🎺 Big news: I've just opened up applications for a second cohort of my Product Management Fundamentals course. This is the course I wish I had when I was starting out as a PM. Spots are limited, so apply now 👇👇👇 productmanagementfundamentals.com
1/ The course is part-time (evenings PST), and fits into a busy PM schedule. After the last course, I heard from dozens of students who credit the course with helping them get a promotion, land a better gig, or simply become more confident in themselves.
2/ This course is targeted at new PMs (<2 years experience), and will run 11/29-12/17. It'll include live lectures, group breakouts, practical assignments, amazing guest speakers, and a few surprises. I took all the feedback from the first cohort and made this cohort even better.
3/ This will be active learning alongside peers, not passive lecture watching.
Topics we'll cover:
✅ Leveling up your strategic thinking and vision
✅ Strengthening your written and verbal communication
✅ Collaborating and influencing your peers more effectively
✅ Mastering the art of shipping on time while keeping your team happy
✅ Gaining confidence as a PM
✅ Leveraging user research, metrics, and stakeholders to prioritize
✅ Leveraging the Minto Pyramid to delivering better presentations
and much more
4/ In addition to myself and a host of amazing guest speakers, you'll also have @AustinRamsland and a team of senior PM coaches, plus a community of students in the same place in their career, supporting you throughout the course.
5/ You'll leave this course a more confident and resilient PM, armed with a toolkit of actionable advice, strategies, frameworks, case studies, and templates you can immediately put into action.
6/ Learn more and apply here 👇👇👇
Pro tip: Ask your manager if you can expense this to your learning and development budget. maven.com/lenny/product-…
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1. Remote jobs are shrinking fast (down 35% from peak)
2. There’s been a shift to hiring more senior candidates
The chart below shows the proportion of open PM jobs by level over time.
If you look at the light blue and dark blue segments below (i.e. Senior and Lead/Senior++ roles), you can see they have definitely grown from early 2023 in the percentage of PMs being hired. In particular, Lead/Senior++ roles are growing their percentage of open roles the fastest. And the share of Entry/Mid-level roles (the pink segment) has decreased the most since early 2023.
3. More than one in five open PM roles is based in the San Francisco Bay Area. The share grew from 15.4% to over 20% in the past two years, and it appears to be growing further.
The rise of product management over the past 25 years.
Huge growth for 20+ years, followed by a plateau over the past couple of years.
This tells us the PM role isn’t going through the hypergrowth it saw earlier this decade, but it’s also not shrinking. This seems like a good and healthy thing all around.
Numbers-wise, there are about 450,000 active PMs in the U.S. right now, and 2,500 to 4,500 are being hired each month.
Here are the top hirers of PM roles over the past few years:
As a comparison, here’s the engineering role over that same time frame—similar growth trajectory, also a bit of a slowdown in the past one or two years, though not as much of a slowdown as PMs. Again, this seems right and healthy.
In most hiring processes, you’re lucky to get 45 minutes to chat with a candidate before having to make a thumbs-up or thumbs-down decision.
How do you use that precious time to get the most important information about the candidate?
For over a year now, I’ve been asking my illustrious podcast guests to share their favorite interview questions (nearly 150 guests now!), and the collection of questions that’s emerged is like nothing I’ve seen elsewhere. These are not just great questions—they are exceptionally good at pulling out the essential insights about the candidate in the least amount of time.
Below, I'll share some of my favorite high-signal-to-noise interview questions, including what to look for in a great answer, grouped by theme. To see the full list, don't miss today's newsletter post (link below).
How to learn the most about a candidate from a single interview question—High-signal-to-noise interview questions inspired by my 150+ podcast guests
Question 1: Talk me through your biggest product flop. What happened and what did you do about it?
“I look for people being brutally honest about how bad it was and why it failed. The rest of the interview, they’re trying to tell you all the wonderful things they did and all the accomplishments they had. And so I think the rawer the answer in terms of how bad it was and why, the better.”
—Annie Pearl, corporate vice president at @Microsoft, ex-CPO at @Calendly
Every startup can be distilled into a simple equation.
And until you can express yours as one, you don’t fully understand your business.
Having this equation gives you a map for understanding your biggest growth drivers, your key inputs and output, and once your teams are aligned behind it, and the equations operationalized, you’ll experience a huge force multiplier—because every team will be focusing their energy on the same (high-leverage) levers.
I teamed up with @danhockenmaier to collect the detailed equations for the eight most common tech business models:
Some of my biggest surprises when researching paths to PMF for top B2B companies:
1. If you build it, they *will* come—if you have strong product-market fit.
Though it often takes years to find initial PMF, once you do, a common pattern across top startups is strong (and explosive) organic growth—primarily seen as cold inbound and word-of-mouth growth.
This was true for Segment, Loom, Dropbox, Canva, Sprig, Stytch, and most others.
2. Stop thinking of product-market fit as a single moment.
It can be, but it almost always isn't.
Instead, think of finding PMF as an ongoing process of finding stronger fit with more and more segments of the market.
Though there will never be a foolproof formula for finding product-market fit, here’s my best attempt at creating a guide for B2B startups that'll save you much time and pain.
It's based on interviews and research into the PMF journeys of 25 top B2B startups.
Here's a peek:
Here's the full post: A guide for finding product-market fit in B2B
Inside: 1. A framework for finding PMF 2. Signs that you’re approaching PMF 3. What to do if you aren’t