Comp for top product roles is at all-time highs and a recent episode of The Skip podcast made the case that product leader compensation is now at pro athlete levels.

The next few years are going to write some incredible chapters in many career stories, especially for people at the cutting edge of technology, which right now mostly means AI. Figuring out which company to join, and being intentional about the specific role and team, has never mattered more.

The market is extremely competitive. The people landing those seats are spending 10x the time, energy, and often capital of the people who are not. They are not taking the first opportunity that shows up.

I’ve coached hundreds of PMs through this, and taught thousands more through courses and lectures. The biggest differentiator IMO is how seriously people take their search and prep. It sucks to see strong PMs lose out on roles just because they treated interviewing as a side project vs giving it the same rigor as a job.

The rule I give people is simple. Unless you believe you are at least an 8 out of 10 fit for the role, don’t even bother going for a role. And once you decide to go for it, go all in. Don’t hold back punches. Lenny’s Jobs just made all of this a lot easier.

🔥 Visit Lenny's Jobs

When my friend Lenny Rachitsky told me he was building a resource that helps people find work they love, my only question was “how can I help?”

He spent the last few months building a site for people looking for their next role: finding great jobs, vetting them, and preparing for the interviews. We’ve been collaborating for years, including the product sense and analytical thinking pieces I wrote for his newsletter, and it was a joy watching it come to life.

Big shout-out to Amit Taylor, founder of TrueUp, who built this site with Lenny. I met Amit several weeks ago and a 15 min chat went over an hour because we’re both so passionate about this space.

You should check out Lenny’s announcement, covering the full scope of what launched today and why he’s excited about it but in this post I want to highlight four specific aspects of Lenny’s Jobs:

1. Am I a fit?

2. The Lenny 100

3. Roles that aren’t posted anywhere else

4. Interview toolkit

1 - Am I a fit?

This is the feature I wish existed years ago.

You put your experience in. For any role, you can open a Fit Score out of 10. It looks at your level, whether you’ve worked at similar companies, and whether you’ve used a similar tech stack. The product copy is blunt: higher is better, but anything 8+ is highly recommended to focus on.

In this market I would generally tell people to avoid applying where they are not at least an 8. Once you filter down to roles with 8+ score, give these 100% of your focus.

2 - The Lenny 100

If you are staring at a blank page, or defaulting to the frontier labs because those are the names you already know, start here. Lenny curates the top 100 companies he would most want to join if he were looking today. It gives you a starting point that is not “apply to Anthropic, OpenAI, and whoever posted on LinkedIn this week.”

3 - Roles that aren’t posted anywhere else

Most of the search still happens on LinkedIn, after the role has already been circulating. The people landing those 10x seats often heard about the job earlier, through a friend, a former teammate, or a hiring manager who never posted it publicly.

Lenny’s Jobs has a filter for roles posted by Lenny’s Community. Those are jobs coming through his network, not a scrape of LinkedIn. They are often not on the company’s careers page either. If you are only hunting public listings, you are late.

That is the distribution edge. It is not a reason to abandon the 8 out of 10 rule. An exclusive 5 is still not worth applying to.

4 - Interview toolkit

Once you’ve picked your fights, you still have to win them.

Lenny put together an interview toolkit with the most actionable prep resources he could find. At the top of that page he featured Insider Loops, the company-specific PM interview guides Marc and I have been building. All eight of our guides are there, so you can go straight to Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Stripe, DoorDash, Uber, Figma, or Meta.

I also love the AI coach built directly into the site. It is a productized, native version of the job search skills Noam Segal published in his guest post with Lenny, titled How to use AI for your next job interview. Because it already has your experience from your profile, the coaching is specific to you, not a generic prompt you paste into ChatGPT. I have not seen anything else like it. I spent time with it and was genuinely impressed. I’m delighted that my interview practice copilot is also included in the curated list.

If you’re looking for your next role, go spend time on Lenny’s Jobs. For the full product tour, read Lenny’s launch post. And if you’re preparing for PM interviews at one of the eight companies we cover, our guides are sitting at the top of his interview toolkit.

Thanks for building this, Lenny. The PM community is better for it.

Ben

Hello from France! Those of you who have been following my newsletter for a while will know I’ve visited Europe almost every summer for the 10+ years, usually a combination of visits to my wife Carole’s family and some fun travel mixed in. You can read a bit more about last year here:

This summer we’ll be in Europe for a little over a month. We landed in Paris last Sunday, are now visiting Carole’s mom in Lorraine with Gaia for two weeks, heading to Bari (Italy) for a week, then finishing with a week in Bretagne to visit Carole’s dad. Back in NYC first week of September.

My calendar has exactly zero calls scheduled for August, which is awesome. Spending a month in Europe with no meetings is a huge privilege and one of the biggest perks of being my own boss. I don’t take it for granted and am very grateful 😍

My ACL recovery is coming along well and I’ve been able to mostly keep up with the girls. Scar is fading, knee is feeling solid, muscles are getting stronger and I’m starting to see the light at the end of this very long tunnel. Still, another 8-9 months of rehab to go to 100%. My physio tells me I’ll be able to jog by November.

I’m a bit behind on sharing here so today’s post will feature a curated mix of ideas I’m thinking about, things I recently shipped and content I’ve enjoyed. Thanks for reading!

Ben

🎉 Celebrating customer wins

We recently got this email from an Insider Loops customer who bought our Stripe guide and it made me so happy.

This one from an OpenAI customer was a bit calmer but still put a smile on my face.

In a market where employers seemingly hold all the cards, I find it very meaningful to help level the playing field by giving candidates a peek behind the curtains. To hear more about Insider Loops, keep reading further down in this post.

🛣️ Coaching corner

Let me start by acknowledging that no job is perfect. There's always something that can be improved. This means the best talent is always in flux, looking for better opportunity. I’ve coached hundreds of people through big career decisions. If you’re stuck thinking about what’s next in your career, this next part might bring clarity.

One problem I often see is high caliber people making career decisions driven by subconscious wiring. They're sleepwalking. To wake them up, we need to make their decision-making heuristics conscious. My favorite way to do this is to tell them THEIR story in MY OWN words.

Specifically, this looks like me reviewing their LinkedIn work experience, talking through each role and narrating what I think happened in each transition point. If I'm ever confused, we talk about it. They often correct me at multiple points, leading to a very actionable list of updates they need to make to their LinkedIn so that others who read their profile don’t make the same mistake.

This makes them conscious by holding a mirror to their past decisions and forcing them to tell me, in a safe space, what actually happened in each chapter. Then, we transition to what they're looking for next.

The majority of people get split across two buckets:

1. Those who know exactly what they want next

2. Those who aren't sure at all what they want next

Each of these buckets has its own challenges and while I show up differently for people based on which bucket they fall into, my goal is always to get the person to invest their time on the highest leverage activities to reach their goals.

People in bucket 1 generally need help opening doors, preparing for interviews, etc. I enjoy helping these people because the clarity they bring sharpens how I can be useful. My course, copilot, and Insider Loops are examples of resources I’ve created for people in this bucket.

Helping people in bucket 2 is a completely different ball game, usually more meaningful to me on a human level. The reason is that this bucket gives me permission to go into discovery mode and map the landscape this person's occupies more completely because the exploration is more open-ended. They’re suggestible.

In exploratory conversations with people in bucket 2, I like to ask questions like:

☀️ "Tell me about the last time you were really energized by work. What do you remember about the people, context, role, etc?"

• Why I like that question: Understanding the "pull conditions" in which someone is super energized and engaged is key to listing the most important factors they should weigh in their next role.

⛈️ "What is it about your present role that's making you explore a change?"

• Why I like that question: Unpacking the "push conditions" that are moving someone away from their current situation is critical for ensuring they don't subconsciously sleepwalk into another role where they won't be set up for success or happy.

🛣️ "Where are you getting stuck?"

• Why I like that question: This is when we finally begin to pinpoint the blockers preventing this person from making progress. Smart people are very good at risk mitigation and have a tendency to analyze decisions to death before taking any action.

Next, I asked them to start listing the options they’re considering. My goal is to identify the ones that feel both realistic from my POV and exciting from their POV. Then, we scope initial tests with the goal of increasing or decreasing conviction on each option based on learnings. High-agency people love this approach.

🚀 Recently shipped

I love shipping useful resources, but if I don’t bring attention to the things I’m shipping, nobody will know about them. And then the things I’m shipping will have no impact, which would make me a sad panda. Here are some recent favorites.

🔄 Insider Loops demo, public changelogs

When people historically asked us, "What do I actually get when I buy an Insider Loops guide?" we didn’t have a precise answer. So I finally recorded the 5-min video below walking through it.

Each of our guides includes a table of contents, detailed guidance for each interview round, notes and insights gathered directly from insiders, date the guide was last updated, and a complete changelog showing what changed and why.

One year ago, when someone pinged me with questions about the eight companies we cover, I was only confident helping them with Meta (which my course and copilot are optimized for). For the other seven companies, I felt pretty useless.

Today, when someone pings me with questions about the eight companies we cover, I confidently point them to our Insider Loops guides because they’re designed to be foundational resources for navigating each company’s PM interview process.

But what makes me most bullish on Insider Loops is what happens after someone buys a guide. We have multiple follow-up touch points with every customer to learn how their interview experience differed, if at all, from the guide:

• Which interview rounds they actually encountered, who interviewed them, how long the interviews were, what was asked, what they think was being evaluated

• How our guide could be more actionable for future candidates, any mistakes they made in the interview, things they wished they had done differently in preparation

We receive a surprising amount of intel from our customers. Many people seem to genuinely want to help other candidates, which is beautiful at a human level (I suspect they might also want to keep a warm relationship with us for the future).

We’ve built a very efficient system for logging new intel and turning it into updates. I personally review every change we make, drawing on my experience as an interview coach, course instructor, former PM, and someone who has spent years studying how product interviews work.

When new evidence conflicts with something in a guide, we investigate it and resolve the discrepancy ASAP with a guide update. Once a month, customers receive an email summarizing everything that has changed in the guide they purchased.

We believe transparency builds trust with prospective customers so now anyone can view the public changelogs for all eight guides directly from our homepage.

💅 Homepage refresh and company pages

A couple months ago, our friend Michael gave us some excellent ideas about improving conversion on our website, leading to a full refresh of our homepage and it’ll always evolve but I love where we landed for this chapter:

We also accelerated the development of company-specific pages and now have a destination for every company (e.g. our Stripe page) that we can beef up in the coming weeks and months to create a definitive hub for each guide.

🤝 Comp negotiation partnership with Valued

People who know how to ask for more tend to get more. In the last few weeks, our customers have secured comp packages ranging from $500k to ~$3mm for senior product roles at the companies we cover (although it seems Anthropic truly does NOT negotiate).

Marc and I love the way Colin Lernell and his team at Valued help talented product leaders maximize their total comp packages so we partnered to offer Insider Loops customers access to their premium comp negotiation services at a discounted rate. We’ll continue exploring partnerships to maximize the value we deliver our customers.

Marc and I spend many hours every week making Insider Loops guides the most accurate and actionable resources on the market. I genuinely wish this existed when I was preparing for interviews. If you’re preparing for PM interviews at Anthropic, OpenAI, Stripe, DoorDash, Google, Figma, Uber, or Meta, you can get $50 off any of our guides with promo code BENSNEWSLETTER50

Visit Insider Loops

🎙️ Supra Insider podcast

Leading up to August, Marc and I recorded a backlog for our podcast, Supra Insider. This means I don’t need to worry about recording slots while I’m in Europe.

We’re 2.5 years into the podcast and we’ve never had more fun with it, especially now that we’re gravitating towards more interview and hiring related topics. It’s just where our interest has flowed as we’ve gotten deeper into building Insider Loops together.

Here are some of my favorite episodes we published since May. Subscribe here to have episodes delivered to your inbox every week 👇

Subscribe to Supra Insider

🎥 #111: Why bootstrapping forces you to get better | Marc Baselga & Ben Erez

What does it actually mean to bet on yourself, and how do you know if the game you’re playing is really the one you want to be in?

🎥 #112: How to Self-Promote Without Burning Trust | Mallory Contois & Hilary Gridley

What if the thing holding you back from posting isn’t laziness or a lack of ideas, it’s that nobody ever told you the cringe feeling goes away, and what it actually looks like to build trust with an audience without burning it?

🎥 #114: Why I quit my high-paying PM job to go all in as a solopreneur builder | Peter Yang (ex-Roblox, Reddit, Twitter)

What does it take to walk away from a decade in product, and a job most people would envy, to bet on yourself?

🎥 #116: Lessons learned from hiring 4 AI PMs in seven months | Chris Gomes (VP of Product at Conveyor)

Chris Gomes set out to hire four AI product managers. Seven months later, his biggest lesson was not about AI at all.

🎥 #119: How I landed a director role in six weeks | Eric Posen (Director of Product at Super.com, ex- ZeroClick, Honey)

After an unexpected layoff, Eric Posen went from day-one outreach to three offers and a director role at Super.com in six weeks.

🎥 #120: How to stop taking rejection personally | Ben Erez & Marc Baselga

What separates the people who get stronger after a rejection from the people who stay stuck on it?

💡 Content I’ve enjoyed

• Inside Anthropic’s $100 Billion Al Compute Commitment | CFO Krishna Rao

• Rick Rubin on Finding Your Life’s Work

• How Brian Chesky Is Redesigning Airbnb for the AI Era

• how to enter side doors: a field guide to jobs, cold emails, and making yourself legible to the right people

• Michael Ovitz: The Psychology of Power

• Rick Rubin interviews Tobias Lütke (Shopify founder & CEO)

• Rick Rubin interviews Louis CK

That’s all for now, have a great week everyone!

We were on vacation in the Dominican Republic a couple weeks ago. Carole was busy with a class, Gaia was in the kids club, we had perfect weather, and nothing to worry about. Yet, I found myself writing about rejection.

Sidenote: I wrote about why it was very hard for me to fully relax during this vacation here (per comments, turns out this is very common). I’m working on it.

What made me write about rejection was one of our Insider Loops customers emailing us that they’d gone through a full interview process at one of the companies we cover, it didn’t go their way, and in response to me saying they shouldn’t take it personally, they replied: “It’s hard not to take this personally.”

I’ve heard that before too many times. After years of coaching hundreds of PMs through interviews and job searches, I’ve come to see that how someone handles rejection is one of the most important signals I can get about their long-term potential.

Not because resilient people aren’t hurt by rejection. They for sure are. But resilient people get stronger after rejection.

My rejection-filled path to Facebook

After being laid off in early 2020, I was rejected by 20+ companies before landing at Facebook. FB itself had rejected me multiple times in the preceding years. By the time their offer came through, I had a long history with NO.

Every NO hurt. What changed over time was how fast I got back up, and what I chose to do next. I just kept taking swings.

The textbook definition of resilience is the ability to bounce back, recover, and adapt positively when faced with adversity. That feels right and I’d take it a step further: highly resilient people don’t just return to the baseline pre-rejection. They come back stronger.

Three mindsets for handling rejection well

1. Abundance over scarcity

✅ Abundance mindset: each rejection is just crossing off one path among an infinite number of opportunities to be explored.
❌ Scarcity mindset: each rejection is brutal because it feels like a door is closing and there aren't that many doors available.

Same event. Completely different experience.

When you’re operating from scarcity, you go into what I think of as “I’m screwed” mode. And here’s the thing about that mode: fear is the mind killer. You cannot make good decisions from a place of fear. The moment you start operating there, you’re in a negative spiral and the rejection has already beaten you.

2. Growth over fixed

✅ Growth mindset: life is not a linear journey up and to the right, but rather an adventure with a lot of zigging and zagging along the way.
❌ Fixed mindset: any setback is a bad thing and every success just keeps the line on its trajectory.

A fixed mindset treats setbacks as failures. The line is supposed to go up. If it goes down, something’s wrong. The growth mindset says: this happened for a reason. My options are different now. I’ll make the best decision with what I have and learn from this experience.

3. Experimentation over waterfall

✅ Experimentation mindset: every rejection contains a very important set of signals to learn from.
❌ Waterfall mindset: life is a game to be “won” by achieving goals, and rejection is evidence that you're losing. It's an extremely fragile mindset.

With an experimentation mindset, life is a series of experiments. You double down on what’s working, kill what isn’t, and go into every high-stakes initiative knowing you’re going to learn something regardless of the outcome.

The 4th ingredient: high agency

The people I see struggle most give their agency away to things outside their control.

“The market is brutal.”
“There just aren’t that many openings.”
“The hiring manager didn’t understand my background.”

The people who bounce back fastest turn inward.

“What’s the actual gap and what can I do about it?”
“What story am I telling myself that might not be true?”
“What are the controllable variables, and am I actually working them?”

Agency is the meta-skill underneath all of this. Your mindset, what you go after, how you prepare, how you reflect on your performance: all of these are your levers. The key to resilience is staying mindful that these levers exist and you have permission to act.

Before I tell you how I handle rejection, a quick plug for something I’m very excited about: Insider Loops.

Want company-specific interview intel?

If you’re preparing for PM interviews at Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Stripe, DoorDash, Uber, Figma, or Meta… I think you’re going to find Insider Loops super helpful. We’ve shipped almost 50 rounds of updates based on real candidate debriefs - these are the most updated guides for PM interview intel at the companies we cover.

In case you're considering purchasing one of our guides, I want to let you know that on July 20th, our guide prices will increase from $300 to $400. Until then, you can still get any guide for $300.

Since each purchase includes lifetime access to future updates, this is a great time to lock in the current price even if you're not yet actively interviewing.

Visit Insider Loops

How I handle rejection (and other setbacks)

Here’s the sequence that’s worked for me across job rejections, layoffs, and most recently, tearing my ACL playing soccer:

1. Accept what actually happened

2. Get my story right

3. Explore my options

4. Do something kind for myself

5. Try decisions on before I pick one

Let’s go one by one:

Step 1: Accept what actually happened

I tend to accept things rationally before I accept them emotionally. When I tore my ACL, I knew immediately something serious had happened. I accepted the fact of it pretty quickly. But the emotional weight hit me two or three days later, in waves. Realizing I couldn’t pick up my daughter from daycare for months. What it was going to mean for Carole. The burden I was about to put on her. 10-12 months of rehab.

Acceptance isn’t a single moment. It’s a process. The mistake I see people make is skipping straight to “what’s next” before they’ve actually come to terms with what happened. That unprocessed emotional load doesn’t disappear. It becomes baggage.

