First, the bad news: I tore my right knee ACL playing soccer last week and if I’m honest, it’s been tough. Physically and mentally.
For one, my soccer days are behind me, and I’m grieving the loss of my favorite sport/activity. But I have a history of knee injuries, I’m getting older, and I just don’t think the risk is worth the reward. I’ll need to find safer ways to get the same enjoyment from physical exercise.
A major injury like this also puts basic life into perspective. For example, taking Gaia to the playground. That’s pretty easy/mundane, right?
The problem is that I’m now very slow, which means I can’t keep her safe if she runs away from me. So Carole has had to cover for me, putting in extra hours with Gaia and George. I hate putting this burden on her but she’s been a champ.
Okay, now to the good news:
I have a very clean ACL tear with no other damage to surrounding ligaments, meniscus, etc. So apparently this is a “best case scenario for an ACL tear”. I’ll take the win.
I’ve been strength-training consistently since January, which has thankfully built up my leg muscles surrounding the knee. This is already making my physical therapy starting point better. I started physical therapy already and am feeling more optimistic than I expected.
I learned that I don’t actually need a functional ACL to do many everyday activities and even maintain a moderately active life (gym, running, swimming, hiking). While there’s no immediate need to undergo ACL replacement surgery, I’m doing my diligence and meeting with a surgeon to understand the options.
I work from home and don’t have a lot of in-person commitments so I’m able to do all of my career-related stuff without setbacks. As you’ll see in the rest of the post, I’ve been busy! Work is a great distraction from physical injury.
All in all, I’m feeling very grateful to have a life that can keep operating without a complete disruption during this recovery period. Thanks for letting me share 🙏
Now, let’s get on with more exciting stuff…
Recently, a PM candidate told me they’re being invited onsite for in-person interviews. Just to confirm they’re an actual human!
It’s the first time I’ve heard of companies doing IRL interviews in a LONG time. So I asked around. Turns out a lot of companies are adding at least one in-person round back into their process, mainly to make sure the person they’re hiring is real!
Some anecdotes I’ve gathered:
Fully remote companies still require one in-person meeting (fly to HQ or coffee with a local employee)
Hybrid companies include at least one onsite round, sometimes multiple
The goal is “real person verification,” not “culture fit"”
Wild to think that candidate fraud is now common enough to justify baking into the hiring process. What this means if you’re job searching right now:
Don’t be surprised if a fully-remote company still asks for one in-person touchpoint. It’s not a red flag about RTO, it’s a fraud check.
Treat the in-person touch point as lower-stakes. Companies are simply confirming you’re you.
The market is finding a new equilibrium: time-efficient virtual rounds for the bulk of the evaluation, with one IRL checkpoint at the end... juuust to make sure you’re not a fake person.
You have any fun “we almost hired a fake person” stories to share? I’d love to hear it - just reply.
Over the past year, my Copilot has helped hundreds of PMs land roles at Meta, Google, OpenAI, Stripe, DoorDash, Uber, Datadog, Monday.com, and more. I’ve been adding testimonials to the site and am very proud of the impact it has had on the way candidates prepare.
Since many people are already finding my copilot through my guest posts on Lenny’s Newsletter diving into product sense and analytical thinking interviews, I teamed up with Lenny Rachitsky to offer our readers $100 off my Copilot. Just use code LENNY100 in checkout here 👇
This week we changed the way Insider Loops customers access their guides and it’s the most exciting “boring thing” I’ve worked on in a while.
Previously, buyers would get sent to a google doc that contained a password to unlock the guide. We rotated those passwords regularly to combat piracy (don’t ask), which meant our paying customers had to go fetch a fresh password every time they wanted to come back. It mostly worked but not exactly delightful for customers or us.
So we decided to implement single sign on (SSO) using “Login with Google”. It took us ~4 days from deciding to launching. Now, when someone buys a guide, they get a link to the guide and can just view it with a simple auth step. WAY better customer experience and simplifies our operations. Win/Win.
It might sound simple but it was an intense project that pushed us well past our comfort zone with “vibe coding”. This was full-stack web app development with AI coding agents and I wanted to share some of my reflections in case it’s helpful.
