You give a product sense answer that is good by every measure you can point to. You clarified the prompt, picked a user, found a real pain, built a sensible solution. And the feedback still comes back that it wasn't quite at the level, or that you could be sharper, and no one can tell you exactly what was missing. By the time you are interviewing at the Director and VP level, a structured, complete answer is the baseline. Everyone in the running can do that. What separates people is whether...

"Tell me about a project you're most proud of." If you have a senior leadership interview coming up, you have answered a version of this before, back when you were more junior. The words have not changed. What makes the answer sound like a leader has. By the time you interview at the GPM, Director, or VP level, being proud of your work is not rare. You have led many teams and shipped many projects, and you were proud of most of them. So the question is not really asking for a project. It is...

To answer a product strategy question like "how would you 10x Google Gemini" at the GPM, Director, or VP level, you reimagine the product instead of improving it. Improving it means making the same product a little better, which competes with its immediate rivals and keeps you at a 2x answer. Reimagining it means asking what the user is really there to do, and competing with everything else people use to meet that same or similar need, which is where a 10x answer lives. A thorough 2x answer...

In the past week, multiple people have asked me how I have worked on my thinking. It took me days to figure out how to articulate it. The truth is that I did not intentionally work on my thinking. What happened was years of inner work, most of it was spiritual and learning on how to tap into my intuitive sense. I spent a lot of that time learning to read Tarot, sitting with what the cards were showing me instead of rushing to answer it, to stay with something uncomfortable instead of reaching...

A recruiter reaches out about a role a rung above your current title, or a mentor makes an introduction, or someone in your network opens a door to a job at the next level. However it starts, you are probably already doing the work of that level, if not all of it then most of it. Your scope has outgrown your title, even though the title has not caught up. So the interview is not really testing whether you can operate at the level you are targeting, because you already do, or you have strong...

A client received a verbal offer from OpenAI! A recruiter reached out to them while we were deep in the prep for a different role at a different lab. They took the call, used the same answers they had been rehearsing, and received a verbal offer about 2 weeks later. We have been working together for about a year. It started when we worked on negotiations for their current role, and then we worked on their onboarding to fast-track their credibility and influence in the new role. After that we...

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...

Meta added new AI PM interviews for the Central Products org a few months ago: Product Sense with Vibe Coding Analytical Thinking and Logical Reasoning Product Architecture. It's starting with Central Products, and other orgs will most likely adopt these rounds in the near future. The round getting a lot of attention is Product Sense with Vibe Coding, because it's the one that looks newest and feels least familiar. Here's the most important thing to know about it. Product Sense with Vibe...

A client and I were working on their behavioral stories. They had a great one. They’d found a $7M opportunity at their company. They told the story well and $7M opportunity they found sounded impressive. When they finished, I asked, “If I’m the interviewer, can I imagine you doing this again at my company?” They paused. “I… I think so?” That pause is where most behavioral interviews stall. These are the tiny moments that can erode trust in an interview setting. They told me what happened, but...