Step 2: Get my story right

Before you can move forward, you need an accurate account of what actually transpired. Not a version colored by emotion - as close to an objective story as you can manage.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve asked candidates to walk me through what actually happened in an interview and they’re all over the place. The memory is a complete mess. This is one of the reasons I encourage people to transcribe their interviews with a tool like Granola.

You just can’t count on your memory as a highly accurate record of high-stakes conversations. I’ve done hundreds of debriefs and would estimate that about a third of the time, someone gives me maybe 10 minutes of content from a 45-minute interview. Memory is unreliable under pressure.

When processing a major setback, write it down to the best of your ability and potentially work with a coach like me to help you get your story straight.

Step 3: Explore my options

Once you’ve accepted your situation and have a clear story about what happened, it’s time to start thinking about your options.

The first question: is this actually final?

With a job rejection, “we went with someone else for this role but really like you” is different from “you’re not a good fit for the company.” You can almost always find out whether you’re on a cooldown or whether there could be another conversation. If it’s final, put a reminder on your calendar for when you’ll be eligible to re-engage, and then stop thinking about that company. It’s just not in the cards for you right now. Move on.

With my ACL injury, I met with three different surgeons and asked them what my options were. This helped me narrow the ambiguity into concrete possible paths.

Step 4: Do something kind for myself

This might be the most underrated step of my process.

I try to do something kind for myself when something doesn’t go my way. It can be small like going for a walk (easier said than done with a freshly torn ACL unfortunately), getting a haircut, catching up with a friend. Whatever gets me out of my negative headspace.

When I was laid off from Abstract, I went for a hike in Marin. It was a treat.

Then I sleep it off. I genuinely believe in the importance of sleeping on the options before deciding what you want to do next. If you’ve actually processed what happened and have a clear story in your head and a set of options laid out, you’ll sleep better.

Why do something nice for yourself after rejection vs punish yourself?

I believe in rewarding myself for putting in the work and betting on myself. If I got everything I reached for, life would be boring as hell. The fact that I tried for something hard and didn’t get it means life is interesting. We each have the choice to view life as a game to be played. Celebrate the fact that you take swings, even if you miss and do something nice for yourself, and then come up with the next thing to try.

Step 5: Try decisions on before I pick one

Don’t rush into your next move.

When I was deciding whether to get surgery on my ACL, I originally leaned against it. Then I sat with what my life would actually look like on that path and found myself way more excited about getting surgery than not (more on that here). That’s when I knew.

Once you make a decision, life has a way of reorganizing around it. But you have to actually commit. Try on a decision, see how it feels, then commit.

Choosing to start interviewing for a new job is a decision. Choosing to pivot your strategy is a decision. Choosing to take a break from your search to regroup is a decision.

Even choosing not to make a decision is a decision : )

One more thing I want to be clear about: resilience is a skill, not a fixed trait.

You can move from a low-resilience state to a high-resilience one. The more you work this muscle, the stronger it gets and the easier it becomes to handle the next setback. The goal is just to spend more and more time operating from that high-resilience place.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned from the layoffs, the 20+ rejections, the ACL, and the years of watching candidates navigate brutal stretches:

You can’t defeat someone who’s resilient. They just keep getting stronger with every no. I strive to be the kind of person who gets stronger after every setback.

I published a much shorter LinkedIn post about this and want to highlight some of my favorite comments (the last one from my friend Josh has a super valid POV):

Here’s the 2022 post as a reference 👇

I’ve had a front row seat to five layoffs at four companies, having been the person laid off three times and the person who “survived” twice. Each one taught me something I couldn’t have learned any other way.

If you’ve recently been caught up in a layoff — or you’re bracing for one — I hope this helps normalize the experience a little. It’s not the end of the world. I know that’s easy to say, but I mean it.

Life360

About a year and a half into my time at Life360, I was already frustrated. I’d been pushing hard to break into product management and it wasn’t happening. Then one Friday morning, I walked into a meeting and found out I was part of a ~20% reduction in force as the company hit a growth plateau.

It stung. But it forced my hand. Within weeks I was interviewing aggressively for PM roles — something I might never have done on my own timeline — and I landed my first PM job shortly after at a Series A startup called Breeze.

Breeze

Breeze leased cars to rideshare drivers and had been growing quickly before the unit economics started unraveling. We went from 85 employees to 25 through two rounds of layoffs, before ultimately being acquired by Ford.

I survived both rounds, and living through that period taught me something counterintuitive: a smaller team can move faster and feel more connected than a larger one. There’s real survivor guilt in those moments, but there’s also an unexpected clarity and cohesion that emerges when you’re the people who stayed. That’s something you can’t fully appreciate until you’ve been in it.

Abstract

Abstract was a design collaboration tool I loved and eventually joined as an early PM. But the rise of Figma proved to be an existential threat we couldn’t outrun. By 2020, we were watching major customers churn in real time — Shopify, Microsoft — and there wasn’t much any of us could do about it.

I was laid off alongside ~30% of the company the same morning our CEO was replaced. In a strange way, being let go was a relief. The Figma problem wasn’t mine to solve anymore. I went into interview mode right as COVID started, which was its own kind of adventure, and ultimately landed at Facebook.

Continuum

Most recently, at Continuum — a fractional exec marketplace I joined with a lot of excitement — we struggled to find the growth we needed. A 30% RIF followed, and the CEO stepped into the product function directly. That was my signal.

Rather than looking for my next full-time role, I decided to lean into solopreneurship. That was 2.5 years ago. It has been, genuinely, one of the best decisions I’ve ever made. I don’t think I get there without that push.

A few things I’ve learned

1. Layoffs aren’t personal. Companies are just people — people who get scared and make hard calls to survive. The decision to let you go was never a reflection of your value as a professional or a human. It was just business.

2. Surviving isn’t always the win it looks like. Morale craters after a round of layoffs, and I’ve seen it up close multiple times. Sometimes being let go is what actually liberates you from a sinking ship and gets you somewhere better, faster.

3. Being laid off can accelerate your career. Every time I was laid off, I ended up taking a leap I might not have taken on my own. The pressure created momentum. Some of my best career moves came directly from being pushed out of a role.

4. Have your story ready. Interviewers will ask about it. Know why the layoff happened, what you observed from the inside, and what you’d do differently. Own the narrative — don’t let it own you.

5. Life genuinely goes on. In the moment, a layoff can feel enormous. Career-ending, even. It’s not. I’ve watched so many people — myself included — land somewhere great within weeks or months. Resilience isn’t the exception here; it’s the rule.

If you’re impacted by layoffs right now, my advice is simple: put yourself out there, build a pipeline, and trust the process. You’ve gotten through hard things before. This is one of those things.

You’ll emerge stronger on the other side. People always do.

You got this 💪

Ben

One more thing…

Announcing: Insider Loops scholarship program

This week Marc Baselga and I launched our Insider Loops scholarship program to help impacted PMs land somewhere great by offering 50% off our interview guides.

We read every application and folks can apply here 👇

Scholarship Application

PMs who were shipping great work two quarters ago are now being told they’re not needed and unfortunately I think we’re going to see a lot more of this in the coming year. I'm glad to be building something that can actually help.

Landing a role at top companies like OpenAI, DoorDash, Stripe, Anthropic, Figma, Uber, and Google can literally change the trajectory of someone’s life. The comp packages, elite rolodex, brand name, etc are all meaningful. Insider Loops helps land those roles.

We’ve been wanting to give back for a while now. And we’re starting now. The program will run as long as people find it helpful.

P.S. If you’ve worked at one of the companies we cover (Meta, OpenAI, DoorDash, Stripe, Anthropic, Figma, Uber, Google) in the last 12 months, we’re also happy to offer you one guide for free in exchange for substantive feedback that helps make our guide about your past company better. Just mention it on your application form.

A few weeks ago I tore my ACL playing soccer and immediately started physical therapy. I had decided to postpone surgery until winter-time, focusing on strengthening my muscles and getting back to the most active life possible without an ACL (apparently you don’t need an ACL for a lot of basic activities).

At least that was my plan until a couple weeks ago, when a friend told me about a procedure called BEAR, which allows eligible candidates to repair their existing torn ACL (instead of replacing their ACL with a graft).

The main pro of BEAR seemed to be a faster recovery at the risk of a higher re-tear rate. I wanted to understand it better and it seemed there was a very limited window of 35-50 days from the injury to undergo the BEAR procedure. The clock was ticking.

So I scheduled three consultations over the course of three days with orthopedic sports surgeons to understand my options. I met with two NYU Langone surgeons and at the behest of a couple people who I trust, I thankfully scheduled a third consult with an HSS surgeon.

The first two NYU surgeons left the decision to me but recommended traditional ACL replacement with a graft. The third HSS surgeon said he doesn’t even do the BEAR procedure because the failure rates are too high (once we have more years of data, he estimates the published 12% re-tear rate would likely land more in the 15-25% range).

If 1 in 4 people who do BEAR are back within a few years for traditional ACL reconstruction, I didn’t want to be one of them. He strongly suggested a traditional patellar tendon ACL replacement because it’s the “gold standard”.

The conviction of the HSS surgeon made me confident that BEAR would be the wrong move for me, leaving ACL reconstruction with patellar tendon as the obvious move. The remaining question was just when.

I considered waiting but ultimately decided to accelerate the timeline and had a successful ACL reconstruction on Friday and I’m now recovering at home. Three and a half weeks from injury to surgery.

The main reasons I went for surgery now vs later:

• There’s data that shows increased risk of arthritis without an ACL

• The instability caused by lack of ACL increases risk of additional knee injuries

• The sooner the operation is done, the sooner I can be back to 100%

The recovery timeline is long but there’s a clear path to being fully active again. It starts with roughly 2-3 weeks on crutches, 1-2 months to comfortable walking, 3-4 months to jogging, and 9-12 months to “good as new” and back to business.

At every step of the way, the key to rehabilitating the knee is dedication to physical therapy, not rushing into activities before I’m ready for them, and overall trusting the process. I’m committed to the process and really don’t want to find myself back in an injured position for a long time.

This likely means my soccer days are behind me. I might still kick around casually but I don’t trust myself to get on the field for a “competitive” 7v7 pickup game. I might change my mind but I’m leaning towards hanging my cleats and doubling down on gym and exercises with more controlled ranges of motion.

I could write a whole post about my grieving process around the end of my soccer days. I stretched soccer to the age of 36 and I’m really proud of the way I was balling leading up to this injury. But living on a 2nd floor walk up with a 3yo daughter, a dog, and a busy life in a walking-centric city like NYC... this injury has been a massive inconvenience to put it softly. I just can’t risk another one of these setbacks.

We are getting some help thankfully: my mom flew up from Florida to be with me at the hospital and take care of me for the first weekend post-surgery. Also, our dog sitter Russell has agreed to watch George until I can safely walk him again... hopefully once I’m off the crutches.

I’m on the mend (and meds), taking things one day at a time. Really appreciate everyone who reached out after my last post with stories about their own injuries and subsequent recovery journeys with tons of success cases. It made me feel a lot less alone and more optimistic about my future 🫶

🎉 Celebrating wins

There's no more rewarding work than helping someone land their dream job and I’ve never been more bullish on Insider Loops because my days are filled with emails like this 😍

🤝 My Maven instructor peer group

Last fall I brought together some of my favorite people to form a peer group that meets every 4-6 weeks for 90 minutes. My group includes Hilary Gridley, Tal Raviv, Colin Matthews, and Aman Khan. Each time we meet, we deep dive into our respective careers and we discuss a couple of top-of-mind challenges in the context of our Maven courses and solopreneurship journeys.

I’ve absolutely loved seeing how every person in this group thinks about their careers and it’s been a pleasure to play a small part in their journeys. I genuinely look forward to each of our sessions and learn a ton each time we meet.

If you don’t have a peer group, I strong encourage you to create one. It’s awesome.

Special thanks to Marc Baselga; our group formed through association with Supra and the way we’re self-facilitating the sessions heavily draws inspiration from Supra’s programming..

🚀 Recently shipped

Meta PM interview guide from Insider Loops is now live

There's a big Meta layoff coming on May 20th (expected to impact >10% of the company) but hiring is still underway as of this week. I literally know multiple people with interviews on the books in the next couple weeks.

If you're a PM interviewing with Meta, make sure you confirm with the recruiter which loop you’re actually going through bc they've now split their PM interview process into three loops: Traditional, Central Products (CP), and Meta Superintelligence Labs (MSL).

(1) Traditional

• The long-standing Meta PM loop, the one most public prep materials still describe.

• Two rounds: a preliminary round (Product Sense + Analytical Thinking) and a final loop.

• 5 interviews total for L6 and under, 6 for IC7+.

• AI tools are banned across the loop.

(2) Central Products (CP)

• Same two-round structure as Traditional, but the final loop is restructured.

• The headline difference is a 60-minute Product Sense round that includes a live AI prototyping segment called Vibe Coding (about 20 minutes building a working UX prototype with v0, Figma Make, Claude Code, or Lovable).

• It also adds a Product Architecture interview and a logical reasoning section to Analytical Thinking.

• AI is required in Vibe Coding and banned everywhere else.

(3) Meta Superintelligence Labs (MSL)

• The only single-round loop with no preliminary round.

• Candidates go straight into the full MSL loop, which includes a dedicated LLM Technical Interview with a senior engineer who will move quickly across embeddings, RAG, evals, and inference economics.

If you want to understand the full PM interview process at Meta, Marc Baselga and I just shipped our eighth Insider Loops guide! I've coached PMs through Meta loops for years and we built this with intel from active Meta PMs and calibrated interviewers across all three loops.

I’m biased but I believe this is the only Meta guide that breaks down all three loops at this depth. We also update every guide within 24 hours of receiving new insights from insiders (candidates or interviewers). We're built for speed and accuracy.

Want to see how top companies evaluate PMs in interviews?

Visit Insider Loops

🎙️ Supra Insider podcast

Here are episodes Marc and I published since my last post. Subscribe here to get them in your inbox every week 👇

🎥 #109: Inside Maven’s shift from EPD specialists to flexible builders | Rishin Banker (VP Product @ Maven)

What happens to the product development process when the lines between who builds, who designs, and who decides start to disappear?

P.S. I’m told the YouTube intro I recorded for this one with a special guest is the cutest intro ever…

🎥 #110: Why AI makes systems thinking the most valuable skill for PMs | Apurva Garware (ex-VP Product at Upwork, ex-Amazon)

What if the most important skill for building AI products has nothing to do with evals, technical background, or knowing how to write a prompt? What if it is the ability to design systems that can handle what you never planned for?

💡 Content I’ve enjoyed

• Rick Rubin interviews Matthew McConaughey

• Organizational shape is the new AI moat (NotebookLM audio overview)

🛣️ On the horizon

Lots of physical therapy, continuing to record podcasts, and exploring some new collaborations in the PM interview space. Excited to share more.

🫶 Go deeper with my work

• 🕵️‍♂️ Insider Loops. Company-specific PM interview guides for Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Meta, Stripe, DoorDash, Uber, and Figma. Verified intel, rigorously researched and continuously updated.

• 📚 My self-paced PM Interview Bootcamp: Product Sense & Analytical Thinking. Selected by Lenny Rachitsky as a top product course on Maven (rated 4.9/5.0 with ~90 reviews).

• 🤖 My AI Practice Copilot for PM Interviews. Unlimited practice reps with calibrated feedback on Product Sense & Analytical Thinking questions. It’s like having a calibrated interview coach available 24/7. Over the past year, my Copilot has helped hundreds of PMs land roles at Meta, Google, OpenAI, Stripe, DoorDash, Uber, Datadog, Monday.com, and more. Testimonials on the site.

My most popular free resources:

• 🧠 My Product Sense Interview Template. Google sheet template for practicing product sense questions. Make a copy and get as many reps as you’d like with my frameworks. Updated regularly and fully compatible with my AI Copilot.

• 🔥 My guest post on Lenny’s Newsletter: The definitive guide to mastering product sense interviews.

• 📊 My Analytical Thinking Interview Template. Google sheet template for practicing analytical thinking questions. Make a copy and get as many reps as you’d like with my frameworks. Updated regularly and fully compatible with my AI Copilot.

• 🔥 My guest post on Lenny’s Newsletter: The definitive guide to mastering analytical thinking interviews.

• 🎥 Useful lectures and panels I’ve hosted as lightning lessons on Maven.

First, the bad news: I tore my right knee ACL playing soccer last week and if I’m honest, it’s been tough. Physically and mentally.

For one, my soccer days are behind me, and I’m grieving the loss of my favorite sport/activity. But I have a history of knee injuries, I’m getting older, and I just don’t think the risk is worth the reward. I’ll need to find safer ways to get the same enjoyment from physical exercise.

A major injury like this also puts basic life into perspective. For example, taking Gaia to the playground. That’s pretty easy/mundane, right?

The problem is that I’m now very slow, which means I can’t keep her safe if she runs away from me. So Carole has had to cover for me, putting in extra hours with Gaia and George. I hate putting this burden on her but she’s been a champ.

Okay, now to the good news:

• I have a very clean ACL tear with no other damage to surrounding ligaments, meniscus, etc. So apparently this is a “best case scenario for an ACL tear”. I’ll take the win.

• I’ve been strength-training consistently since January, which has thankfully built up my leg muscles surrounding the knee. This is already making my physical therapy starting point better. I started physical therapy already and am feeling more optimistic than I expected.

• I learned that I don’t actually need a functional ACL to do many everyday activities and even maintain a moderately active life (gym, running, swimming, hiking). While there’s no immediate need to undergo ACL replacement surgery, I’m doing my diligence and meeting with a surgeon to understand the options.

• I work from home and don’t have a lot of in-person commitments so I’m able to do all of my career-related stuff without setbacks. As you’ll see in the rest of the post, I’ve been busy! Work is a great distraction from physical injury.

All in all, I’m feeling very grateful to have a life that can keep operating without a complete disruption during this recovery period. Thanks for letting me share 🙏

Now, let’s get on with more exciting stuff…

🤝 In-person interviews are coming back (but not for the reasons I expected)

Recently, a PM candidate told me they’re being invited onsite for in-person interviews. Just to confirm they’re an actual human!

It’s the first time I’ve heard of companies doing IRL interviews in a LONG time. So I asked around. Turns out a lot of companies are adding at least one in-person round back into their process, mainly to make sure the person they’re hiring is real!

Some anecdotes I’ve gathered:

• Fully remote companies still require one in-person meeting (fly to HQ or coffee with a local employee)

• Hybrid companies include at least one onsite round, sometimes multiple

• The goal is “real person verification,” not “culture fit"”

Wild to think that candidate fraud is now common enough to justify baking into the hiring process. What this means if you’re job searching right now:

1. Don’t be surprised if a fully-remote company still asks for one in-person touchpoint. It’s not a red flag about RTO, it’s a fraud check.

