feeling like investment and started feeling like proof that none of it mattered.

“More experience” is rarely a diagnosis. It’s a placeholder. It’s what people say when something feels unclear to them about your readiness, but they can’t name what it is.

And that’s the part nobody tells you. The issue isn’t usually your track record. It’s how your track record is being interpreted in the rooms where decisions get made.

When she and I first sat down, I asked her a question that stopped her mid-sentence: “Who in leadership can describe the scope of what you’re actually doing right now?”

Long pause.

“My direct manager, probably.”

“Probably?”

That was the moment. She had been working harder to close a gap that had nothing to do with effort. The people making decisions about her future didn’t have a clear picture of the scope she was already operating at. Her results were strong, but the story around those results wasn’t reaching the right people in the right way.

It was a visibility problem, not a performance one.

Once we changed that, the “more experience” feedback disappeared. Not because time passed. Not because she accumulated more wins. Because the people evaluating her finally understood what she’d been doing all along.

If you’ve been hearing feedback that sounds reasonable but never seems to move you forward, this is worth paying attention to. The gap might not be in your experience. It might be in how your experience is being read.

If this resonated, I built a free series that goes deeper. You’ll uncover the gap between your real value and how it’s landing — and walk away with one concrete change you can make in 15 minutes.

→ Join the Career Readiness Series

Onward.