Focus on what *you* did and what *you* accomplished and you’ll do OK in your interview. Did you design a web application despite ambiguous requirements and shifting support from business teams? That’s a great thing for PMs to learn. Did you protect your engineers from randomization by executives so you could deliver the product? That’s also great PM experience. Did you deliver a 1.0 product that failed in the marketplace, and did you take specific, actionable learnings from that experience that will help you do better next time? That’s great too.

Products fail for all kinds of reasons. Sometimes management pulls the plug for reasons that you or your team won’t agree with. It’s happened to me several times. It sucked every time. But failures make you a better PM as long as you learn from them and can explain how you’ll do better next time.

But….

If you start talking about how your CEO sucked, then your interviewer will think that you’re one of those toxic employees who blames other people instead of figuring out how to achieve the best possible outcome given whatever limitations are in front of them.

As a hiring manager, a candidate who blames other people for failure is a HUGE red flag. I literally will not hire a candidate, no matter how otherwise promising, if I get even the slightest inkling that they won’t take full responsibility for failures on their watch. (and also if I think that they won’t be magnanimous in allocating praise when things go well.)

Also, candidates who are bitter about ex-employers are another class of people that I generally won’t hire. It’s OK to be wistfully regretful (“I really thought the product would have been successful if we could have had a few more months to grow the user base, but management pulled the plug before we could find out.”) But anger or derision towards previous management? That’s an immediate no-hire, because it suggests either emotional instability or a lack of perspective.

So be careful. It seems like you’re still very angry at your ex-CEO. If that shows through in your interview, don’t expect to get the job. My advice to you is to try to get past the emotion and negativity. Try to focus on what *you* could have done to improve the outcome and what *you* learned from the experience.

You can’t make your old CEO—or any other person—suck less. But you can make yourself suck less. Focus on the latter and you’ll be fine.