2. Treat the in-person touch point as lower-stakes. Companies are simply confirming you’re you.

The market is finding a new equilibrium: time-efficient virtual rounds for the bulk of the evaluation, with one IRL checkpoint at the end... juuust to make sure you’re not a fake person.

You have any fun “we almost hired a fake person” stories to share? I’d love to hear it - just reply.

🚀 Recently shipped

🤖 Lenny’s favorite PM interview prep copilot

Over the past year, my Copilot has helped hundreds of PMs land roles at Meta, Google, OpenAI, Stripe, DoorDash, Uber, Datadog, Monday.com, and more. I’ve been adding testimonials to the site and am very proud of the impact it has had on the way candidates prepare.

Since many people are already finding my copilot through my guest posts on Lenny’s Newsletter diving into product sense and analytical thinking interviews, I teamed up with Lenny Rachitsky to offer our readers $100 off my Copilot. Just use code LENNY100 in checkout here 👇

Visit Copilot Site

🔑 Insider Loops now uses SSO (login with Google)

This week we changed the way Insider Loops customers access their guides and it’s the most exciting “boring thing” I’ve worked on in a while.

Previously, buyers would get sent to a google doc that contained a password to unlock the guide. We rotated those passwords regularly to combat piracy (don’t ask), which meant our paying customers had to go fetch a fresh password every time they wanted to come back. It mostly worked but not exactly delightful for customers or us.

So we decided to implement single sign on (SSO) using “Login with Google”. It took us ~4 days from deciding to launching. Now, when someone buys a guide, they get a link to the guide and can just view it with a simple auth step. WAY better customer experience and simplifies our operations. Win/Win.

It might sound simple but it was an intense project that pushed us well past our comfort zone with “vibe coding”. This was full-stack web app development with AI coding agents and I wanted to share some of my reflections in case it’s helpful.

First, the key to pulling this off was a really solid, detailed plan.md file that got programmatically updated as we went. Here’s what made it work:

• Codex and Claude Code have encyclopedic knowledge of where every single setting lives in every tool. Google Cloud, Vercel, Railway, GitHub. Every phase of the plan was broken into “what the agent does” and “what the user does,” sequenced one step at a time.

• We spent 30-40% of the time on the plan to make sure the project was set up for success. I cannot overstate the importance of the execution plan.

• Marc and I were able to pass the baton to each other by working out of a single plan. I stepped away for two hours, committed to GitHub, and he just pulled and kept going. This is one benefit of not working alone.

• Every time something wasn’t working, we’d just explain the problem and the coding agent would help us plan a new approach to try.

• We needed to roll back a couple of production deployments after we thought we were done. Vercel’s “instant rollback” feature is magic.

• Codex ended up getting us over the finish line. Claude Code’s ideas weren’t quite working at the very end when we were troubleshooting the deployment failures. Different agents have different strengths, and you learn by pushing them.

The dopamine when everything was finally working was off the charts. Best feeling ever 😍

Building right now truly feels like playing a video game. That’s the closest thing I can describe it to. You have a problem, you describe it, the agent suggests an approach, you try it, you tell the agent what happened, and keep going. The feedback loop is so tight and the progress is so tangible that it doesn’t feel like work. It’s play.

If you’ve been on the fence about building something because you don’t know how to code, you need to understand we’ve crossed into a brand new world. The tools are good enough that the constraint isn’t technical knowledge anymore. It’s the willingness to sit with a problem, describe it clearly, and iterate.

Before this project, I was comfortable using AI to build a lot of frontend capabilities. But I was intimidated by backend work, and especially scared of biting off SSO because it’s notoriously tricky.

But now we’re on the other side of the project, having shipped a real auth flow, on production, touching four different cloud services, in a few days. Marc and I have no engineering background at all.

What a time to be building!

🚢 More Insider Loops updates

While SSO was the big win this week, I wanted to share a few other things we shipped that I’m proud of:

• We added more testimonials our website. It’s so rewarding to build a product that truly helps talented people achieve their goals.

• Marc is an AI ninja. He built a guide update system that allows us to update our guides within 24 hours of getting feedback from candidates. We still manually triage and verify every update but once it’s in our queue, we have AI draft a proposal for integrating the feedback into the guides and it’s magical. Our process and speed are becoming real competitive advantages.

• We shipped an improved guide viewing experience that includes dark mode, better table of contents nav, and an in-guide feedback collection mechanism. We’re just getting started.

Want to see how top companies are evaluating PMs in interviews?

Visit Insider Loops

🎥 How to Self-Promote Without Burning Trust

On Tuesday I hosted a fireside with Hilary Gridley and mallory contois on how to self-promote without burning trust.

I've been thinking about this stuff a lot because I've needed to lean into marketing myself a lot over the last two years and realize that a trusting audience is quite a valuable asset.

And content is arguably the best way to build (and scale) a trusting audience. BUT... the cringe of putting yourself out there is real, and most people get stuck before they ever start.

So here are a few things from the session that stuck with me:

1. Mallory shared that content compresses the "get-to-know-you" phase. By the time someone's deciding to hire you, advise with you, or grab coffee, they already have a sense of how you think.

2. Hilary shared that the goal isn't reach, it's becoming a magnet for the people you'd actually want to work with. The bigger the blast radius of your authentic voice, the more likely the right people find you.

3. Mallory shared a theory on why building in public feels so hard: we spent 25 years being trained to do our work in private and submit a polished final product for grading. Now the in-progress thinking is the interesting part. It takes some unlearning.

4. Hilary still finds posting on LinkedIn mortifying. She just does it anyway. The skill is built through reps, ideally in lower-stakes places first.

5. The trust guardrail Mallory uses: over the last year, did she give more than she asked for? If yes, she's fine.

6. Play the game you want to win. Don't optimize for what the algorithm rewards if winning that game would build a life you don't want.

But what made the Zoom erupt was something Hilary said almost in passing: "whatever you have to say is probably better than 90% of what's on LinkedIn already." Ain't that the truth! If you've been sitting on the sidelines, might be time to let it rip 🌶️

Full session recording available here: https://maven.com/p/79f5f4/how-to-self-promote-without-burning-trust

🎙️ Supra Insider podcast

Here are episodes Marc and I published since my last post 👇

🎥 #106: The rise of the full stack builder | Tomer Cohen (Former Chief Product Officer @ LinkedIn)

What happens to the PM, the designer, and the engineer when a single person with a great idea can take it all the way to market on their own?

🎥 #107: How synthetic users are changing product decision making | Tom Charman (Co-founder @ Blok)

What if you could know whether your product change was going to work — before a single real user ever saw it?

🎥 #108: How to find clarity when your career path keeps shifting | Molly Siemers (Coach + Advisor for Senior Product Leaders, ex-Kiva, Change.org)

What if the reason you feel like you never have enough time isn’t actually a time problem at all?

💡 Content I’ve enjoyed

• Lenny’s Podcast: Why half of product managers are in trouble | Nikhyl Singhal (Meta, Google)

• Jensen Huang on Dwarkesh Patel’s podcast

• Jonah Hill interviewed by Rick Rubin

🎧 NotebookLM Audio Overviews

NotebookLM’s audio overviews have started to fill more of my listening time on walks and I’m loving this way of consuming content. Here’s a recent one I enjoyed:

• Act 2: The Struggle to Ship a Second Product (24 min)

🛣️ On the horizon

• 5/14: Negotiation tips for candidates targeting $350K+. As my interview prep resources help more PMs land roles, I’m increasingly getting asked for comp negotiation advice. So I’ll be hosting a live session on Thursday 5/14 with my friend Josh Doody, a professional salary negotiation coach.

• 5/28: Toronto Product Conference. At the end of May, Marc and I are heading to Toronto for a live recording of the Supra Insider podcast in front of an audience of a couple hundred people. It’ll be my first time in Toronto and our first time recording live in front of an audience. Can’t wait.

🫶 Go deeper with my work

• 🕵️‍♂️ Insider Loops. Company-specific PM interview guides for Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Stripe, DoorDash, Uber, and Figma (more coming soon). Verified intel, rigorously researched and continuously updated.

• 📚 My self-paced PM Interview Bootcamp: Product Sense & Analytical Thinking. Selected by Lenny Rachitsky as a top product course on Maven (rated 4.9/5.0 with ~90 reviews).

• 🤖 My AI Practice Copilot for PM Interviews. Unlimited practice reps with calibrated feedback on Product Sense & Analytical Thinking questions. It’s like having a calibrated interview coach available 24/7. Over the past year, my Copilot has helped hundreds of PMs land roles at Meta, Google, OpenAI, Stripe, DoorDash, Uber, Datadog, Monday.com, and more. Testimonials on the site.

My most popular free resources:

• 🧠 My Product Sense Interview Template. Google sheet template for practicing product sense questions. Make a copy and get as many reps as you’d like with my frameworks. Updated regularly and fully compatible with my AI Copilot.

• 🔥 My guest post on Lenny’s Newsletter: The definitive guide to mastering product sense interviews.

• 📊 My Analytical Thinking Interview Template. Google sheet template for practicing analytical thinking questions. Make a copy and get as many reps as you’d like with my frameworks. Updated regularly and fully compatible with my AI Copilot.

• 🔥 My guest post on Lenny’s Newsletter: The definitive guide to mastering analytical thinking interviews.

• 🎥 Useful lectures and panels I’ve hosted as lightning lessons on Maven.

After my initial burst of laughter, I was struck by the sheer creativity of that sentence.

Was this just me being a proud dad? I bet everyone’s kids say stuff like this all the time…

But where does this magic come from?

I tried tracing it in my mind. She had a unicorn headband and was putting her pants on. She must have been firing connections between a ton of disconnected things in her sphere of awareness. Then, some tiny fraction of those ideas make their way out in the form a full sentence.

Her internal monologue might have gone something like:

I like this unicorn headband, pink t-shirt and pants, do i have unicorn pants to match the unicorn headband? I can have a full unicorn outfit today! That would be so cute. I just see pink pants and spice girls shirt. do spice girls wear unicorn headbands? no but they have leopard pants. do leopards wear pants? that’s silly. do unicorns wear pants? no way, they’re horses!

And maybe this all happens in a split second, leading to her blurting out “unicorns have no pants because they’re horses”… out of seemingly thin air.

It makes me wonder: are the things we say always the tip of an iceberg of quiet thinking in our own heads that precedes a verbalization of an idea? And the more silent thinking we do in our own heads, the less clear to any audience where the idea came from?

This brings me back to some of my most profoundly funny moments during psychedelic trips with friends.

I remember multiple moments sitting around, when someone blurts out something that they seemingly pulled out of a hat, a complete non-sequitur with zero apparent tracing, and the pure surprise of it creates a cascade of associations in each listener’s head, resulting in an eruption of laughter. It “clicks” even though it makes no sense.

When things calm down, I sometimes ask where that gold nugget came from. Most of the time, they either don’t remember or can’t articulate it.

What’s even more interesting, is that we often struggle to articulate exactly why we laugh in those moments! It’s not obvious. There’s some deeply subconscious wiring that triggers a sense of hilarity and humor when someone says something genuinely unexpected that has a kernel of truth to it. It’s simultaneously novel and recognizable.

I suspect the listener needs to be in a very suggestible state as a precondition for the “click” to occur, with full presence. Psychedelics make you suggestible and certainly force you to be present.

Watching my daughter get dressed puts me in a very present state because her entire existence is a magic trick I don’t understand. So watching her do anything feels like an unraveling miracle. She has my full attention.

It’s not a stretch to say that our kids hypnotize us - they’re world class manipulators. They excel at putting us in suggestible states because that’s their best chance at getting what they want.

On a related note, I think the best standup comedians are masters at hypnotizing audiences into a state of suggestibility that allows them to get a roar of laughter by saying the surprising thing that has a kernel of truth to it at the perfect moment.

The beauty of standup comedy is that they bring us along one step at a time, getting us to the verge of thinking we know where it’s going, just to take a complete turn and punch us with a well-timed truth that causes us to laugh for reasons that aren’t always easy to pinpoint.

Jerry Seinfeld said: “kids are the greatest show on earth”. Coming from one of the best comedians of all time, I couldn’t agree more.

I get the greatest show on earth every day, right at home ❤️

Which is a great segue to celebrate a personal milestone with the woman who made me a dad…

🎉 Celebrating 10 years of marriage

Saturday was my ten year wedding anniversary with my beautiful wife Carole, and we spent it with Gaia, George and friends. Just living normal life. We didn’t throw a party or go to a fancy restaurant.

We’ll celebrate properly soon - we like to do things spontaneously. Like that time got married after a year together in Santa Cruz, with no friends or family present. It was a special day for just the two of us.

We told ourselves we’d plan a proper wedding within a year or two. Ten years later, still no wedding. Our friends always tell us how much they wish they could skip the whole wedding thing (maybe they’re just being nice - weddings are so fun).

I’m a very big “follow my gut” guy and knew I wanted to marry Carole three months after we started dating. There was no rationality or logical reasoning to it - I just knew. Somehow the stars lined up and she felt the same way.

Not a day goes by without me feeling a deep sense of gratitude that I get to sit next to her on this giant spaceship whirling through the solar system.

We live a very full life together. It’s a life that can be described as both super simple and unnecessarily complicated, depending who you ask. But it’s ours. We love to spend time together and there’s never a dull moment. We’re always on the move. I mean literally - we walk everywhere.

Carole makes me feel like the luckiest guy in the world because I have the most engaging life I can imagine, with someone who keeps me on my toes and calls me on my bullshit. Everyone who knows Carole loves her.

Happy anniversary, chou chou. Every day with you is a gift. And thanks for putting up with me. Here’s to the next ten years ❤️

That’s it for today, thanks for reading! I have some more stuff to share soon but it feels a bit weird to talk about product management, work, career stuff at the end of this one. See you soon.

Ben

My wife, Carole, was recently on a work trip to Japan (she’s a baller) so I had eight days of solo parenting, which was challenging and also filled with quality time. Thanking the heavens for daycare - our daycare is the best. I also owe (1) our dog-sitter Russell, who refuses to take our money to watch George for long stretches when we need help and (2) our friends Zach+Laura who watched Gaia one night this week so that I could go to the Maven event (see below). Support systems are everything. And we loved our presents from Tokyo : )

Celebrating 36 🎉

Over the years I’ve found myself wanting some reflective time in nature on my birthday to take stock of everything.

To honor the tradition, I closed my laptop last Tuesday and did a chill 5-mile solo hike in Harriman State Park (~1 hr north of NYC) and it was gorgeous. Spring has finally arrived!

This year’s main takeaways: I’m doing all the right things, I need to get better at saying no, Clarity comes from looking within, My habits are who I am, I love building flywheels.

Grateful to do what I do 🫶

🗽 IRL is making a comeback and NYC claps

I was invited to a small gathering in Brooklyn earlier this week, organized by the Maven team. This was the third and final stop of their "Expert Salon" tour in SF, LA, and now NYC. There was a mix of Maven staff, experts who teach on the platform, and other interesting people.

I’ve been working with the Maven team as an instructor on the platform for ~ 2 years and it was special to finally meet them in person. The quality of guests was excellent and I learned a ton. I even got to meet some online friends in person for the first time.

We got a sneak peek at some new stuff Maven will announce soon and I won't spill the beans but cohort-based courses were just Maven's first act; I'm excited for the second because I think they get how courses fit into the overall portfolio of what they’re calling “experts”.

After Maven’s CEO Gagan Biyani and VP growth mallory contois shared their upcoming plans, the room clapped. They said neither SF nor LA clapped. I found that curious. Hmm.

The evening also provided additional internal validation that IRL stuff is a good use of time despite being not at all scalable. The quality of in-person dialogue and connection is just not possible online through DMs, comments, video, etc. Everyone I met is now more textured for me, and vice versa.

Excited to do a lot more IRL stuff this year and NYC is a great place for it 💪

🚀 Recently shipped

🤖 Anthropic interview guide by Insider Loops

Anthropic went from $1B to $30B ARR in under two years and they're strapped for strong PMs.

Anthropic has been our most requested guide at Insider Loops and their head of growth Amol Avasare just shared on Lenny's Podcast that PM teams across the company are stretched and Anthropic is actively hiring strong PMs.

If you're thinking about joining Anthropic, this is a great time to get in the door. I’m not saying it’ll be easy.

The timing of Lenny’s episode with Amol couldn't be better because the same day it dropped, we announced the launch of our Insider Loops PM interview guide for Anthropic. This is the 7th company we’re covering, joining OpenAI, Google, Stripe, DoorDash, Figma, and Uber.

To create this guide, we spoke off the record with PMs at Anthropic and candidates who recently went through their interview process to unpack each step of the loop and what's being evaluated.

Out of all the guides we've created, it feels like Anthropic takes culture interviews more seriously than any other company. They're looking for PMs they can trust with the heavy responsibility of bringing AGI to the world.

I joked to Marc Baselga when we were putting the final touches on the guide that it seems they're screening for PMs who can see the Black Mirror episode downstream of every decision and pick the *other* path.

After getting dozens of pings in recent months about how little information is available about Anthropic's PM interviews online, we believe our guide is now the best resource for candidates to understand the company’s PM interview process.

I'm sure the Anthropic loop will evolve quite a bit in the coming months and thanks to our steady flow of insights from real candidate, we'll update our guides on a weekly/monthly basis as new changes are rolled out. Nobody updates guides faster than us!

And a quick personal note: if I was looking for a PM role, Anthropic would probably be my top choice right now. What they're doing is impressive AF and the way they're working is just as fascinating as what they're shipping.

Want to see how top companies are designing PMs interviews?

Visit Insider Loops

🎙️ Supra Insider podcast

Marc and I continue loving the podcast and recently published two new episodes 👇

🎥 #104: Why the best talent fails in the wrong environment | (CEO @ Crazy Egg, ex- Dropbox)

What if the reason great talent keeps failing at your company has nothing to do with the talent — and everything to do with the environment you built around them?

🎥 #105: How I built my AI “chief of staff” | (GM, Behance + Adobe Portfolio @ Adobe)

What if the cognitive overhead of constant context-switching, endless meetings, and deciding what to work on next could be offloaded to a system that actually knows how you think?

