Meta is testing for vibe coding. Anthropic is asking what frontier AI should and should not do. OpenAI hands you a hypothetical capability and asks how you would bring it to market. People talk about these rounds like they are new tests for new skills. But are they really that new? They are more like old tests with the safety net removed. The safety net was the framework. The pattern. The familiar product category. For years, a strong candidate could memorize a structure, apply it to a...

A reader sent me a note last week after we exchanged a few messages on LinkedIn. I had asked which of my posts had resonated with them, to learn what was landing for the people who read along. They wrote back with 4 things. A post on deliberate practice over volume. A post on the inability to see your own blind spots. A post on thinking on your feet, and how it comes from experience and pattern recognition, not from effort. And then they said one more thing: “These are things I subconsciously...

A IC6 client of ours had been at Meta through more than one round of cuts. We had been working together on their executive presence and the framing of how they communicated their work to leadership, not for interview prep. Then this round of cuts has started. They decided they wanted to be in a position to choose, started interviewing, and had landed an offer at another tier 1 company. The role was a level up at L7. The total comp was $1.14M, up from their Meta TC at $750K. When the offer...

A client shared with me that they've been feeling super overwhelmed: The AI course they kept starting and dropping. The interview prep they wanted to get serious about. The VP who wanted a deck by Tuesday. The customer calls they couldn't miss, the kid's doctor appointment, the partner asking why they were on a 8:30pm work call again. And then at the end of our session, they told me they had 3 things at work that week, and that was it. They no longer felt overwhelemed. Nothing had left their...

A client told me their interview didn't land but they walked out thinking they had nailed it. They talked about their big launches, impact metrics, the team size, the cross-functional wins. Everything was strong. But feedback came back a few days later -polite, warm, and a no. When you're more junior, interviewers evaluate you on whether you can do the job. Can you run a launch, write a clear spec, ship a feature, move a metric. They need to know you're competent because that's the bar you...

Your colleagues already see you at your level. They've watched you in product reviews. They've seen you work through messy tradeoffs in real time. When you give a short answer in a 1:1 or drop a one-liner in a leadership meeting, they fill in the depth behind it because they were there for the conversations that built your shorthand. In a 45-minute interview with someone who has never met you, no one fills in anything. The interviewer has only the words you say in those 45 minutes. Whatever...

One of my mom's go-to phrases, even to this day, is "you could do better." Most of us were probably raised on this. And it worked. It got us into the right schools, companies, and roles. Once a month, on the last Monday of the month, a small group PMs targeting L7-L9 roles gathers on Zoom to ask me and my partner Amit Saxena (ex Meta Director) anything. What does "great" actually sound like at this level? How do you frame cross-org impact without sounding junior? What's the real difference...

At $900K+ in total comp, the interview bar changes in a way most of our L7-L9 clients don't expect. It's not harder questions. It's that the person across the table cares a lot more than evaluating whether you can do the work (because of course you can), their focus is on how you think. That distinction showed up clearly during one of our weekly Acing L7-L9 PM Case Interviews calls where we worked through "How would you improve the DMV." Everyone naturally started by segmenting users (new...

When Varun Gujjanudu shared “You have been foundational in helping me with this transition and I’m so grateful for that” I was so delighted to see the word “foundational.” Most coaching testimonials mention words like “helpful”, but the word “foundational” has a different weight. It means something deeper underneath transformed, not just on the surface. A lot of our interview prep focused on one thing: finding the crux of the problem, not the surface level answer, the thing that not many...

I used to wait for something to happen externally before I could feel confident. The offer will make me feel ready. The title will make me feel like I belong. The feedback will tell me I'm good enough. This is confidence 101. Something good happens, and confidence follows. Which means when something bad happens, confidence disappears. Because it was never really yours to begin with :( It was borrowed from external events. A client came to us in a painful stretch, not landing offers and...