Revealed: How to Succeed in Meta Product Manager Interviews.

Here's the exact doc Meta shares with candidates for its PM Interviews:

Steal this template for your homepage: 1. Above the Fold

This is the most important part of the homepage. Too many people waste the space:

A. Convey the category of software your product is in, and how your solution differs
B. Add in wow logos from industries in your ICP (ideal customer profile)

There’s a paradox of seniority: people get more messages, yet they are even more responsive.

This is especially true for important emails.

Here’s why: THE IC LIFE

As an Individual Contributor, your work (outside of certain roles) mostly is internal to your company.

You can spend the vast majority of your day in Slack for responsive tasks.

Email responsiveness matters, but it’s not the most important thing.

For a company founded in '93, Nvidia's ascent to $2.7T market cap has been FAST. But what really is Nvidia's moat?

Let's break it down.

PART 1 — SOFTWARE

The story starts all the way back in the early 2000s. That's when Jensen Huang, Nvidia CEO, and his team were out meeting researchers using their products.

Most researchers were hacking graphics packages to run complex parallel compute tasks. It was not ideal. To say the least.

So, when the Nvidia team met Ian Buck, who had the vision of running general purpose programming languages on GPUs, they funded his Ph.D. After graduation, Ian came to Nvidia to commercialize the tech.

Two years later, in 2006, Nvidia released CUDA.

C ompute
U nified
D evice
A rchitecture

CUDA made all those parallelization hacks the researchers were doing available to everyone. Over time, CUDA became the default choice for researchers.

CUDA allowed accessible customization of the low-level hardware. So developers loved it.

Nowadays, when startups like MosaicML evaluate the available technology vs CUDA, they inevitably choose CUDA.

The ecosystem around CUDA has grown so robust that its lead is virtually unbeatable. This software layer is at the core of Nvidia's moat.

PART 2 — HARDWARE

The other side of Nvidia's moat is hardware. But it's not graphics cards for crypto and gaming. The hardware that matters is AI supercomputers.

The story of these supercomputers begins in the late 2000s. As Nvidia was developing CUDA, Jensen asked the team to build a supercomputer to help him build better chips.

The result was a massive supercomputer that weighed 100 pounds and strung together many GPUs with world-class networking for ultra-fast computing.

In the early 2010s, Jensen gave a talk at a conference about this AI supercomputer. Elon Musk got wind of it and said, "I want one."

So, in 2016, Jensen actually donated one to Elon Musk's relatively unknown nonprofit, OpenAI. He hand delivered it, and there's photographic proof.

OpenAI quickly learned the supercomputer worked really well. Especially for training large neural networks. That 2016 Pascal architecture delivered an impressive 19 TFLOPS of FP16 operations.

That's 19 trillion floating point operations per second. It's a massive amount. But that was just the beginning.

Since then, Jensen and the Nvidia team have been lapping the industry in delivering more TFLOPS, growing them at an exponential rate.

The latest Blackwell architecture delivers a massive 5000 TFLOPS. That's >260x AI computer in 8 years. And sells for more than $75K. But buyers like Meta, OpenAI, Google, and Amazon just can't get enough, as their internal ASICs are nowhere near Nvidia's level.

As a result, Nvidia's profits and market cap continue to soar, cementing its position as a leader in the AI hardware and software space. Jensen is one of the most impressive entrepreneurs alive.

He spotted the AI revolution before any other semiconductor CEO and bet the company on it.

That's a rare trait.

There is no one-size-fits-all when it comes to GTM.

Maja Voje and I studied 12 leading B2B SaaS companies.

(including interviews with their teams)

Here’s what we learned: 1. PLG is eating the world

>80% of the companies in our study employ PLG in some fashion.

Even enterprise companies like Snowflake and Salesforce are adding free trials & freemium.

It’s the new normal.

There's so many ways orgs mess up transforming the product team away from the feature factory.

Here's the top one's, as I see them: 1. Understanding and commitment

It's not enough to just have engineering, product, and design on board for transformation.

Transformation impacts marketing, sales, customer success, finance...

You need to drive top-down alignment from the CEO and Senior Leadership Team.

The fractional CPO role is the hottest new role in product.

Here's what you need to know:

1/10 1. Fractional v Interim v Consulting

It's easy to confuse the variety of non-traditional product leadership jobs these days.

You can think of a simple 2x2 to distinguish them.

You ask 2 questions:

• Do you lead product?
• Are you full-time?

2/10

"I'm in a feature factory. I hate my job."

Spoiler alert: You shouldn't just immediately try to transform the company.

That a recipe for disappointment at best, and getting exited at worst.

Instead, figure out which of these 3 approaches is best for you:

1. Guerilla Tactics
2. Soft Power
3. The Long Game

They all can make you happier, but are totally different.

OPTION 1 - Guerilla Tactics

The reality is that most PMs don’t have the clout to drive transformation for everyone on their own.

So instead of trying to change everyone, you can just change your immediate vicinity.

For instance:

1. Organize 'innovation labs' that champion product model practices.
2. Offer to manage small 'side projects' that run in the product model, showcasing rapid progress.
3. Embed Agile principles subtly, using phrases like 'quick syncs' and 'priority check-ins' to avoid bureaucratic pushback

These are all little, tactical things that you don't have to be super public with. But they make your life better.

The key with all of these is to have a mindset that “I can shape my job.”

OPTION 2 - Soft Power

Another option that has worked for quite a few people is not to go guerilla - but go soft power.