Michael’s episode is getting wild traction - it’s already our #2 most downloaded episode of all time. His LinkedIn post about the episode got such a wave of interest from people who want to build their own chief of staff, that he put together a full step-by-step guide after the episode shipped, to give the people what they want 👇

Michael Leibovich

How I Built My AI Chief of Staff

I Don’t Write Code. I Turned Claude Code Into My Personal Operating System Anyway…

Read more

5 months ago · 4 likes · 3 comments · Michael Leibovich

💡 Content I’ve enjoyed

• Rick Rubin interviewing WeWork founder Adam Neumann under a tree in a beautiful garden. Wonderful conversation.

• Shane Parrish interviewing James Clear was a great listen and reminded me how critical little habits and everyday behaviors are to long term results.

• The latest season of For All Mankind on AppleTV. Love this show.

🎧 NotebookLM Audio Overviews

NotebookLM’s audio overviews have started to fill more of my listening time on walks and I’m loving this way of consuming content. I simply feed the URL of an article and it generates a 15-25 min conversational podcast covering the essence of the content in dialogue form. I think our brains are wired to consume content this way. Here are some of my recent favorites:

• Authenticity as the Ultimate Creative Competitive Advantage (20 min)

• From Hierarchy to Intelligence: Block’s New Organizational Design (25 min)

• OpenAI and the Search for a Durable Strategy (25 min)

📚 Charts for Babies: A Picture Book

I always enjoyed numbers and shapes in school. Geometry and algebra felt fun. Solving for X and Y over and over was like doing puzzles!

But not everyone has that type of relationship with numbers. My wife Carole is now learning math on Duolingo (shout out ) and we want our daughter to develop a positive relationship with numbers as well.

So when I saw that ‘s talented wife, Michelle Rial, was publishing a kid's picture book called Charts for Babies about… well, charts… I bought it immediately.

Last weekend I took Gaia with me to a small in-person live reading in Manhattan where I snagged the overdue selfie below. Our copy arrived mid-week and after Gaia did her own completely made up voiceover of every page, I was ultimately able to read it to hear and we both loved it. She slept like a logarithm 🥁

If you’re looking to get your young kids comfortable with shapes, charts, math and numbers, you should grab a copy of the book. It’s awesome.

🛣️ On the horizon

• Negotiation tips for candidates targeting $350K+. As my interview prep resources help more PMs land roles, I’m increasingly getting asked for comp negotiation advice. So I’ll be hosting a live session on Thursday 5/14 with my friend Josh Doody, a professional salary negotiation coach. You can RSVP for free here (recording sent after to all who signed up).

• Toronto Product Conference. At the end of May, Marc and I are heading to Toronto for a live recording of the Supra Insider podcast in front of an audience of a couple hundred people (part of the Toronto Product Conference, which is generously hosting us). It’ll be my first time in Toronto and our first time recording live in front of an audience. Can’t wait.

🫶 Go deeper with my work

• 🕵️‍♂️ Insider Loops. Company-specific PM interview guides for Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Stripe, DoorDash, Uber, and Figma (more coming soon). Rigorously researched and continuously updated with Marc Baselga.

• 📚 My self-paced PM Interview Bootcamp: Product Sense & Analytical Thinking. Selected by Lenny Rachitsky as a top product course on Maven (rated 4.9/5.0 with ~90 reviews).

• 🤖 My AI Practice Copilot for PM Interviews. Unlimited practice reps with calibrated feedback on Product Sense & Analytical Thinking questions. It’s like having a calibrated interview coach available 24/7. Over the past year, my Copilot has helped hundreds of PMs land roles at Meta, Google, OpenAI, Stripe, DoorDash, Uber, Datadog, Monday.com, and more. Testimonials on the site.

• 🤝 I offer a limited number of 1:1 coaching slots. Book here.

My most popular free resources:

• 🧠 My Product Sense Interview Template. Google sheet template for practicing product sense questions. Make a copy and get as many reps as you’d like with my frameworks. Updated regularly and fully compatible with my AI Copilot.

• 🔥 My guest post on Lenny’s Newsletter: The definitive guide to mastering product sense interviews.

• 📊 My Analytical Thinking Interview Template. Google sheet template for practicing analytical thinking questions. Make a copy and get as many reps as you’d like with my frameworks. Updated regularly and fully compatible with my AI Copilot.

• 🔥 My guest post on Lenny’s Newsletter: The definitive guide to mastering analytical thinking interviews.

☕️ On my mind

There’s a trope about product managers being “mini CEOs”. It never sat well with me. I recently had some wifi issues at home and have been toying with the idea that PMs might be more like CEO amplifiers than mini-CEOs.

Here’s what I mean: imagine a mesh wifi network in your house. You’ve got a main router generating the signal. Then you’ve got mesh routers placed around the house that pick up that signal and amplify it.

The CEO is the router. They set the vision, the strategy, the priorities. They generate the signal.

The PM is a mesh router. Their job is to tune into that signal and make sure every decision in their corner of the product is consistent with it. PMs amplify the CEO.

CEOs don’t want their PMs to be mini-CEOs, but they do want PMs who make decisions the way the CEO would if they were sitting in their seat (assuming they were looking at the same information and had the same “on the ground” context).

Does this make any sense? Keep me honest.

🚀 Recently shipped

🎥 The Rise of the Full Stack Builder

Last week I learned that LinkedIn required their top R&D leaders do 15 hours of vibe-coding homework before an offsite. Not optional - mandatory. These are people with decades of experience in technology. Some of the best tech execs in the industry.

And many of them came back and said the same thing: "I was hearing about it. I was learning about it. I was even talking about it. But I had never actually done it."

Tomer Cohen (former Chief Product Officer at LinkedIn who recently left after 14 years with the company) shared this story during a fireside chat I hosted with him - recording below.

This story stuck with me more than anything else we discussed bc this is the gap I keep seeing everywhere. Not a knowledge gap - but more of an "agency gap". People know AI is important. They read about it. They have opinions about it. They can hold a great conversation about it at dinner. But so many haven't sat down and built something with it. And until you do, you don't really understand it. You're operating on perception, not experience.

Tomer put it simply: AI literacy is not the same as AI agency.

The leaders who came out of that offsite didn't just learn a new skill. They changed how they thought about what was possible. And that shifted how they led their teams. And if some of the most senior technology leaders at LinkedIn needed a forced deadline to close that gap, the rest of us probably aren't immune either.

You might not need need 15 hours. Start with 2. Pick a real problem you have. Not a toy project. Something you actually care about solving. Then sit down with the tools and take a stab at building it. Building is how you close the literacy<>agency gap.

Full Session Recording

🔎 Insider Loops PM interview guide for Google

Marc and I recently shipped our sixth Insider Loops PM interview guide, this time unpacking Google’s loop. This one felt different bc there really isn’t just one track - there are different paths.

After spending a few weeks talking to Google PMs across different orgs and candidates actively going through the loop, we realized that Google's PM interviews are going through so much change, that there's variance even within Google insiders about the current interview process. Here’s some of what we found:

• Standalone behavioral questions like "tell me about your biggest weakness" have mostly been phased out across Google.

• They still evaluate Googleyness and leadership, but it comes through how you handle product and execution questions now, not through dedicated behavioral rounds.

• Estimation is evolving in parts of the org too, moving from standalone Fermi problems to analytical thinking embedded in product context.

• The technical/system-design round for PMs got replaced in mid-2024 with an execution and cross-functional round.

• No more algorithm questions, but they still expect technical fluency throughout.

Our Google guide covers the full process across orgs (excluding Waymo and DeepMind which are their own thing), including what's changing and what's being evaluated in each of the interview loop variants.

Visit Insider Loops

🎙️ Supra Insider

Celebrating 100 episodes 🎉

My first few attempts at running a podcast died in the first 10 episodes.

When Marc and I started the Supra Insider podcast, we knew the survival rates were super low. I think 90% of podcasts do not make it past three episodes. And of the 10% that survive past three episodes, roughly 90% of those die before episode 20.

So when we recently shipped episode 100, it felt really special. Mainly because of the relationship with Marc, our process, and culture that allowed us to publish every week for two years. It's all been very intentional.

To celebrate, we recorded a short but special 100th episode reflecting on what we've learned and how we're thinking about the future of the pod. We call these episodes without a guest "one-on-one-isodes" and they're some of our favorites.

At the end of the episode we riffed on podcast longevity, contrasting two podcasts we believe have staying power: Acquired and TBPN. These two couldn't be more different from one another.

• Acquired has been running for 10 years. They publish a single four-hour episode every few months. The content is so thoroughly researched that episodes from years ago are still worth listening to today. Their catalog compounds.

• TBPN has been running for about a year. They go live for three hours every single day, five days a week. The content is day-of relevant. Yesterday's episode is already stale. There is zero catalog value.

Two completely different approaches, both working really well. So what do they actually have in common? A few patterns I noticed:

• Two co-hosts who love talking to each other

• An obsession with getting better over time

• A commitment to making the show feel authentic and true to who they are

• Designing the show to fit their life instead of forcing their life to fit the show

• Refusing to let outside pressure turn the show into something it isn't

Supra Insider looks nothing like those shows. We're a weekly conversational podcast about PM careers, product leadership, and the tech industry. We're not four-hour deep dives. We're not a daily live show.

But when I look at Acquired and TBPN, some of it feels like looking in a mirror. Marc and I talk every day. We make changes to the show constantly. We protect the recording slots like they're sacred. And we've never once optimized for anything other than "does this feel right for us."

That's what got us to 100. And I think it's what will get us to 1000 🚀

Ep 100 on YouTube

We also recently published a couple episodes with awesome guests 👇

🎥 Ep 101: Why everyone should have an AI-powered cloud computer | Ben Guo (Cofounder @ Zo)

So many people tinkering with AI tools right now are committing the cardinal sin of "solution in search of a problem".

I've asked friends buying Mac minis and setting up OpenClaw what problem these solved and get "I'm just exploring" or "nothing yet".

This is no different than building solutions in search of a problem. Just instead of building a product, it's building a toolkit or setup.

As product people, we know that solutions in search of a problem are bad places to spend time. But when the FOMO is strong enough, even experienced product people get sucked in.

Don't get me wrong, I love tinkering. But I forced myself to do what I'd tell any PM to do: I started with a problem.

I identified one specific, annoying, repeatable podcast workflow that required AI. After every podcast episode, our teammate uploads the transcript to Google Drive. Then, I would:

1. pull it into Claude

2. brainstorm episode titles

3. brainstorm ideas for how I'd write about the episode on LI

4. draft the post for the idea I like best

This felt like a good candidate for a workflow to automate with an agentic system.

I looked at options and landed on Zo​, which is essentially a personal computer in the cloud with AI built into it. What caught my attention about Zo was that it could connect to Google Drive, run scheduled tasks on its own, build reusable skills, and text or email me. Everything the OpenClaw crowd was raving about, but easy and secure.

I wired up the exact workflow I was already doing by hand and have it run every day without me touching it.

🤖 My Zo agent has a scheduled task to check Google Drive daily for a new transcript.

🤖 When it detects one, it pulls it in, generates a folder with title ideas and post concepts, and emails me when it's done.

🤖 If there's no new transcript, it still emails me with a "no update" update.

🤖 I built custom skills inside Zo for title generation and post ideation, and a separate voice transformer skill trained on my past writing so the output actually sounds like me.

This one workflow solved a problem I could name clearly before I ever opened the product. The people getting real leverage from this wave of AI tools aren't the ones with the most impressive setups. They're the ones who start with a clear problem and work backwards to the tool.

Same principle PMs have always known, just applied to tooling instead of product development. Marc & I got into all of this with Ben Guo​ (co-founder & CEO of Zo Computer), in episode 101. If you're feeling pressure to tinker with AI but aren't sure how it can actually improve your life, I think you'll love this conversation.

Ep 101 on YouTube

🎥 Ep 102: How to stand out in a crowded space | Elan Miller (Founder @ Off-Menu)

Anyone can build products now but almost no one can get anyone to care. That's the trap of the AI age. Building has become the easy part. Standing out is hard. And the only way to do it is with a unique and memorable point of view. You gotta be opinionated!

We just published our first ever in-person episode of Supra Insider with Elan Miller, my friend of 20ish years, where we hit this whole topic head on.

Here's what stuck with me from my convo with Elan:

1. Personal branding matters more than ever. When anyone can build anything, the differentiator isn't the product - it's who's behind it and what they stand for.

2. Tasteful positioning wins. Look at Claude and Anthropic. No ads. No slop. They built a brand that screams "we have standards." And it works - great positioning attracts your people AND repels the rest.

3. Brands that stand for something repel people and that's the point. If everyone likes you, you're probably not saying anything worth hearing. The best brands are magnets for their people and turn off everyone else.

4. Your brand story is a recruiting weapon. In the talent war, the companies with clear points of view win. People don't just join companies - they join movements.

The episode goes deeper on all of this. Talking with Elan is always a masterclass in thinking clearly about brand, identity, value, and messaging. You're going to love it.

Ep 102 on YouTube

🎥 Productivy (guest appearance on Israeli PM podcast)

I joined Ran Erez on his product management podcast, Productivy. People wonder whether Ran Erez and I are related. It’s flattering because he’s a more gifted PM and podcast host than I am.

In the conversation, we explored the PM lessons that can be learned from the process that led to my AI practice copilot. Ran’s conversations with PMs are to-the-point in typical Israeli “תאכלס” culture, but were always in Hebrew... which made them inaccessible to 99% of the PM world.

So we did this one in English to broaden the appeal. Hopefully a good tradeoff!

If you’re thinking about how to package your expertise or if you’re a product builder looking to hear a new perspective on building products that are possible with AI (but not necessarily AI products), I think you’ll enjoy this conversation.

P.S. while Ran and I are not related, we learned that both of our grandfathers changed their last name to Erez. We suspect they chose it because Erez is the Hebrew word for Cedar tree, which symbolizes “strength, longevity, and nobility in Jewish tradition”. It’s nice to have a name that makes you want to deserve it 💪

You can check out the full episode on YouTube here.

🕵️‍♂️ PM market insights

OpenAI doubling headcount

While everyone’s doing layoffs, OpenAI is reportedly planning to double headcount to 8,000 people. That means a lot of PM hiring.

We launched our Insider Loops guide for OpenAI's PM interviews in February and it's already our best seller (Stripe and DoorDash following shortly behind).

I'm sure the OAI loop will evolve quite a bit in the coming months and we have dozens of candidates feeding us regular insights from the interviews, which we bring into our guides in breakneck speed. Nobody updates guides faster than us.

Stripe’s early career hiring is shifting to AI-native builders

Stripe product leader Stephanie J Neill posted that Stripe is opening applications for their “Product Manager: New Grad Accelerator” program. This isn’t a traditional PM role. They’re looking for early-career engineers, designers, and data analysts who are highly autonomous and deeply immersed in AI-native workflows.

If you spend your time tinkering in Claude Code or Cursor and refining your own skills.md files, this is for you.

You’ll be paired with a host team for 12 months to take acute user problems from discovery to deployment. Learn, ship, repeat.

If you care deeply about quality, thrive in ambiguity, and want to help us define the next archetype of product building, come join us.

📍 SF, Seattle, or NYC (In-person)
⏳ Apply by April 24, 2026
🔗 Link to apply: https://lnkd.in/e8_zp5QY

Lastly, just dropped his latest “state of the product job market” report, which I’m excited to dive into 👇

Lenny's Newsletter

State of the product job market in early 2026

👋 Hey there, I’m Lenny. Each week, I answer reader questions about building product, driving growth, and accelerating your career. For more: Lenny’s Podcast | Lennybot | How I AI | My favorite AI/PM courses, public speaking course, and interview prep copilot…

Read more

5 months ago · 216 likes · 1 comment · Lenny Rachitsky

💡 Content I’m enjoying

• David Senra’s interview podcast has been excellent. I loved his interviews with Jason Fried, Tobi Lutke, and Michael Ovitz.

• Halfway through Bonehunters (book 6 of the Malazan series). I blame Laser for hooking me. Yes, the same Laser from the wedding. How many Lasers do you think I know?

• Carole and I watched Sinners the other night. Was… different. Entertaining but definitely not best actor performance IMO.

• I can’t wait to watch Project Hail Mary - I loved the book.

🛣️ On the horizon

• I’m hosting an in-person morning fireside chat in NYC on April 2nd with Rishin Banker, VP Product at Maven, about the blurring lines between PM/eng/design. Request invite here (30 seat cap). Excited to experiment with IRL events.

• At the end of May, Marc and I are heading to Toronto for a live recording of the Supra Insider podcast in front of an audience of a couple hundred people (part of the Toronto Product Conference, which is generously hosting us). It’ll be my first time in Toronto and our first time recording live in front of an audience. Can’t wait.

🫶 Go deeper with my work

• 🕵️‍♂️ Insider Loops. Company-specific PM interview guides for OpenAI, Google, Stripe, DoorDash, Uber, and Figma (more coming soon). Rigorously researched and continuously updated with Marc Baselga.

• 📚 My self-paced PM Interview Bootcamp: Product Sense & Analytical Thinking. Selected by Lenny Rachitsky as a top product course on Maven (rated 4.9/5.0).

• 🤖 My AI Practice Copilot for PM Interviews. Unlimited practice reps with calibrated feedback on Product Sense & Analytical Thinking questions. It’s like having a calibrated interview coach available 24/7. Over the past year, my Copilot has helped dozens of PMs land roles at Meta, Google, OpenAI, Stripe, DoorDash, Uber, Datadog, Monday.com, and more. Testimonials on the site.

• 🧠 My Product Sense Interview Template. Free Google sheet template for practicing product sense questions. Make a copy and get as many reps as you’d like with my frameworks. Updated regularly and fully compatible with my AI Copilot. My guest post on Lenny’s Newsletter: The definitive guide to mastering product sense interviews.

• 📊 My Analytical Thinking Interview Template. Free Google sheet template for practicing analytical thinking questions. Make a copy and get as many reps as you’d like with my frameworks. Updated regularly and fully compatible with my AI Copilot. My guest post on Lenny’s Newsletter: The definitive guide to mastering analytical thinking interviews.

• 🤝 Interested in coaching? I offer 1:1 coaching and a premium coach-matching service. Learn more on my site.

☕️ On my mind

I was recently talking to some product leaders I trust about a trend where tenured engineers at established tech companies seem to be dragging their feet when it comes to AI adoption.

There's a heavy skepticism about the impact of AI, potentially fueled by fear. You can probably map every engineer to some point on the spectrum between these two extremes:

1. Engineers eagerly excited to evolve their job using AI

2. AI skeptics/laggards who refuse to embrace AI to evolve

The latter group is losing relevance in the workplace and this is happening at an accelerating rate. It made me think of one of my favorite Pokémon, Pikachu.

