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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

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 (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.

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.

2026 PM hiring predictions and the future of higher education