A lightweight replacement for bloated multi-page job descriptions: three short bullet lists — Must-have, Should-have, Nice-to-have — capped at roughly three bullets each. Every bullet has to be concretely evaluatable in an interview; generic or table-stakes traits ("good communicator," "strategic thinker") are excluded by design because they can't discriminate between candidates.
The list also restructures the interview loop itself: each interviewer is assigned ownership of one or more specific MSN bullets, so their session is scoped to evaluating that criterion rather than forming a diffuse, generic impression. This turns a panel of vague "what did you think of them" debriefs into a set of pointed, falsifiable verdicts.
Pairs naturally with the The '11 out of 10' Question for framing candidate expectations, and with Product Leader Role Definition and Diagnostics for Reading a Candidate's Product-Leadership Archetype for deciding what the Must/Should/Nice bullets should actually say for a given role.
An MSN list should hold only bullets that are concretely evaluatable through an interview, background check, or reference check. Generic traits like 'passion for building delightful products' are excluded as fluff — they don't discriminate between candidates and can't be scored. The test for whether a bullet belongs on the list is whether a specific interview question, reference check, or background check could confirm or refute it; anything that fails that test gets cut, which is why the framework favors three tight bullets per tier over the sprawling, multi-page job descriptions it replaces.
Once an MSN list exists, assign each interviewer in the leadership hiring loop ownership of one or more specific bullets rather than letting every interviewer ask generic 'how smart are they' questions. Each interview is then built around probing its assigned criteria, so the panel's questions collectively cover the full Must/Should/Nice-to-have list instead of overlapping on generic impression-forming. This turns the MSN list from a hiring-manager artifact into a shared interview-loop structure.