Pikachu refuses to evolve into his new form, Raichu, because he's stubbornly determined to compete with the best Pokémon at the highest levels of evolution without, himself, needing to evolve.

Ash’s Pikachu famously refuses to evolve into Raichu in the Pokémon anime. Pikachu rejects using the Thunder Stone multiple times, starting with the episode “Electric Shock Showdown”. He wants to prove his strength as a Pikachu rather than relying on evolution, aiming to defeat stronger opponents, like Lt. Surge’s Raichu, in his base form.

I think people dragging their feet with AI adoption are being Pikachus.

While that's admirable in a fictional cute and cuddly cartoon character, I don't think that there is going to be a large demand for very cute and cuddly engineers who refuse to adopt AI because they think they don't need it.

To future-proof your career, embrace AI. Don’t reject the opportunity to evolve.

Don't be a Pikachu.

🚀 Recently shipped

🎙️ Supra Insider

We just shipped episode 99 with my friend Yaniv Fatal.

Yaniv spent 13 years in the Israeli military, including many years as a fighter pilot in the Israeli Air Force. In that time, he completed five Ironmans and ~25 marathons (but who's counting). He also build a beautiful family with two kiddos and a dog.

And on a more personal note, Yaniv is one of my oldest friends. We celebrated our 7th birthday together at the zoo in Jerusalem. This one felt special.

When Yaniv decided to leave the IDF and break into tech, he didn't know what an API was. He failed ~20 interviews and after each one, he debriefed himself the way pilots debrief after missions:

• what went well

• what went wrong

• what didn't he know

• what should he say/do differently next time

Then Wiz came along. Someone posted in a pilots' WhatsApp group: "We're looking for a pilot who can manage technical things." Yaniv raised his hand.

They sent him a take-home: "Build a Python script that identifies vulnerabilities in EC2 instances."

He didn't understand a single sentence of the assignment prompt. Most people would've looked at that take-home and said "I'm not qualified."

Yaniv looked at it and said "I'm not qualified... yet. CHALLENGE ACCEPTED ✅"

He taught himself about cloud infra and security from scratch. Two weeks just to understand what they were asking, one week to take a stab at solving it.

The instructions said it should take a couple of days. He sent it back three weeks later, assuming they'd already hired someone else.

Then his phone buzzed. "Can you come in tomorrow to present?"

He told them he was busy that week. He wasn't. He used the extra time to prepare.

When he finally presented, he told them straight up: "Before I got this assignment, I didn't know anything about cloud. This took me three weeks but imagine what I can do in three months."

They hired him. This was before Wiz became a $32B company.

A couple years later, Yaniv joined Blast Security as their founding PM.

What I love most about this story is that somewhere around day three, the take-home assignment stopped being about getting the job. It became about proving to himself that he could figure it out.

Whether you're prepping for PM interviews, switching careers, or learning something brand new, the willingness to sit with confusion and keep going anyway is the unlock.

If you're someone who want to push yourself to do hard things, you'll love it.

Check out the full episode: Spotify, Apple, YouTube

🕵️‍♂️ PM market insights

Meta PM re-interview mandate that isn’t a mandate

Meta just walked back its plan to re-interview hundreds of their current PMs in March because of misaligned leadership.

A few days ago, I reported that Meta was overhauling its PM interview process for the Central Products org, and that current CP PMs would need to re-interview internally in March.

Almost overnight, this plan hit resistance at the top ranks. Multiple senior executives pushed back hard, and the internal program was significantly reframed:

• It’s no longer described as an interview

• Participation is now opt-in

• No stated consequences for not participating

• Timeline extended from March to across the entire year

That’s a dramatic reversal from what was being communicated internally just days earlier.

Which raises an obvious question: if it’s voluntary with no consequences, why would anyone opt in?

My hypothesis is that the incentive is in the signaling.

In a company actively recalibrating what it means to be a great PM, opting in and performing well is likely to be visible in ways that matter. It’s an opportunity to get on record as an “AI PM” rather than quietly sitting it out.

The PMs who participate early may find themselves with an advantage when it comes to promotions, high-visibility projects, or internal transfers. Opting out is probably going to signal playing it safe.

Meta has removed the stick, for now. But that doesn’t mean there’s no carrot. It just means the carrot might not be explicit… yet.

And the underlying takeaway hasn’t changed.

Meta tried to mandate an AI fluency re-baselining for its CP PM org. It got softened. But the belief that the PM bar needs to be redefined around AI product thinking didn’t go away. It just got repackaged.

AI fluency is becoming table stakes and the shift from PM to “full stack builder” feels inevitable.

If Meta is a leading indicator for the rest of big tech, it feels like we’re getting a real-time look at the future of the PM role and I can’t look away 🍿

💡 Content I’ve enjoyed / been inspired by

• As someone who runs a podcast, I found this conversation on the Dialectic podcast hosted by Jackson Dahl with the co-founders of TBPN fascinating. If you don’t know TBPN, it’s basically a daily show like CNN/Sports Center for tech news featuring big name guests for 15 min segments. Jackson asked great questions and I found every minute interesting. Thanks for the rec!

• On a completely different note, Carole and I watched The Handmaiden over the weekend and it was weird and amazing. Highly recommend especially if you like Korean films. Next on our list is Oldboy.

🛣️ On the horizon

• This weekend, Carole, Gaia and I are heading down to Charleston, SC (first time there) to enjoy some southern food and warm weather.

• In a couple weeks I’m heading to a wedding in Florida (solo for that one).

• On Wednesday 3/18 I’m hosting a fireside chat with Tomer Cohen, who recently left his role as LinkedIn’s Chief Product Officer after 14 years with the company. We’ll discuss the rise of the full-stack builder. You can sign up here to join the live event (you’ll get the recording emailed to you after if you can’t make it).

• At the end of May, Marc and I are going to Toronto for a live recording of the Supra Insider podcast in front of an audience of a couple hundred people (part of the Toronto Product Conference, which is generously hosting us). It’ll be my first time in Toronto and our first time doing a live podcast recording. Can’t wait.

🫶 Go deeper with my work

• 🕵️‍♂️ Insider Loops. Company-specific PM interview guides for OpenAI, Stripe, DoorDash, Uber, and Figma (more coming soon). Rigorously researched and continuously updated by Marc Baselga and I.

• 📚 My self-paced PM Interview Bootcamp: Product Sense & Analytical Thinking. Selected by Lenny Rachitsky as a top product course on Maven.

• 🤖 My AI Practice Copilot for PM Interviews. Unlimited practice reps with calibrated feedback on Product Sense & Analytical Thinking questions. It’s like having a calibrated interview coach available 24/7. Over the past year, my Copilot has helped dozens of PMs land roles at Meta, Google, OpenAI, Stripe, DoorDash, Uber, Datadog, Monday.com, and more. Testimonials on the site.

• 🧠 My Product Sense Interview Template. Free Google sheet template for practicing product sense questions. Make a copy and get as many reps as you’d like with my frameworks. Updated regularly and fully compatible with my AI Copilot. My guest post on Lenny’s Newsletter: The definitive guide to mastering product sense interviews.

• 📊 My Analytical Thinking Interview Template. Free Google sheet template for practicing analytical thinking questions. Make a copy and get as many reps as you’d like with my frameworks. Updated regularly and fully compatible with my AI Copilot. My guest post on Lenny’s Newsletter: The definitive guide to mastering analytical thinking interviews.

• 🤝 Ben’s premium coach-matching service. White glove service in which I match PM candidates with calibrated interviewers from their target companies. Fully confidential and quick to start.

☕️ On my mind

I’m more excited about work than ever, while simultaneously having less hours to work than ever. My life this year so far is basically down to family, work, health/gym, and sleep. I’m doing a lot and it feels full.

Yet, I perpetually feel behind.

I don’t know exactly what I’m behind on, but I’m sure there’s something.

Here are a few that my various inboxes are baiting me about:

• If I’m not automating my whole life with AI, I’m a laggard.

• If I’m not buying a Mac Mini to configure OpenClaw, I’m a dinosaur.

• If I’m still doing anything the old way, I’m a boomer.

• If I’m not spending hundreds of dollars per month on tokens, I’m under-leveraged.

• etc etc etc

Every minute not spent tinkering with AI is making me fall behind… right?

Come on. What a depressing way of thinking!

In a world where tools are proliferating faster than the population of South Williamsburg, it seems to me that the ability to embrace the uncomfortable FOMO of not playing with every single thing is a superpower.

What if the best thing I can do is less, not more?

In her awesome post today, how to be an idea factory, my friend wrote about how AI might be able to help us do less. And now I feel behind because I’m not using AI to learn how to do less.

You get the idea.

This will only continue, too. Things won’t slow down anytime soon.

My thinking will keep developing but for now, here’s the story I tell myself:

AI tools are a new category of tools. Tools will get better, faster, and cheaper. This will accelerate at a pace none of us can imagine.

The most important thing isn’t using every tool. It’s being insanely focused. Picking the right areas to spend my time, defining the top problems to solve, scoping the right solutions to these problems, and executing intentional experiments to test solutions in the market.

All the while, I need to be incorporating my learnings from experiments into how I think about the next wave of work.

This means I can’t plan too far ahead. I need to stay nimble and as long as I’m excited about what I’m working on for the next 1-2 weeks, that’s the best way to spend my time.

Worrying about falling behind isn’t productive - shipping and learning is the way.

If a new tool comes along that clicks for me, I’ll try it out. But I won’t invest 30 hours to tinkering with a tool that may or may not help me hit my goals.

That’s a conscious tradeoff: I’m fine with being in the first 1% to adopt new tech instead of the first 0.1%. And I’m happy to ignore a lot of tools as long as I adopt the ones that are truly going to make a difference for me.

Being an early adopter is not in itself the goal.

The goal is staying focused and executing intentionally and consistently.

Tools that helps me hit my goals will get my fullest attention as I go.

🚀 Shipped recently

Here are some of the things I shipped since my last post in late January: our OpenAI guide is live, four new episodes of the podcast are live, and recordings from two lightning lessons I hosted are available. Details below.

🤖 Our Insider Loops guide for OpenAI is now live

Since launching Insider Loops last September, the most common request Marc & I have received for new guides is OpenAI.

So we got to work over the last couple months and had a bunch of off-the-record convos with insiders, as well as a handful of PMs who recently went through the OpenAI loop. The result is our first guide for a major AI lab’s PM interview process.

OpenAI is raising at a $850B valuation and our Insider Loops guide breaking down their PM interview process is now live.

We launched the OpenAI guide at a lower introductory price of $150 because we had fewer insiders and debriefs to draw from compared with our more mature guides.

That said, we're still highly confident in the guide's accuracy and usefulness today: it captures the core filters, stage-by-stage expectations, and preparation strategy that matter most for OpenAI.

As we add more proprietary interview intelligence in the coming weeks, we'll continue enriching the guide and increase the price accordingly. Since buyers get lifetime access to guide updates, we want to let people lock in the early bird price.

Based on early feedback, we’re confident bringing the price up to $200 within the next week.

P.S. more guides are in the works and our existing guides for Stripe, DoorDash, Figma, and Uber are getting better every month based on real-time insights from PMs

🎙️ Supra Insider (podcast I co-host)

• #95: How to find your authentic voice online without faking it | Mallory Contois (VP Growth at Maven, Ex-Pinterest)

• #96: Inside Magic Patterns: Why frontend focus helps win over product teams | Alexander Danilowicz (CEO & Co-founder at Magic Patterns)

• #97: What it means to be a forward-deployed product leader | Chase Schwalbach (SVP Product & Technology at Millie)

• #98: Why mid-career people are doubling down on self-learning | Gagan Biyani (CEO and Co-Founder at Maven)

🎥 What senior product people should know about fractional work

I hosted a 90 minute solo session on Feb 10th, packaging up the advice I find myself repeating to people who ask me about fractional work and solopreneurship (full recording here). I’m honestly really proud of how it came out.

Some of the big buckets I covered in the session:

• What fractional work actually is (and isn’t)

• Why the right starting point is your constraints

• How narrow positioning helps drive business

• Why most sustainable fractional setups combine multiple types of work instead of relying on one role or one client

• The difference between perceived risk and actual risk with this path

• The importance of being intentional with designing your portfolio career

🎥 How to interview product managers for AI fluency

I hosted a session with and on Feb 3rd where I shared a new framework I’ve been developing for designing PM interviews to evaluate AI fluency. We had ~2.5k signups and hundreds joined live. Full recording here.

Some of the key ideas we covered:

• Interview design requires tradeoffs. There is no perfect loop. Every interview should have a clear job to do, and if two interviews do the same job, one should probably be cut.

• Using AI ≠ building AI. Using AI tools to ship faster builds intuition, but it’s not the same as having shipped AI features to production. Teams need to be explicit about which one they actually care about.

• Behavioral, live cases, and take-homes surface different signals. The same competency can be evaluated in multiple ways, but you should be intentional about where you want depth.

• Live cases are especially revealing for AI fluency. Watching how someone actually works with AI in real time often reveals more than how they describe it after the fact.

• Judgment matters more than tool choice. Fancy prompts or tools don’t matter if the candidate can’t explain when to use AI, when not to, and how it actually changed outcomes.

• Candidate experience is a product decision. Timeboxing take-homes, giving sufficient context, and being explicit about expectations directly affect signal quality and who opts out of your process.

🛰️ Market insights

A talent leader recently pinged me they’re hiring a product recruiter. I asked around for referrals and was truly surprised what I heard back.

Multiple versions of: “Tell them good luck. it’s impossible right now”. And that’s from recruiting leaders I trust!

My reaction: “wait wait wait... what?”

I’ve been operating under the assumption that there are tons of strong recruiters available because so many companies slashed their recruiting teams. So when someone asked me if I knew a great product recruiter, my instinct was, “there must be a ton of them - one sec...”.

And apparently - nope! There’s a surprisingly intense squeeze for top recruiters. They’re almost impossible to hire. Had no idea.

So I asked, “why is this happening?”

• Not because companies aren’t hiring.

• Not because the recruiter role isn’t important.

It’s because the top end of that market is extremely constrained.

So I asked “why is that the case?” and heard two factors back:

1. The last cycle of tech didn’t actually produce that many truly great recruiters.

2. The ones who are great tend to have extreme agency. They’re either in the best job already, or they’ve gone independent and built their own platform.

Basically, the best recruiting talent is either operating at the top 1% of companies or working for themselves.

Hmm.

We keep saying it’s a buyer’s market for talent. And overall, that might be true. But when you zoom in on specific high-leverage IC roles, the market may still be structurally tight.

The truly strong ones don’t float around for long. They choose environments. Or they create them.

Which forces a tougher question for hiring managers: if you can’t hire the top 1%… are you building a system that can grow someone into that tier?

And is recruiting unique constrained? Or is the top 5% of IC talent simply concentrated than we want to admit across the board?

💡 Content I’ve enjoyed / been inspired by

• Joe Rogan Experience #2443 - Filippo Biondi. Filippo led the team that discovered the mega structures beneath the great pyramids on the Giza plateau using ground penetrating radar. Those of you who follow my newsletter know I’m fascinated with ancient civilizations (post and another post) so this was an absolutely delightful episode for me.

• Make Something Heavy “We’re creating more than ever, but it weighs nothing.” This is like an anti-slop manifesto that deeply motivates me. I aim to make heavy things.

🛣️ Coming up

I’m excited to be hosting a fireside chat on Wednesday March 18th with Tomer Cohen, who recently left his role as LinkedIn’s Chief Product Officer after 14 years with the company.

The topic is about the rise of the full-stack builder. You can sign up here to join the live event (you’ll get the recording emailed to you after if you can’t make it).

🫶 Support my work

My goal is to always create more value for the community by sharing free content than I can ever capture with my paid offerings (e.g. I have no plans to monetize this Substack). But if any of the below looks interesting to you, I invite you to take a look:

• 🕵️‍♂️ Insider Loops. Company-specific PM interview guides for OpenAI, Stripe, DoorDash, Uber, and Figma (more coming soon). Rigorously researched and continuously updated by me and Marc Baselga.

• 🎥 Self-paced course: Product Sense & Analytical Thinking Bootcamp for Meta-Style PM Interviews. Selected by Lenny Rachitsky as a top product course for Lenny’s List.

• 🤖 AI Practice Copilot for Meta-Style PM Interviews. Unlimited practice reps with calibrated feedback on Product Sense & Analytical Thinking questions. It’s like having a calibrated interview coach available 24/7. Over the past year, my Copilot has helped dozens of PMs land roles at Meta, Google, OpenAI, Stripe, DoorDash, Uber, Datadog, Monday.com, and more. Testimonials on the site.

• 🧠 Product Sense Interview Template. Free Google sheet template for practicing product sense questions. Make a copy and get as many reps as you’d like with my frameworks. Updated regularly and fully compatible with my AI Copilot. My guest post on Lenny’s Newsletter: The definitive guide to mastering product sense interviews.

• 📊 Analytical Thinking Interview Template. Free Google sheet template for practicing analytical thinking questions. Make a copy and get as many reps as you’d like with my frameworks. Updated regularly and fully compatible with my AI Copilot. My guest post on Lenny’s Newsletter: The definitive guide to mastering analytical thinking interviews.

• 🤝 Ben’s premium coach-matching service. White glove service in which I match PM candidates with calibrated interviewers from their target companies. Fully confidential and quick to start.

🧟‍♂️ Interview horror story

I want to share what might be the worst candidate experience story I’ve heard in years.

I recently helped a PM prepare for interviews at an extremely hot company.

Over ~3 months, they invested 40+ hours into the process: take-home, panel presentation, multiple recruiter syncs, several follow ups with future teammates and executives, you name it.

They made it to the very final round and met the Chief Product Officer. Twice.

They were explicitly told that references would only be checked if the company was moving to an offer.

The company ran a reference check with a current teammate, who strongly vouched for them. Then... the company PASSED. No offer.

The feedback? “We all loved you but the CPO didn’t like you enough.”

This is hands down one of the most despicable candidate experiences I’ve seen. What a royal waste of time.

Running backchannel references against a candidate’s current teammates without consent is reckless. Doing it after telling the candidate the opposite is worse. Now the candidate’s team knows they’re exploring while there’s no offer in hand.

I’m tempted to name the company and publicly shame them but I won’t.

It would be irresponsible (and unethical) of me to broadcast the name of the company because anyone from the company who caught wind of the post would immediately know which candidate it’s about, and I don’t want that candidate to be impacted in any negative way from this... or at least more negatively than they’ve already been impacted.

But if you’re a hiring leader reading this, know that stories like this travel fast in non-public discourse, where your reputation is tested through backchannels. And stories like this will absolutely shape who will and won’t trust you with their career.

