Confusion at Meta, engineers being Pikachus, 3 weeks for a 2-day takehome

What's on my mind, what I've shipped since last time, market insights, inspiration, and what's coming up

Mar 02, 2026

I’m writing this on the third day of the most recent escalation in the middle east, as my family and friends in Israel are scrambling multiple times per day to reach safe spaces each time there’s a new rocket launch heading in the country’s direction from Iran. I recognize how trivial the content of my newsletter is in light of serious stuff. But the show must go on.

☕️ 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:

Engineers eagerly excited to evolve their job using AI
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.

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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 Hilary Gridley 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.

OpenAI guide, fractional work advice, PM recruiter squeeze, endless FOMO

What's on my mind, what I've shipped since last time, market insights, inspiration, and what's coming up

Ben Erez

Feb 23, 2026

Writing this from my living room while the snow continues piling up outside and the blizzard is in full swing. Everything in NYC is basically closed because of the 20+ inches of snow. George is loving the powder (esp eating it - which is basically him chugging water in solid form). Gaia is enjoying an extra day of weekend-only TV time while Carole & I are staying afloat.

George last night enjoying a big stick in Brooklyn

☕️ 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 Hilary Gridley 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.

graphical user interface, text, application — Get the guide at www.insiderloops.com

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)

🎥 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 Tal Raviv and Aman Khan 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:

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

An interview horror story, big podcasting milestone, and a few things I’m thinking about

Snowy Brooklyn, brutal candidate experiences, celebrating 100k downloads, PMs crying in bathrooms, Acquired, Sequoia, GSB, and two upcoming sessions.

Ben Erez

Jan 30, 2026

We got a massive amount of snow in NYC last weekend, leading to daycare closure on Monday which gave us a curveball 3-day weekend. Our golden retriever George can’t get enough time in the snow, our daughter refuses to wear gloves and beanies while wanting to play in the snow but getting immediately cold, and my wife and I are just trying to get through the day while Ubers are 3x the price, buses are late, and snow piles render our stroller useless. Oh and it’s freezing for at least the next week so nothing will melt. Why do we live here again?

🧟‍♂️ 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.

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:

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
we only invite guests if at least one of us is extremely excited about them and prioritize the guests we're most excited about
we pick interesting "trailheads" for every episode and go off-roading by letting our curiosity pull us
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)
we trust that the more present we are in the conversation, the more engaging the episode will be for the audience
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
we don't delegate anything we don't do first ourselves - we have an incredible teammate named Tehreem who helps us run the podcast
we aim to make episodes that guests will genuinely want to promote and believe a world-class guest experience is a growth driver
we believe in making the podcast 1% better every week - the score takes care of itself
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, Casey Winters (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 Adam Fishman 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 Hilary Gridley (WHOOP, Dropbox, Nike) and Nickey Skarstad (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…

a month 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…

a month 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!

2026 PM hiring predictions and the future of higher education

How PM hiring will change in the new year, the future of higher education, and the questions I’m asking myself as I celebrate my daughter's 3rd birthday this week

Ben Erez

Jan 16, 2026

Hope everyone’s having a fantastic January so far. I’ve completed the first two weeks of my personal training package ( = 4 sessions) AND I’ve played pickup soccer two weeks in a row. The fitness journey is on track.

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 Nickey Skarstad (Director of Product @ Duolingo (previously @ Airbnb, Etsy) and Hilary Gridley (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.

I can’t stop infusing unnecessary ancient Egypt themes in Nano Banana sry

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

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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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:

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.

I'm hosting 3 sessions for product leaders in January

How product managers can get noticed by companies in 2026, how hiring managers can evaluate AI fluency in PM candidates, and what senior product people should know about fractional work.

Ben Erez

Jan 06, 2026

As I was writing my 2025 reflection post I realized that almost everything I accomplished last year had a seed or spark in January. So I’m starting 2026 hosting three free sessions that cover current areas of interest to get the momentum going:

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.

The three of us jamming about the future of PM interviews in Brooklyn last summer

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 Nikhyl Singhal‘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 Marc Baselga 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.

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Ben’s Newsletter

Confusion at Meta, engineers being Pikachus, 3 weeks for a 2-day takehome

What's on my mind, what I've shipped since last time, market insights, inspiration, and what's coming up

☕️ On my mind

🚀 Recently shipped

🎙️ Supra Insider

🕵️‍♂️ PM market insights

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

💡 Content I’ve enjoyed / been inspired by

🛣️ On the horizon

🫶 Go deeper with my work

OpenAI guide, fractional work advice, PM recruiter squeeze, endless FOMO

What's on my mind, what I've shipped since last time, market insights, inspiration, and what's coming up

☕️ On my mind

🚀 Shipped recently

🤖 Our Insider Loops guide for OpenAI is now live

🎙️ Supra Insider (podcast I co-host)

🎥 What senior product people should know about fractional work

🎥 How to interview product managers for AI fluency

🛰️ Market insights

💡 Content I’ve enjoyed / been inspired by

🛣️ Coming up

🫶 Support my work

An interview horror story, big podcasting milestone, and a few things I’m thinking about

Snowy Brooklyn, brutal candidate experiences, celebrating 100k downloads, PMs crying in bathrooms, Acquired, Sequoia, GSB, and two upcoming sessions.

🧟‍♂️ Interview horror story

🎉 My podcast just hit 100k downloads

😵‍💫 Know thy culture

🎙️ Supra Insider #94 featuring Casey Winters

🎥 How to get noticed by PM hiring managers in 2026

🎙️ 10 Years of Acquired (with Michael Lewis)

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

🙋‍♂️ The stable marriage problem

⏭️ Coming up…

⚡️ How to interview product managers for AI fluency

⚡️ What senior product people should know about fractional work

🫶 Want to support my work?

2026 PM hiring predictions and the future of higher education

How PM hiring will change in the new year, the future of higher education, and the questions I’m asking myself as I celebrate my daughter's 3rd birthday this week

Upcoming free sessions

Interviewing at Uber, Figma, Stripe, or DoorDash?

2026 PM hiring predictions

Happy birthday Gaia 🥳

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

I'm hosting 3 sessions for product leaders in January

How product managers can get noticed by companies in 2026, how hiring managers can evaluate AI fluency in PM candidates, and what senior product people should know about fractional work.

How to get noticed by PM hiring managers in 2026

How to interview product managers for AI fluency

What senior product people should know about fractional work

Content Recommendations

Supra Insider

The Skip series on PM career frameworks for AI

Live in NYC

TV

Film

Books

Music in the background while working