Job Search Retro: Product Manager

Anoop landed a PM role focused on AI applications at a growth stage education tech company.

Hedgy Member Background

• Computer Science undergrad major with 6 years of PM experience.
• Was focused on PM roles at AI startups.

Key Insights

The mental aspect of a job search

• A lot of time is spent on the tactics around interviewing or negotiating an offer, but less discussed is how to mentally prepare yourself.
• The search is a full time job in itself. It’s important to have the activation energy to jump in and also be realistic with what the market may bear. Everyone’s candidate-market fit is a bit different and early on in the process you’ll start to get feedback either through coffee chats or by the responsiveness of companies as to what yours is.
• In Anoop’s case the entire process took around 2 months. In retrospect, he could have thought of this as almost two 4 week sprints with a week break in between. He ended up completing 48 interviews and interview burnout is a real possibility.

The human element of landing interviews

• Anoop had 30+ coffee chats to land 18 interview loops with companies. 16 of the 18 came through referral submissions. Our hope with Hedgy is we can help streamline this coffee chat -> referral motion. We hope to be your extremely well connected friend who can get you multiple introductions.
• He approached coffee chats as a way to re-connect with old classmates or friends and learn about what they were working on. Some folks he didn’t even know that well and he was surprised at how open people generally are at having a quick chat. When it made sense he would then follow up with an ask to be submitted as a referral - no one declined his ask.

A ChatGPT enabled search process

• ChatGPT turned out to be a great resource at all stages of his search.
• He would use it to craft outbound emails or messages to schedule coffee chats or request referrals.
• Using voice mode he was able to turn ChatGPT into a mock interviewer (he did mention it was no substitute to mock interviews with a fellow PM friend). He would feed it the job description, any materials the recruiter provided and put together a mock rubric. Prompting it to think like a hiring manager at X company, it would serve as an always available interviewer. He did note ChatGPT tends to be much nicer on their evaluations than the actual hiring managers :).

This post is part of our job search retro series where Hedgy members who have recently started a new job share learnings from their search. If we can be helpful as you navigate your search, email us at founders@hedgy.works