And on a very different note…

🎉 My podcast just hit 100k downloads

Marc Baselga and I started the Supra Insider podcast almost two years ago with the goal of bringing product leadership conversations from within the Supra community to a wider audience.

Supra Insider

A podcast for product leaders, inspired by discussions within the Supra product community.

By Ben Erez

This week we passed 100k downloads and it feels like a huge milestone. We've published an episode every week since March 2024. We only missed two weeks ever. Episode 100 airs in a few weeks.

We've made hundreds of updates to the podcast since its inception: branding, project management, guest outreach, editing, titles, pre-episode guest comms, etc. It all matters.

We've talked to many podcast growth experts and keep hearing the same thing: the key to growth is content quality and consistency. If we can do that for long enough, we'll grow.

Reaching 100k downloads feels like the perfect moment to reflect and try to unpack what's enabled us to be so consistent while improving the quality:

1. we have fun and don't take things too seriously - podcast recording slots are Marc and I's favorite items on the calendar every week

2. we only invite guests if at least one of us is extremely excited about them and prioritize the guests we're most excited about

3. we pick interesting "trailheads" for every episode and go off-roading by letting our curiosity pull us

4. we keep the lift for guests minimal; no pre-recording syncs, scripting, or prep work beyond trailhead selection (<2 hrs total time commitment including everything)

5. we trust that the more present we are in the conversation, the more engaging the episode will be for the audience

6. we aim for each episode to feel like a conversation between three friends who are learning from each other - the guest is an equal owner of the conversation

7. we don't delegate anything we don't do first ourselves - we have an incredible teammate named Tehreem who helps us run the podcast

8. we aim to make episodes that guests will genuinely want to promote and believe a world-class guest experience is a growth driver

9. we believe in making the podcast 1% better every week - the score takes care of itself

10. we treat the podcast as the energy source for everything else we do

Last but certainly not least: Marc. Marc is the key to our consistency. The guy is an operational savage. I admire his discipline and his ability to create systems that hold him (and now me) accountable to necessary behaviors and tasks.

The podcast is a well-oiled machine because of Marc's executional rigor. He makes me better every day.

Super grateful to all of our incredible guests over the last two years and all the people who bring us along for their commutes, gym sessions, laundry-folding and dish-washing and dog-walking, etc. We appreciate you.

It feels like we're just getting started. Here's to the next 100k downloads 🚀

😵‍💫 Know thy culture

“DoorDash is the kind of place where PMs are expected to go cry in the bathroom and come back swinging.”

🎙️ Supra Insider #94 featuring Casey Winters

This week we released episode 94 of the Supra Insider podcast, featuring one of my favorite product thinkers, (co-founder & CEO at SuperMe, previously Eventbrite, Pinterest, Grubhub).

We went deep on how Casey’s new company, SuperMe, is helping world-class operators open-source their expertise with their AI-native professional network. You can now chat with my SuperMe - it has access to ~350k “insights” ingested from almost everything I’ve ever said online.

I’ve followed Casey for nearly a decade so this was a bit of a dream come true moment for a product nerd like me. It was awesome. Big thanks to for introducing us to Casey!

🎥 How to get noticed by PM hiring managers in 2026

3,600 people signed up for a recent session I hosted with (WHOOP, Dropbox, Nike) and (Duolingo, Airbnb, Etsy) about how to get noticed by PM hiring managers in 2026. Nearly 600 people showed up live! Full recording available for free here.

Some of the main topics we covered:

• Why the old playbook (generic resumes, cold outreach, etc) is breaking down as AI lowers the effort to meet the old quality bar

• What hiring managers actually respond to today: relevance, judgment, effort, and proof that you can do the job.

• How cold outreach still works, but only when it feels human, specific, and framed as an offer rather than an ask (bonus points if you can make them smile / laugh)

• Why building in public (writing, prototyping, experimenting) increases your surface area for luck and serendipity

• How referrals still matter, but only when they’re truly warm and easy to forward

• Why doing “too much” is rarely the problem - most candidates don’t do enough

Also - Hilary has been on fire with her Substack so be sure to check it out. She quickly took the session transcript and created 7 custom GPTs for job searching and shared them here:

writerbuilder

I turned my hiring manager insights into tools

If you’re job searching right now, the system probably feels broken. You’re tailoring your resume, writing thoughtful cover letters, doing everything “right”, and hearing nothing back…

Read more

7 months ago · 8 likes · Hilary Gridley

🎙️ 10 Years of Acquired (with Michael Lewis)

I recently listened to the nearly 3 hour episode of the Acquired podcast (with Moneyball author Michael Lewis interviewing the co-hosts) and found it insanely relevant to the way Marc and I think about our podcast. For anyone thinking about building a media presence, this episode distills 10 years of learnings into 3 hours. It’s gold.

🎥 Don Valentine, Sequoia Capital: “Target Big Markets”

^ that episode led me to Acquired’s episode about Sequoia Capital, which led me to this incredible 1-hr Don Valentine (Sequoia founder) talk at Stanford in 2010 for anyone looking for a healthy dose of OG SV wisdom:

🙋‍♂️ The stable marriage problem

This post breaks down why people who aren’t afraid to ask for what they want will get better results than the people who wait for opportunities to come to them 👇

Good Bones

The stable marriage problem

If you happen to be a student at Berkeley, I highly recommend CS 70 (Discrete Mathematics and Probability Theory), especially when it’s taught by Anant Sahai, who’s a delightfully classic hardass immigrant professor who will probably teach you a lot about math and at least something about life…

Read more

7 months ago · 2552 likes · 86 comments · Ajeya Cotra

⏭️ Coming up…

⚡️ How to interview product managers for AI fluency

Next week I’m hosting a free session with my friends Tal Raviv and Aman Khan: How to interview product managers for AI fluency. This will be the first time I share a new framework for interview design that I’ve been developing. Sign up here to join live and if you can’t make it to the session, you’ll get the recording afterwards.

⚡️ What senior product people should know about fractional work

I also have an upcoming solo session sharing the most common advice I give people looking to get into fractional work: What senior product people should know about fractional work. It’ll be relevant to folks interested in the creator journey, audience building on the side, etc. Sign up here to join live and if you can’t make it to the session, you’ll get the recording afterwards.

🫶 Want to support my work?

My goal is to always create way more value for the community through the free content I share than I capture through my paid offerings/services. If any of the below might be useful to you or someone you know, give it a look:

• 🎥 Self-paced course: Product Sense & Analytical Thinking Bootcamp for Meta-Style PM Interviews. I’ve now run four cohorts of the fully async version of the course and students are loving it because it fits their work schedules and interview timelines. Featured by Lenny Rachitsky 🔥. The $1,500 course price includes my Copilot below 👇

• 🤖 AI Practice Copilot for Meta-Style PM Interviews. My Copilot has helped dozens of PMs land roles at Meta, Google, OpenAI, Stripe, DoorDash, Uber, Datadog, Monday.com, and more. I’ve only ever had one refund request, with most people feeling like the value is well worth the $500 price (see testimonials on the site).

• 🧠 Product Sense Interview Template. Free Google sheet template for practicing product sense questions. Make a copy and get as many reps as you’d like with my frameworks. Updated regularly and fully compatible with my AI Copilot.

• 📊 Analytical Thinking Interview Template. Free Google sheet template for practicing analytical thinking questions. Make a copy and get as many reps as you’d like with my frameworks. Updated regularly and fully compatible with my AI Copilot.

• 🕵️‍♂️ Insider Loops. Company-specific PM interview guides for Stripe, DoorDash, Uber, and Figma (more coming soon). Rigorously researched and continuously updated by me and my friend Marc Baselga who you might recognize as my podcast co-host. We invest many hours into creating the guides and keeping them up to date based on real candidate debriefs. I would have gladly paid $300 for guides like this to get the “real talk” about what my top companies are looking for in the interview process.

• 🤝 Ben’s premium coach-matching service. White glove service in which I match PM candidates with calibrated interviewers from their target companies. Fully confidential and quick to start.

Thanks for reading and see you next time!

I learned that I need to be getting 1-1.5g of protein per lb of body weight. I started sharing my meals with ChatGPT and just this week realized how hard it is to get enough protein. Also realized I’ve been dramatically under-hydrating, which explains some of my historical issues with calf cramps during soccer. No cramps this past Tuesday night 💪

Upcoming free sessions

I’m getting into the swing of the new year and hosting a few live events in the coming weeks (RSVP for free below and get the recording even if you can’t join live):

⚡️ Thursday 1/22: How to get noticed by PM hiring managers in 2026

• The old playbook isn’t working anymore. Nobody is looking at cold applications. I recently met a product leader who hired a PM after receiving a thoughtful cold DM with a 1-pager strategy.

• In this session I’ll be joined by two fantastic product leaders and experienced hiring managers (Director of Product @ Duolingo (previously @ Airbnb, Etsy) and (Product Leader (Whoop, Dropbox, Nike). Almost 2k people have already signed up.

⚡️ Tuesday 1/27: How to interview product managers for AI fluency

• Interviews are evolving in front of our eyes and many of the PM hiring managers I meet are scrambling to craft an evaluation rubric around AI competencies.

• I’ll be joined by two of my friends who are at the cutting edge of AI fluency, Tal Raviv (Riverside, AppsFlyer, Patreon), and Aman Khan (Arize AI | ex-Spotify, Apple, Cruise). We’ll dive deep into a framework for designing interviews to evaluate AI fluency in PM candidates (first time I’ll show this framework in public so I’m really excited).

⚡️ Thursday 2/5: What senior product people should know about fractional work

• More people than ever are reaching out to me and asking for my thoughts about fractional work: how to land customers, how to structure and price engagements, etc. There’s a lot of advice I’ve been repeating so my goal with this session is to package up the advice and link people to this recording.

• I did a try run of this talk in the Supra community and got tons of helpful feedback. This will get into solopreneurship, portfolio careers, etc. I pushed it out a week to prepare because there’s a lot I want to say.

Interviewing at Uber, Figma, Stripe, or DoorDash?

If you’re a PM preparing for interviews at Uber, Figma, Stripe, and DoorDash, I think you’re going to love Insider Loops. This started as a passion project and it’s now a growing business I’m building with Marc. You can read about it in my LI post, Marc’s LI post or check out our site directly below 👇

Visit Insider Loops

2026 PM hiring predictions

Over the last two years, I’ve been watching interview loops, hiring criteria, and candidate strategies change in major ways driven by AI, flattening orgs, rise of super ICs, etc. PM hiring is changing in front of our eyes.

Here are my predictions for where PM hiring is headed in 2026.

1. Judgement and taste emerge as the top qualities evaluated in PM interviews. As AI handles more of the heavy lifting for producing artifacts and building products, PM interviews increasingly focus on what candidates choose to build and the depth of insight in how they critique existing products.

2. Experience evaluating AI system performance becomes a must-have for AI PM roles. Proven experience building golden evaluation sets and operationalizing AI eval loops becomes table stakes for PMs leading AI products, whether they train their own models or consume foundation model APIs.

3. PM hiring weighs domain experience higher than ever. As teams internalize the importance of AI evaluation, hiring managers favor candidates with deep domain intuition who can spot failure modes and make faster, better product decisions.

4. PM JDs are for senior PMs only.
   Companies will fill junior PM positions through internal transfers rather than open PM job postings. PMs with less than 3-5 years of experience will be under-qualified on paper for every JD.

5. The generalist PM hiring loop dies.
   Companies abandon “approve for hire first, match later” processes and only interview PMs for clearly defined roles with explicit mandates. Wrote a bit more about that here.

6. Cold applications die for real.
   As each JD gets hundreds/thousands of applications, hiring teams completely ignore inbound cold applications and shift to hiring fully through referrals, creative inbound that shows proof of work, and spearfishing outbound. On Jan 22nd I’m hosting a panel, How to get noticed by PM hiring managers in 2026, which will go deeper.

7. AI-native startups hire PMs after insisting they don’t need them.
   Companies that claim they do not need PMs will turn around their stance on this once they realize someone has to do the product management function. I wrote more about this here.

8. Big Tech PMs struggle to break into hot AI companies.
   PMs whose compensation is inflated by stock performance struggle to land attractive roles at hot AI companies because they’re overpriced and under-skilled (unless their experience in big tech is directly working on aI products).

9. Senior IC PM compensation hits all time highs.
   As the zeitgeist reinforces the story around PM leverage increasing (i.e. each PM doing the work of 3-5 PMs historically), hiring teams will raise the bar and compete aggressively for a smaller set of top talent, pushing the compensation ranges higher.

10. PM hiring evaluates AI fluency but it won’t be pretty.
    Interview loops increasingly differentiate between two buckets of experience: 1) building AI products and 2) using AI to build products. The second bucket will be easier to evaluate because it’s much easier to get that experience. Companies will struggle to evaluate the first bucket because many of them won’t have enough experience themselves, leading to lots of messy interviews.

Happy birthday Gaia 🥳

This week was my daughter Gaia’s third birthday 🎂

She's at the age where real interests are emerging (the performing arts are definitely holding a special place) and we're starting to encourage sparks of passion and interest. K-12 is right around the corner and before we know it, university will be looming.

Will college still make sense for my three year old?

This week we published an podcast on my podcast with Stephen Cognetta (co-founder of Exponent) where we dove deep into the future of higher education and it's relationship with the job market.

This episode was a full-circle moment for me. Back in 2020, when I was preparing for my Facebook PM interviews, I spent an embarrassing number of hours watching Exponent's mock interviews on YouTube. I genuinely don’t think I'd land my FB offer without Stephen and Exponent.

Stephen sits at a really interesting intersection. He runs the leading interview prep platform for tech professionals, teaches at Northeastern, sells to universities, and does executive coaching.

He highlighted that these days many first year students come in with immediate goals around figuring out their plans to land a job when they graduate. But universities are not particularly good at job placement and they're getting even worse. So what are they good for?

For me, college was an incredible container for self-discovery and fun (time to explore, exposure to new ways of thinking, being surrounded by people who stretched how I saw the world, etc). I wouldn’t trade my time at the University of Florida for anything.

But I keep wondering about a different kind of student:

• Someone who isn’t especially interested in the “college experience”

• Someone who mostly wants a job

• Someone who’s pragmatic, motivated, and outcome-oriented

^ For that person, I’m less convinced the traditional university path delivers the value it promises.

If the goal is employment, the reality is that students need to develop real skills the market values and get good at telling that story in interviews / getting someone to bet on them. They don't need courses, degrees, and certificates. They need experience.

I'd love to see universities redesign themselves as experiential learning environments where students can get reps developing the skills employers value. But I think we have a long path ahead.

Will college be right for my daughter? I suppose it'll depend on her goals, options, priorities, etc. I'll encourage her to explore whichever environments seem to be the best fit. I'm sure we'll cross that bridge when we get there.

For now, I'm going to enjoy having a three year old whose biggest concern is not having enough Disney princess dresses. Happy birthday, Gaia ❤️

Feel free to check out the full conversation with Stephen:

• Spotify: https://bit.ly/4qrrwXi

• Apple: https://bit.ly/3NxzLlT

• YouTube: https://lnkd.in/eVR5ck84

• Substack: https://bit.ly/4qrrCy8

Interested in getting matched with a PM interviewer at your target company?

I’ve been connecting PM candidates with calibrated interviewers at their target companies for coaching. It’s working well so I’m looking to grow the program.

Submit interest form (quick)

till next time ✌️

Ben

P.S. Part 3 of the PM career framework series on The Skip podcast dropped and it was excellent. If you’re thinking about making a change in 2026, I recommend the full 3-part series.

1. Jan 22: How to get noticed by PM hiring managers in 2026

2. Jan 27: How to interview product managers for AI fluency

3. Jan 29: What senior product people should know about fractional work

Here’s a bit more information about each and why I’m excited 👇

At the bottom of the post I’ll also share some recent content favorites.

BTW… want to stop typing so much? My favorite voice-to-text dictation app is Willow. It’s faster and better formatted than any of the other Mac apps I’ve tried. You can sign up with my referral code BEREZ64 (auto-applied here).

To support my work, check out the links on my site at www.benerez.com.

How to get noticed by PM hiring managers in 2026

Thursday, Jan 22, 2026 2pm Eastern

RSVP here - recording sent after even if you can’t join live

Hilary Gridley and Nickey Skarstad are two incredible product leaders who have been deeply involved in hiring at WHOOP and Duolingo over the last few years. They’re both extremely hands-on with AI, which has influenced how they think about hiring PMs moving forward. They also talk to a lot of other hiring managers at top companies, giving them a unique POV into the hiring side of the market.

The session aims to help the audience:

• Understand why old PM job search playbooks no longer work. Resumes, generic DMs, and surface-level signals fail in today’s market so see what hiring managers respond to instead.

• See what “real signal” looks like to hiring managers in 2026. How product leaders interpret proof of work, including building in public, shipping, and demonstrating strong judgment.

• Learn what actually cuts through the noise to get noticed. Examples of referral asks, cold outreach, and proactive work that earned attention, and why most attempts get ignored.

Why this topic matters

The PM hiring market in 2026 will be more competitive than ever. Candidates are sending more applications than ever and hearing nothing back, while hiring managers are flooded with resumes but still struggling to find the right signal. This session breaks down how the hiring bar has quietly shifted and what actually helps PMs stand out today, long before the onsite interview.

How to interview product managers for AI fluency

Tuesday, Jan 27, 2026 1pm Eastern

RSVP here - recording sent after even if you can’t join live

I hosted a session a couple months ago with my friends Tal Raviv and Aman Khan (Unpacking Meta’s new “Product Sense with AI” interview) and we had a blast doing it. We’re all getting our hands dirty with AI and developing our intuition around how the craft of PM is evolving given these new capabilities, and we believe PM interviews are due for a major refresh to account for the changing expectations.

The session aims to help the audience:

• Define your evaluation rubric. Differentiate between building products with AI and building AI products (and why each requires different evaluation).

• Structure your PM interview loop. Map the most critical AI fluency dimensions in the rubric to behavioral, case, and take-home interviews.

• Reduce false positives in interviews. Identify common failure modes in PM interviews and redesign or remove evaluations that don’t produce useful signals.

Why this topic matters

Every company will want to hire AI-native PMs in 2026. But most PM hiring managers have never been through interviews that gauge their experience building products with AI or building AI products, thus don’t have a clear mental model for evaluating these areas. Instead of running the old interview playbook, this session will help you design PM interviews for the AI era.