So you're not under cover. You're out in the open.

You do things like:

1. Bring customer discovery and solution iteration into the process
2. Empower your designers and engineers in the what and why
3. Think like an owner about outcomes to drive
4. Then, you document and share those wins.

This is a really nice middle ground that PMs use to get promoted by bringing state of the art practices to their product domain.

Instead of just bringing happiness to your job, you also try to move the company along.

Especially with that step 4.

OPTION 3 - The Long Game

This final option is a long-shot... and too many content creators jumpt to his.

But it can be done by PMs who want to stay at a company--and also effectuate change.

The idea is you:

1. Get in with some execs: you find and win sponsors
2. Patiently prove out the process: you slowly keep showing proof points of success
3. Celebrate, celebrate, celebrate: act as the on-the-ground cheerleader for the initiative

And you try to be that unicorn IC PM who helps drive transformation org-wide.

But beware: the odds are long. Options 1 and 2 also can make you happier.

Too many people underrate them. I see so many PMs saying stuff like this. It's a shame.

The books idealized too much. Enjoy what you have.

This data really stuck with me...

There's a huge gulf between what PMs and designers think each other's responsibilities are.

🧵 From the chart:

1. Do PMs own stakeholder buy-in?
→ 53% of PMs think they do, but only 16% of designers do

2. Do PMs own what features the team should build?
→ 56% of PMs think so, but only 15% of designers do

Source: @NNgroup

The product trio is merging.

And it's not just because of AI.

🧵 I first saw this concept from Yuhki Yamashita (@yuhkiyam), CPO of Figma, in 2020.

Well before the current AI boom.

It's driven by 3 key trends:

(Video: @productschool)

The product leadership job search is completely unlike the IC PM search.

Here's what you need to know:

(That most people don't) My collaborator (and 3x Sr Dir of Product) @xolin and I talked to:

• 7 external executive recruiters
• 2 internal big tech executive recruiters
• 2 VC talent teams
• And 10 CPOs and VPs

To learn these 5 things:

2 rules govern how much you can make:

Stage and success of company

Let me explain 🧵 Factor 1 - Where You Work

At bigger companies, the same title earns a lot more. Take VPs:

• $10M rev/ Series A: TC $675K
• $100M rev/ Series E: TC: $750K
• $500M rev/ Series E: TC $750K
• $1B rev/ Small-Mid Cap: TC $950K
• $100B rev/ FAANG-like: TC > $2.15M

Remember the days of unlimited music skips on Spotify's free tier?

I bet you didn't know removing it increased paid subscribers 25%.

Here's the story: Unlimited skips on the free plan was a golden age for music lovers.

But, for Spotify, they were losing money on each of those customers.

They needed them to upgrade.

I researched the pricing models of 50 leading consumer software companies.

These are my top 4 takeaways: 1 — Subscriptions have come to every industry

In every industry, it's worth considering if a subscription makes sense for you.

Recurring revenue, stable cash flow, and higher LTV are all potential prizes.

But, consumers might be annoyed.

Companies kill their own messaging over time.

4 bad habits seep in as they grow.

Here's the breakdown: @apierriPMM Bad Habit 1 - Speaking to multiple audiences at once

In the world of growth-focused companies, prioritization can be seen as weak.

But instead of effectively speaking to multiple audiences at once, you end up speaking to none.

In messaging, you must prioritize.

You know ChatGPT. But you don't know the history of AI.

Here's the key events you need to know: 1956 -- Dartmouth Conference:

• Academics gathered at Dartmouth. They used the term AI for the first time
• The idea was to build a machine that mimicked human reasoning
• The first model was created

Notion's $10B valuation isn't magic. It's a masterclass in PLG.

There's 7 key elements to this motion.

Here's a quick rundown of each ↓ 1. Core problem communication

Clear & cute messaging:

↳ Notion has its trademark cartoon style
↳ And it always pays close attention to the details of design

Community to get the word out:
↳ Notion's creators and users spread the word
↳ It adds fuel to the fire

What does it take to build the world's hottest SaaS?

And steal share from big tech giants Microsoft and Google?

This is how Notion has built one of the most mesmerizing businesses in tech: 1️⃣ Pivoting to success:

Ivan Zhao and Simon Last's first no-code startup failed.

So they packed their bags in San Francisco to cheaper Kyoto.

Ivan took a $150K loan from his family and the pair "coded in their underwear" for a year.

Your roadmap is not a product strategy: Of tasks a PM should do, strategy tends to be the most confused.

Too often, some window dressing on a roadmap is called strategy.

Strategy needs to be a level higher than roadmaps:

1. It connects vision & roadmap
2. It considers competition
3. It helps prioritize

“CS Background Preferred”

It’s one of the most feared PM requirements: being technical.

But even if you don’t have a CS degree, you can develop awesome technical skills.

10 steps to becoming a great technical partner as a PM: 1. Query the data

Learn how to use SQL and python to pull data out of your company’s database.

· Create a list of 3 questions you’re keen to learn
· Get the permissions from IT
· Make a friend in analytics (to ping when you have questions)

Then get to work. Google as you go.

One of the key controversies in the NYT v OpenAI case is ChatGPT's most weighted dataset: Common Crawl.

What is it, and who is behind it? BIG DATA, SMALL TEAM

Common Crawl is a giant crawl of the web that is many Terabytes. The 2012 set of data alone is 210TB.

It's a small team that maintains this giant database. Just 11 people work on it.