What senior product people should know about fractional work

Thursday, Jan 29, 2026 2pm Eastern

RSVP here - recording sent after even if you can’t join live

My last full time role was as the head of product at Continuum, a Series A startup building a marketplace for fractional executives. While we weren’t able to crack the demand side of the marketplace in a venture-backed scale, we had insane PMF on the supply (talent) side of the marketplace.

This gave me essentially unlimited access to world-class senior talent doing fractional work either instead of, or in addition to, their full time job. I spoke 1:1 with dozens of fractional leaders about what’s working and not working, which felt like hard-earned secret knowledge.

I’ve kept those conversations in mind as a solopreneur over the last two years, while allowing my own experiences to shape my views about fractional work. I’ve been finding myself repeating a lot of the same advice to people reaching out to me so figured it’s time to share more widely.

The session aims to help the audience:

• Design fractional work around your life. Learn how to start with your time, energy, and income needs, then design fractional work that fits them.

• Position yourself narrowly without boxing yourself in. Learn why specificity drives referrals and how to pick one clear positioning that still leaves room to evolve.

• Build a sustainable fractional portfolio. Learn how to combine advisory, part-time, and interim work to avoid income volatility and burnout.

Why this topic matters

Full-time work no longer offers the stability it once did. Layoffs and reorganizations have made even strong roles feel fragile. Fractional work offers a new way to build security through multiple clients and income streams. This lesson shares practical frameworks for designing fractional work intentionally, so it creates resilience and control instead of stress.

Content Recommendations

Supra Insider

I co-host the Supra Insider podcast and want to share a couple of our top episodes from 2025:

• #80: Becoming an IC again is how products leaders will stay relevant in the AI era | Gokul Rajaram (Investor and Company Helper; ex-Google, ex-Facebook)

• #89: The hidden role of rituals in Duolingo’s product culture | Nickey Skarstad (Director of Product @ Duolingo, ex-Airbnb, Etsy)

The Skip series on PM career frameworks for AI

I love ‘s breakdown of how product leaders should be thinking about their career in the age of AI. I listened to both Part 1 and part 2 over the holiday break and am excited for part 3 coming soon.

Live in NYC

We took Gaia to see Mozart’s Magic Flute at the Met Opera over the break, which was my first time at the opera. I learned that it’s a Singspiel, a popular opera form that included both singing and spoken dialogue. So good.

Carole and I took advantage of her mom visiting us and also snuck out to the Broadway run of Oedipus, starring Mark Strong and Lesley Manville. We all knew where it was going but the acting was superb so we were invested. It was superb.

TV

I’m a big fan of Better Call Saul so when I saw Vince Gilligan teaming up with Rhea Seehorn for a sci fi Apple TV, I couldn’t wait. Pluribus delivered. It’s slow but so good.

I’m almost done with the last season of Stranger Things and am really enjoying it.

Film

Carole and I saw Marty Supreme in the theater over the holidays and it was fantastic. Same director as Uncut Gems so if you want to feel tight for 2 hours, this is for you.

We also watched Frozen 2 with Gaia over the break which is surprisingly dark. We liked it.

Books

Currently reading book 5 of the Malazan series, Midnight Tides. When I want to switch it up a bit, I’m also reading Ikigai.

I recently got into both Project Hail Mary (which he loved) and Hyperion if you’re looking for sci fi recs.

Music in the background while working

Found a YouTube channel I love with live daytime sets for deep house, which is extremely enjoyable to have in the background while working.

I started this newsletter to replace an annual-ish life update I used to send to friends, family and people who helped me along the way. This was never meant to be my main platform for sharing thoughts about product, work, etc. I saw it more as a public journal of sorts.

As I look back at my activity here in 2025 (or lack thereof), it’s clear I completely neglected this part of my life. I only published one post all year. I did spend a lot of time on Substack this year, but for a different publication: Supra Insider (the podcast I co-host with my good friend Marc Baselga).

Instead, my writing took place mainly in DMs, group chats, on LinkedIn and in emails to my Maven list.

I would like to get back into writing here in 2026. Let’s see how it goes.

Wishing you all a happy new year 🥳

Ben

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Writing this post gave me an excuse to look back at what I did this year and man… it’s a lot!

This post is written for future Ben to look back and appreciate this moment. When you’re going fast, things blur and I don’t want my life to be blurry.

It’s not a comprehensive reflection on everything that happened in 2025 or a detailed roadmap for what’s coming up in 2026. But I’ll touch on both, and I’ll do so bucket by bucket:

1. Family & Personal Life

2. Maven Course

3. AI Copilot

4. Supra Insider Podcast

5. Insider Loops

6. Content

7. Coaching, Advising and Consulting

8. Side Projects / Community

9. Income

1. Family & Personal Life

2025 Lookback

My proudest achievement is that I spent 2-3 hours a day with my daughter Gaia and my wife Carole while achieving all of my professional goals. Most weekends were entirely offline with family. This is my core, and I’ve gotten better at defending it.

I also carved out dedicated time for non-work stuff that matters to me:

• Carole, Gaia and I spent a week in Belize, a week in Costa Rica, and a full month in France.

• I took my dog George for three separate full-day Friday hiking trips in Hariman State Park outside of NYC. Excellent thinking time while getting him exercise.

• I played pickup 7x7 soccer twenty times.

• I hosted my sister and her kids in NYC. I hosted my mom too.

• I traveled to Florida twice to visit my mom and grandma.

• I flew out to SF for the first time since we left ~4 years ago and made it to Tahoe for my friend Laser’s bachelor party. I crashed for a couple nights with my friend Connor.

• I got closer with more dads in my neighborhood as the line between socializing and family time continues to get murky (which is hard to appreciate without kids).

• I read a few pages of a physical book almost every night before bed. Lots of epic fantasy (I’m now on book 4 of the Malazan series after taking a detour to the latest Stormlight Archive book).

• I started using a monthly blood collection service to track my health on a tighter basis and am more informed (while I’m not optimal everywhere, as of this month nothing is in the red).

• I rarely have a hard time falling asleep and get 7+ hours of sleep most nights.

There’s more but I’ll leave it at that for now. The personal highlights come first because they’re the foundation for everything else. Without a healthy personal life, none of the rest matters. I love my girls and George 😍

Going into 2026…

I’m going to continue prioritizing family above all else and continuing to be extremely active as a dad and carrying my weight at home. We will continue to travel, especially when we need a break from the cold and/or heat in NYC. A month in Europe in the summer will ideally continue to be a thing we do.

One area where I fell short in 2025 is my personal fitness. I just bought a 24-pack of 1:1 sessions with a personal trainer here in Brooklyn and I’ll go Mondays and Wednesdays at 10am for the first three months of the year, with a plan to transition to 4-person group sessions afterwards. My main goals are to gain functional strength, trim the waist line, and feel better / more energized.

I’d love to play pickup soccer at least once every month, but ideally closer to 2-3 times. Taking 10 days this year to hike outside the city with George feels like a good goal too.

I’ll keep reading paper books every night before bed, probably getting through 3-4 more Malazan books because they’re thick (but so good).

Two of my best friends (Laser and Sam) are getting married next year, so I’m excited for those two weddings. Laser is the one who got me tangled up in the Malazan series. And yes, his real name is Laser.

It’s not clear yet whether I’ll be able to make it to Israel to visit my dad and family this year but I’ll do my best to make that happen.

2. Maven Course

2025 Lookback

I ran eight live cohorts of my Maven course this year, serving almost 200 students.

After running the tenth and final live cohort in October, I decided to overhaul the course to better fit the schedule of busy PMs getting ready for interviews. I received emails all summer from people who wanted to take the course while I was in France but the next cohort didn’t line up with their interview schedule and availability.

So I decided to take my own availability out of the equation and re-launched the course in a fully self-paced format.

My first self-paced cohort ran in December and it worked great for students and for me. I’m getting less students than I used to but students can now access the full course content on their own schedule which feels like a big win. Once they complete the syllabus, they get access to my AI Copilot for practice. In addition to benefitting students, this also allows me to re-allocate the time I used to spend teaching live cohorts into other priorities I’m excited about (more on that below).

My Maven mailing list grew to over 13,000 emails this year, fueled by eight live Lightning Lessons, which are free workshops that funnel signups into my course waitlist. The sessions had 2,800 live attendees which is a full small-scale sports arena. You can see all my lightning lessons from this year here.

My biggest lightning lesson of the year, How top companies evaluate PM candidates in 2025, has 7.8k signups. I believe it’s a top 5 LL all-time on Maven. People loved what the panelists - , and had to say.

Another big win I’m celebrating is the inclusion of my course in Lenny’s List, a hand-selected lists of Maven courses curated by . This has helped me with both discoverability and credibility.

Thanks to both Lenny and Maven for helping me grow my course this year 🙏

Going into 2026…

I’m planning to continue offering the self-paced version of the course and running frequent cohorts. Since there are no longer any live sessions, this is easy. I want to ensure PMs can always get the course on a tight interview timeline.

I’m planning on doing more Lightning Lessons in 2026 than I did in 2025, because it’s been such an effective way for me to share content with my audience that is valuable, and also help me grow my list. Maven has crafted a genuinely effective win-win platform with these Lightning Lessons and I’m excited to keep investing. The other cool thing about the Lightning Lessons is that I can also take the recordings and publish them on my YouTube channel (more on that below).

I’ve contemplated launching an entirely new course on Maven, but I’m holding off on that for now. It’s exciting but likely a distraction. It doesn’t feel like a primary goal, but maybe something that will come up organically this year if the timing is right, and I get really excited about a new topic.

3. AI Copilot

2025 Lookback

My AI Copilot was my least expected win of the year. I’m happy I leaned into it and found ways to make it better while also getting a feel for how to market it.

A few months ago I published an episode with Marc on our podcast sharing the whole story around my AI Copilot and we covered all the bases so I won’t repeat them here but if you’re interested, just check out the episode:

With zero paid advertising, I sold over 200 units with only one refund request. I get regular emails from people telling me it’s the best $500 they’ve spent given the comp packages they’re targeting are often $500k/year or more.

I wanted to showcase more of these testimonials so I vibe-coded a website for the Copilot that has allowed me to tell the story in a way I’m proud of. The website has real demos, videos, FAQs, and more.

Building the website also gave me an excuse to spend a lot of time in Cursor and staying on top of the latest capabilities with AI prototyping tools powered by LLMs. I use Stripe, Zapier, and Apps Script to automate delivery. It felt really good to get my hands dirty and take control of the full stack.

Going into 2026…

I’m keeping a very close tab on how interviews are evolving (especially the interviews that I cover in my course and with the copilot). I’ll need to keep the Copilot relevant otherwise it’ll become obsolete. I imagine it’ll be good for another 3-6 months before another major update will be needed.

As for the website goes, I think it’s in good shape. I plan to publish more content in 2026 to market the copilot and show it in action because I continue to get feedback that people want to try it before they buy it but that’s fundamentally hard because once you have it, you have it (it’s a one-time purchase).

4. Supra Insider Podcast

2025 Lookback

My co-host Marc Baselga and I published over fifty episodes of the Supra Insider podcast this year. We published every single week. The show drove 64k downloads and 120k Substack views across 85k people. Our YouTube hit 1k subscribers (up 5x from last year) with 116k views and over 3k hours of watch time.

Check out my podcast

Our Spotify follower count grew 3.5x to 750 followers. Spotify delivered 10k plays and 2k consumption hours. Our total Spotify audience was 2.2k people. We have over 3k Substack subscribers.

Based on our most recent Spotify Wrapped, we’re the top podcast for 71 people. Those are our true fans.

Zooming out, the real value of the podcast isn’t in the numbers. It’s the conversations and the ritual.

The podcast helps me stay close to what’s shifting in how products get built and how work gets done in the age of AI. Everything I do requires me to be extremely plugged in and the podcast is an excellent forcing function for it.

The podcast has also allowed me to maintain a consistent habit where I talk with other people about topics that are interesting to me and publish something. Shipping on a regular cadence has been amazing for regulating my mood.

Going into 2026…

We’re going to keep publishing at least one episode per week, experimenting as we go with ways to make the podcast more fun for us and improving the guest experience. As long as we’re learning, having fun, and talking to interesting people, this podcast has staying power.

We’ll likely experiment with monetization this year, exploring partners/sponsors who want to reach out premium audience. I truly think we have one of the best podcasts for product leaders in the world. The key to growth will be consistency and quality above all else. The score will take care of itself.

5. Insider Loops

2025 Lookback

I launched Insider Loops with Marc (same one I co-host my podcast with) in September to help PMs prepare for interviews with Uber, Figma, Stripe. We added DoorDash in October and are working on the next guide now at a very hot company almost every PM wants to join.

We have many happy customers and proved the core thesis with very limited distribution. We’ve validated that PMs will pay for company-specific interview prep if they trust the source of the insights and know they can’t find this content anywhere else. We’ve developed a strong sense for how to create and market our guides, but still haven’t cracked large-scale distribution.

Marc and I have a full-blown collaboration in a shared repo that we each contribute to in Cursor (for the vibe-coded site as well as guide creation, updates, changelogs, etc). This project is another accelerant for Marc and I to stay very on top of AI tools (just this week Marc told me how Claude Skills are helping with some aspect of our guide changelogs). Insider Loops also gave me a reason to play with Gamma and we love it for this use case.

Marc and I dedicated a full podcast episode to talking about the full story behind Insider Loops if you’re interested in learning more:

Going into 2026…

We’re receiving real-time feedback from our customers about their interview experience and incorporating these insights into the guides on a biweekly basis. When someone buys one of our guides, they’re getting lifetime updates to that guide for a one-time payment.

The process for updating the guides is getting better every week and we’re well-positioned to become the best destination for updated PM interview guidance at top companies. Today that’s Stripe, DoorDash, Uber and Figma. But we’re planning to create many new guides for popular companies hiring PMs in the new year.

In addition to improving current guides and adding new guides, the third piece we will be looking to crack in 2026 is scaling relevant traffic to our site. This will be an ongoing area of experimentation for us.

6. Content

2025 Lookback

My content footprint expanded quite a bit this year, even outside of the podcast and my Maven course and lightning lessons.

The highlight was definitely publishing not one but two guest posts on Lenny’s Newsletter in April and July, respectively:

• The definitive guide to mastering product sense interviews

• The definitive guide to mastering analytical thinking interviews

Those two posts now dominate SEO for “Product Sense interview” and “Analytical Thinking interview.” Given that these are the two most common interviews PMs encounter, I’m very happy about this result. The Lenny posts drive consistent traffic to my interview templates (PS | AT) and course page. Writing a Lenny post is a big lift because of his insanely high bar and it’s worth every minute.

My LinkedIn follower count grew this year from 8k to 21k. My posts drove 2.5 million impressions and 32k engagements, reaching 570k members.

I also decided to start a YouTube channel early this year and have been working with an incredible video editor in the Ukraine who I found on Upwork. My channel went from literally 0 subcribers to over 900, driving over 100k views with 3.3k hours watched.

I also made two appearances on podcasts I’ve been a big fan of as a listener for years:

• Adam Fishman’s Startup Dad

• Peter Yang’s Behind the Craft podcast

Going into 2026…

Content is everything in this phase of my career. Staying top of mind for my network is key to manufacturing serendipity and increasing my surface area of luck.

In addition to podcast-related content, I will continue writing regularly on LinkedIn, ideally writing more here on Substack, and doing a lot more on YouTube. I want to keep sharing my ideas and growing my platform for amplifying strong thinkers I admire. If I get invited on a podcast I like, I’ll say yes.

I’m going to create way more value for people than I capture in any of the products and services I sell. High quality, premium content, and a lot of it. That’s the goal.

7. Coaching, Advising and Consulting

2025 Lookback

I coached <100 PMs one-on-one this year with dozens of those as paid sessions (many were my students). Many landed new roles and credited our time together with their success.

There have been times when I wasn’t available for coaching so I built a very small network of top-tier interview coaches for Meta, Google, Stripe and DoorDash. I’ve learned that many PMs trust me over platforms for coach-matching, even if the folks I refer them to are more expensive. Folks looking to get matched with a coach through me can submit this Google Form.

While building my solopreneur/creator revenue this year, I also kept some fractional product work going:

• I did six months of part-time PM work with a Series A fintech startup called Lettuce which was fun and kept me fresh shipping product. The company is building for solopreneurs and most of the team is fractional so it’s just a great fit. And Ran Harpaz, the founder/CEO is an awesome human being who I’ve enjoyed helping.

• I completed a two-month paid customer research project for a stealth AI company early in the year, which I always enjoy.

• I’ve also had a paid advisory engagement going for the past six months with a talented early career head of product.

I liked the fractional work and it generated meaningful income but I had a realization halfway through the year that fractional product work doesn’t accelerate my solopreneur flywheel as much as the podcast, course, and copilot. In a way, Insider Loops came out of my need to replace the fractional PM income.

Going into 2026…

I’m not looking for consulting projects or part-time PM work but I’d love to have another 1-2 advisory engagements going with early career heads of product at growing companies. Basically, extremely sharp people with a strong work ethic and no PM background who find themselves running the product function at their company.

Looks like my experience as the first PM at three startups paired with my experience as a coach come together to make me a pretty effective advisor to this kind of client.

I’ll keep my 1:1 interview coaching in the new year but I will likely increase my prices again since control over my time is becoming more important to me. I will keep vetting coaches to refer folks to if I’m short on bandwidth and also for more affordable rates. If you want 1:1 coaching with me, you can grab time here.

8. Side Projects / Community

2025 Lookback

I got to a working MVP for a new product called Airframe with my friend Connor Jacobsen. I ran customer research with about fifteen PMs and learned a lot about how people are using Projects in Claude and ChatGPT. We ultimately decided not to move forward with it because the problems we wanted to solve were getting shipped faster than we expected by OpenAI and Anthropic, which is amazing. I don’t believe in building solutions if someone else is solving the problems I care about better and faster than I could.

On the community side, I’ve been investing time into two main forums.

Supra: I’ve been a member of Marc’s Supra community for over two years as the community has grown to over 400 members now. In the fall, I founded a self-facilitated Supra cohort for Maven instructors including , , , and . I organize and facilitate our 90-minute sessions every 5-6 weeks. We learn a ton from each other and some exciting collaborations have already come out of it. Excited to keep it going in the new year.

PM Creators Country Club: I become friends with this year after going on his podcast and we decided to bring together some of our favorite people in our DMs into a WhatsApp group that we jokingly named the PM creators country club. This group includes Peter, Tal, Aman, Colin and Hilary above and also , , , , , . Conversations in that group have replaced a good amount of social media time for me and I love it.

Going into 2026…

Side projects are unpredictable so we’ll see what piques my interest! But the community stuff will definitely continue.

9. Income

2025 Lookback

I’m transparent in a lot of ways but numbers are still a little uncomfortable for me to share publicly. That said, 2025 was the best income year in my career.

What I’m most proud of is that I got there with a real diversification of income streams, with the biggest contributors being:

• 35% from Maven

• 25% from AI Copilot

• 25% from fractional product work

Going into 2026…

Given that most of my revenue this year came from unexpected places, I’m not going to share public goals for revenue. I’m focused on maximizing number of hours spent doing work that plays to my superpowers and that I find engaging and meaningful. I want a lot of time in flow. As long as I continue creating a ton of value for people and capturing a fraction of that in the form of monetization, 2026 could be an even bigger year for me. Let’s see how it goes.

I recently had the chance to sit down with on his podcast, and it was the first time I've really talked publicly about how becoming a dad has changed... well, everything. Most of my content these days is about product management and interview prep, so it felt both vulnerable and important to dig into the backdrop that actually drives how I show up in my work: fatherhood.

YouTube:

Spotify:

A few things that surprised me as I was talking through it:

The portfolio thing is working better than I thought. When I first went fractional/solopreneur, Carole & I worried about financial stability. Turns out, having multiple income streams (fractional PM work, my Maven course and AI copilot for interview practice, the podcast I co-host) actually feels safer than when I had one employer who could decide my fate. No single client represents more than 30-50% of my income these days.

Solo parenting days are sometimes easier. This one caught me off guard. When Carole travels for work and I'm flying solo with Gaia, there's zero communication overhead. If something doesn't get done, I know exactly where the ball was dropped. The control freak in me finds it oddly relaxing compared to the constant "did you pack the snacks?" coordination of tag-teaming.

I've accidentally built a dad community. Walking around Brooklyn with Gaia has connected me with other dads in ways I never expected. I’m part of a group called "Dadmilk" (😂) with about 15-20 neighborhood dads, and it's become one of my most valued social circles.

The structure thing is real. Before kids, routines felt limiting. Now they're the only way I get anything meaningful done. Our bedtime routine has been the same since Gaia was 3 months old, and it still works like magic. Carole deserves all the credit for figuring this out—I was just following her lead in those early days.

Gaia's almost 2.5 now and turning into this little person with opinions and jokes who gets her gentle, playful energy from Carole and has trained George to be her personal floor-cleanup service.

The conversation with Adam made me realize how much Carole and I have been figuring out as we go, and how rare it is for me to actually pause and reflect on what's working and what isn't. If you're curious to listen/watch the full convo, it's on Spotify, Apple, and YouTube.

What's been going on with all of you? I know I've been terrible at staying in touch, but I'd love to hear what you've been up to.

Ben

P.S. - Still haven't finished a single parenting book. Somehow we're all still alive.

There's a very small number of people who impacted the trajectory of my career and Gib Biddle is on that list.

A decade ago, Gib joined Life360 as an Interim Chief Product Officer for 3 days a week. His goals were to level up the entire product function at the company, pull us out of the weeds to think about product strategy, and become more hypothesis-driven.

While I was a pretty junior member of the team at that point, I enjoyed full access to Gib through his product review sessions, 1:1 coffees, and his afternoon talks where he tried out new formats with the product team, his guinea pigs. I was a sponge, the osmosis was strong, and the learning was rapid.

I learned so much from Gib about tradeoffs, goal-setting, experimentation, user research, and more. But most importantly, Gib was a role model for a different kind of success: he was the first truly successful exec I met who also seemed to be fully enjoying life professionally and personally at the same time. His way of life was inspiring.

That's why this week's episode of the podcast is a special one.

In this conversation, Marc Baselga and I went deep with Gibson Biddle on:
⛰️ Gib’s transition from traditional product roles to fractional CPO work
⛰️ The motivation behind semi-retirement and redefining success personally and professionally
⛰️ Strategies for scaling impact as a product leader through content, including talks and courses
⛰️ The importance of structured feedback and how Gib uses NPS to improve his presentations
⛰️ How Gib engages audiences in both in-person and virtual settings
⛰️ Key lessons from organizing the Product Leader Summit and what makes it unique
⛰️ Insights from Gib’s first cohort on Maven and his plans for future workshops
⛰️ Reflections on balancing life and work through meaningful experiments and adventures
⛰️ And more!

If you're looking to learn more about life outside the "traditional" route, this episode is for you.

Check it out here 👇

Supra Insider

#34: Scaling Impact Off the Beaten Path | Gibson Biddle (Netflix, Chegg)

Welcome to another episode of Supra Insider. This time, Marc and Ben sat down with Gibson Biddle, former VP of Product at Netflix and Chief Product Officer at Chegg. Gib shares his journey from full-time product leadership to becoming an interim and fractional executive, driven by the desire to live life on his own terms. He discussed his strategies for…

Listen now

2 years ago · 3 likes · Ben Erez, Marc Baselga, and Gibson Biddle

The Supra Insider podcast continues to be a labor of love for me. It’s a way to have conversations that just wouldn’t happen otherwise. We have some exciting guests scheduled for the rest of the year so if you want more of this kind of content, be sure to subscribe/follow.

Maven Course

Another area that I’ve been enjoying is my Maven course. A few weeks ago I wrapped up the second cohort, which also had 15 students (same as the first cohort). I made some large updates to the structure of the course to generate more value and the reviews indicate that it was successful.

I’ve opened enrollment for the third cohort starting in January so if you know anyone planning to interview for PM roles at big tech companies that use Product Sense and Analytical Thinking interviews (e.g. Meta) in 2025, my course will help.

If you enroll by the end of the week, you’ll get a 25% discount as part of Maven’s seasonal promotion. Here’s a link with the promo auto-applied.

Check out my course

Journaling Project

I have been writing consistently in some form since 2011, both privately and publicly. It’s been incredibly valuable for me to understand my own thoughts and to express myself better.

Recently a couple friends and I hacked together a prototype of a new journaling product that helps you understand yourself better through writing and I’m already benefitting from it.

Here’s a story about how the product helped me in the last week:

By analyzing my writing, the product was able to pinpoint an emotion that never shows up in my entries: anger.

The product educated me about the likelihood that I’m repressing anger and the dangers associated with not embracing anger more consciously.

I thought about Gaia, my 2 year old daughter, and how I want her to feel 100% comfortable with all of her emotions. I would be a hypocrite not to sit with my anger.

Yesterday, I had a very therapeutic journaling session where I was able to connect the dots between my anger and some difficult childhood memories around assimilating into an Israeli classroom as a six year old who didn’t speak any Hebrew. I never made the connection between my anger issues and that experience.

I haven’t been this excited about building a product for a long time.

If you’re looking to better understand yourself through writing and want to share feedback on the alpha product, just reply to this email. We’ll be ready to start onboarding friendlies in December.

This wouldn’t be a complete post if I didn’t share a bit of what I’m loving about my life outside of podcasts and projects.

Gaia is turning 2 in January and is an absolute pleasure to be around. She’s also starting to develop a trademark sneaky/devious look 🤣

And I took a couple days off in recent weeks to do some nature hikes with George. The nature outside of NYC is not as accessible as what we had in SF but it’s extremely beautiful and grounding for me.

And Carole once again crushed the Halloween game with the group costume from The Little Mermaid.

That’s all for now - thanks for reading 🙏

Also - welcome to the 100s of you who are hearing from me for the first time since subscribing. I’m glad you’re here 👋

Before we dive in…

I recently opened enrollment for the second cohort of my Maven course (I share a lot more about my course in this post) and spots are filling up. If you're gearing up for PM interviews with big tech companies like Meta and want to ace their Product Sense and Analytical Thinking interviews, my course is for you 🫵

Subscribers of my newsletter get 10% off with promo code `substack` (auto-applied on the course page here). If you know someone getting ready for these interviews, feel free to share my course with them. Would mean a lot 🙏

Visit Course Page

Fractional Work & Solopreneurship

Earlier this year I left my full-time role at Continuum and began exploring a new phase of my career: fractional work. Some also call this solopreneurship.

What is fractional work, you might ask?

It’s not one thing, but rather a spectrum of non-traditional ways of working together. Imagine a sliding scale of commitment levels that starts at “zero working relationship” and goes all the way to “full-time employee”. The points along that spectrum are what I’d consider fractional and include (but are not limited to) the following:

• Product Advisory: 2-3 hrs per month

• Fractional PM: 15-20 hrs per week

• Interim Product Leader: 25-30 hrs per week for multiple months

I’ve experimented with all three models over the past eight months, which has been super interesting and full of learnings. Active engagements have helped me to learn what I like vs dislike, where I’m stronger vs weaker, etc.

Here are some examples of active engagements I’ve had so far:

• Joined a stealth startup as an interim product lead for four months, got their product in the hands of the first users and onboarded the full-time product leader.

• Drove major 0->1 project for a Seed-stage startup which has now raised a Series A.

• Advised a pre-seed founder for a few months on her startup’s product direction to accelerate design iteration and improve the clarity of their v1 mobile app.

I’m excited to do more of this work for the rest of this year and have room for another client or two if you know early stage founders who could use help on the product side.

The Realities of Self Promotion (i.e. Content)

My biggest learning from building relationships with hundreds of fractional executives during my time at Continuum was the importance of getting good at business development (i.e. finding clients). So when I started this phase, I knew that for me to have a chance, I’d have to up my content game and figure out how to be top of mind for my target audience - early stage startup founders.

This means a key aspect of fractional work is getting comfortable promoting myself, which is uncomfortable for a lot of people I know who are exploring fractional work. Many people want to use their skills and experience to do the work; they don’t want to ramp up content on social media, build a personal brand, etc.

The problem with avoiding the cringey work of promoting yourself is that nobody else is going to do it for you. So if you don’t do it, your “business of one” won’t have any marketing touch points with your target audience. And any business with no marketing motion will struggle.

Here are some of the highlights on the content side of things:

• Launched a podcast called Supra Insider with Marc Baselga (founder of Supra, an invite-only community of product leaders) and we’ve published 26 episodes, hitting 1.2k subscribers and 5k downloads. It’s a ton of fun.

• Increased my presence on LinkedIn, more than doubling my follower count from ~4k to ~9k. Feel free to follow me there if you want more content 😜

• Published a guest post on Lenny's Newsletter, the largest newsletter for the product community with over 700k subscribers (one of my LI posts is actually what prompted that guest post, so you can see how the content adds value).

In addition to the fractional product work and content, I also decided a few months ago to run a course on Maven to scale my one-on-one interview coaching business:

• I ran my first Lightning Lesson on Maven, “How To Ace Product Sense & Analytical Thinking PM Interviews”, resulting in 700 signups (120 attended live and 60 stayed 30 min extra given the engaging Q&A). You can access the recording for free in that link.

• I launched my PM interview prep course on Maven, Product Sense & Analytical Thinking PM Interview Bootcamp, and ran the first cohort with 15 enrolled students, netting out at 4.5/5.0 rating on the course page. I wrote a post about my learnings from the first cohort here and discussed with Marc on our podcast in further depth here.

• I recently announced enrollment for the second cohort of the course, which will be even better than the first. Subscribers of this newsletter get 10% off with promo code `substack` (auto-applied on the course page here).

Here’s what one student from the first cohort had to say - this makes me happy 😃

"𝘉𝘦𝘯'𝘴 𝘤𝘭𝘢𝘴𝘴 𝘪𝘴 𝘴𝘶𝘱𝘦𝘳 𝘱𝘳𝘢𝘤𝘵𝘪𝘤𝘢𝘭, 𝘵𝘢𝘬𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘺𝘰𝘶 𝘵𝘩𝘳𝘰𝘶𝘨𝘩 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘸𝘩𝘰𝘭𝘦 𝘱𝘳𝘰𝘤𝘦𝘴𝘴 𝘴𝘵𝘦𝘱-𝘣𝘺-𝘴𝘵𝘦𝘱 𝘸𝘪𝘵𝘩 𝘦𝘷𝘦𝘳𝘺𝘵𝘩𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘤𝘭𝘦𝘢𝘳𝘭𝘺 𝘦𝘹𝘱𝘭𝘢𝘪𝘯𝘦𝘥 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘤𝘰𝘯𝘯𝘦𝘤𝘵𝘦𝘥. 𝘠𝘰𝘶 𝘳𝘦𝘢𝘭𝘭𝘺 𝘨𝘦𝘵 𝘩𝘰𝘸 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘧𝘳𝘢𝘮𝘦𝘸𝘰𝘳𝘬 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘮𝘦𝘵𝘩𝘰𝘥𝘰𝘭𝘰𝘨𝘺 𝘸𝘰𝘳𝘬, 𝘯𝘰𝘵 𝘫𝘶𝘴𝘵 𝘮𝘦𝘮𝘰𝘳𝘪𝘻𝘦 𝘴𝘵𝘶𝘧𝘧. 𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘣𝘦𝘴𝘵 𝘱𝘢𝘳𝘵 𝘧𝘰𝘳 𝘮𝘦 𝘪𝘴 𝘩𝘰𝘸 𝘪𝘯𝘵𝘦𝘳𝘢𝘤𝘵𝘪𝘷𝘦 𝘪𝘵 𝘪𝘴—𝘐'𝘷𝘦 𝘱𝘪𝘤𝘬𝘦𝘥 𝘶𝘱 𝘴𝘰 𝘮𝘢𝘯𝘺 𝘯𝘦𝘸 𝘪𝘯𝘴𝘪𝘨𝘩𝘵𝘴 𝘢𝘣𝘰𝘶𝘵 𝘪𝘯𝘵𝘦𝘳𝘷𝘪𝘦𝘸𝘴 𝘵𝘩𝘢𝘵 𝘐 𝘩𝘢𝘥𝘯'𝘵 𝘤𝘰𝘯𝘴𝘪𝘥𝘦𝘳𝘦𝘥 𝘣𝘦𝘧𝘰𝘳𝘦.

Course Details

Family & European Summer

Way better than all of the professional updates has been my ability to be extremely present with my family throughout this period. Our daughter Gaia will be turning two in January and I’ve really enjoyed spending time with her every day, noticing every major milestone of her development. I’m grateful that my current lifestyle has allowed me to not miss anything big. It’s a gift.

My parents both visited us in NYC over the last few months and got to spend time with Gaia, which made me (and them) really happy.

Lastly, we recently got back from spending a month in Europe (🇫🇷🇵🇹), visiting my in-laws on the west and east of France and spending a couple weeks exploring the broader Lisbon area for fun. It was intense traveling this much with a 1.5 year old but I was able to fully disconnect from work for a full month and enjoy European summer.

My podcast co-host Marc was also in Europe visiting his family in Spain and then taking time off in Greece so we recently published our 1:1 conversation about the benefits and challenges of taking time off in episode 25 here.

Note: last year I was working for the majority of our Europe trip (newsletter post from last year) and while we had a great time, it was insanely stressful to work 4-5 hours per night after full days. This year I worked harder in June and July so that I could turn off work 100% to be present in August. One of the benefits of fractional work is the flexibility to make that tradeoff.

That’s all for now, this was a dense one but that’s what happens when I don’t publish for several months. Thanks for reading!

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I don’t have as much time to write these days but I wanted to celebrate two of the special moms in my life with a few words before the writing window closes again (parents who write know what that means 🤣).

❤️ Two Special Moms

Gaia’s Mom

Before having Gaia, Carole was worried she wouldn’t have a maternal instinct. That she wouldn’t be a good mom. I told her I wouldn’t want to have a baby together if I didn’t know in my core that she would be a perfect mom. Not good - perfect.

I was right.

This week Gaia turns 16 months. She’s the coolest baby I’ve ever met. She’s happy, smiley, laughs a lot and makes funny sounds all the time. She’s starting to walk, has only one tooth and knows a few words. She’s incredible.

I see so much of Carole in her: her fun, focused play, her intelligence, her likability, her overall easygoing, her cheeky grins, and lots more. I’m convinced Gaia is the way she is because she has Carole as a mom.

And Carole’s giving her a VIP baby life. There’s always a new package arriving with Gaia stuff. We have enough books and toys to keep her busy for years, fashionable cute clothing for every weather and occasion, delicious organic meals, etc. Gaia has everything she needs and more.

While I’m not surprised that Carole is an extraordinary mom, I’m blown away by how easy she makes it look. Despite Carole having little patience for pretty much everyone else, she’s 100% patient with Gaia. I never see her rushing Gaia.

I could go on for hours about why Carole is such a perfect mom, but none is more important than this: she loves Gaia more than anything, and wants her to be safe and happy. It’s basic but it’s everything.

Happy Mother’s Day, Chou Chou! Gaia is lucky to have you as a mom and I love raising a human with you ❤️

Here’s to being the kind of parents that let our daughter lick windows at stores 🤣

My Mom

Like Gaia, I was fortunate to grow up with a mother who wanted me and loved me. It went a long way.

My relationship with my mom was special, and still is. We spent many hours watching movies and TV together. We watched each of the Lord of The Rings films in the theaters and, years later, binged the entire trilogy back-to-back in a single day. We enjoyed getting sucked into stories, together.

My mom always encouraged me to do what I wanted and never tried to push me in any direction. When I told her I wanted to quit my banking job to start a company, her response was that I could stay with her as long as I needed. She always had my back. Still does.

In high school, unlike my friends’ moms, my mom didn’t ask me not to party. Instead, she told me to be safe and to call her if I needed anything. As a result, I never felt the need to lie to her - I could tell her anything. Still can. This has been key to us staying close over the years.

I’ve learned that it’s rare for people to have this kind of relationship with their mom. I don’t take it for granted for a moment.

Happy Mother’s Day, Mom! Thanks for having me and for always being there. You’re the best mom I could have asked for and a wonderful grandma to Gaia ❤️

🎙️ Supra Insider

I’ve been having a ton of fun co-hosting the Supra Insider podcast with Marc. He has a crazy work ethic, wants to get better every day, and asks great questions. We’ve been PM-ing the podcast like it’s a product, learning and iterating after each episode.

And it’s paying off: we recently passed 350 subscribers and 1.3k downloads. Episode 10 is coming out this week and it’ll be a special one where I interview Marc about his journey building Supra and where it’s heading.

Below are the episodes we published since my last newsletter - enjoy!

If you want the next Supra Insider episode delivered to your inbox, subscribe below 👇

Supra Insider

A podcast for product leaders, inspired by discussions within the Supra product community.

By Ben Erez

Also, we published a couple new episodes of the Supra Insider podcast, which I’m co-hosting with Marc Baselga (founder of Supra, an invite-only community of 200+ product leaders which I’ve found valuable since joining last year).