First, the key to pulling this off was a really solid, detailed plan.md file that got programmatically updated as we went. Here’s what made it work:
Codex and Claude Code have encyclopedic knowledge of where every single setting lives in every tool. Google Cloud, Vercel, Railway, GitHub. Every phase of the plan was broken into “what the agent does” and “what the user does,” sequenced one step at a time.
We spent 30-40% of the time on the plan to make sure the project was set up for success. I cannot overstate the importance of the execution plan.
Marc and I were able to pass the baton to each other by working out of a single plan. I stepped away for two hours, committed to GitHub, and he just pulled and kept going. This is one benefit of not working alone.
Every time something wasn’t working, we’d just explain the problem and the coding agent would help us plan a new approach to try.
We needed to roll back a couple of production deployments after we thought we were done. Vercel’s “instant rollback” feature is magic.
Codex ended up getting us over the finish line. Claude Code’s ideas weren’t quite working at the very end when we were troubleshooting the deployment failures. Different agents have different strengths, and you learn by pushing them.
The dopamine when everything was finally working was off the charts. Best feeling ever 😍
Building right now truly feels like playing a video game. That’s the closest thing I can describe it to. You have a problem, you describe it, the agent suggests an approach, you try it, you tell the agent what happened, and keep going. The feedback loop is so tight and the progress is so tangible that it doesn’t feel like work. It’s play.
If you’ve been on the fence about building something because you don’t know how to code, you need to understand we’ve crossed into a brand new world. The tools are good enough that the constraint isn’t technical knowledge anymore. It’s the willingness to sit with a problem, describe it clearly, and iterate.
Before this project, I was comfortable using AI to build a lot of frontend capabilities. But I was intimidated by backend work, and especially scared of biting off SSO because it’s notoriously tricky.
But now we’re on the other side of the project, having shipped a real auth flow, on production, touching four different cloud services, in a few days. Marc and I have no engineering background at all.
What a time to be building!
While SSO was the big win this week, I wanted to share a few other things we shipped that I’m proud of:
We added more testimonials our website. It’s so rewarding to build a product that truly helps talented people achieve their goals.
Marc is an AI ninja. He built a guide update system that allows us to update our guides within 24 hours of getting feedback from candidates. We still manually triage and verify every update but once it’s in our queue, we have AI draft a proposal for integrating the feedback into the guides and it’s magical. Our process and speed are becoming real competitive advantages.
We shipped an improved guide viewing experience that includes dark mode, better table of contents nav, and an in-guide feedback collection mechanism. We’re just getting started.
Want to see how top companies are evaluating PMs in interviews?
On Tuesday I hosted a fireside with Hilary Gridley and mallory contois on how to self-promote without burning trust.
I've been thinking about this stuff a lot because I've needed to lean into marketing myself a lot over the last two years and realize that a trusting audience is quite a valuable asset.
And content is arguably the best way to build (and scale) a trusting audience. BUT... the cringe of putting yourself out there is real, and most people get stuck before they ever start.
So here are a few things from the session that stuck with me:
Mallory shared that content compresses the "get-to-know-you" phase. By the time someone's deciding to hire you, advise with you, or grab coffee, they already have a sense of how you think.
Hilary shared that the goal isn't reach, it's becoming a magnet for the people you'd actually want to work with. The bigger the blast radius of your authentic voice, the more likely the right people find you.
Mallory shared a theory on why building in public feels so hard: we spent 25 years being trained to do our work in private and submit a polished final product for grading. Now the in-progress thinking is the interesting part. It takes some unlearning.
Hilary still finds posting on LinkedIn mortifying. She just does it anyway. The skill is built through reps, ideally in lower-stakes places first.
The trust guardrail Mallory uses: over the last year, did she give more than she asked for? If yes, she's fine.
Play the game you want to win. Don't optimize for what the algorithm rewards if winning that game would build a life you don't want.
But what made the Zoom erupt was something Hilary said almost in passing: "whatever you have to say is probably better than 90% of what's on LinkedIn already." Ain't that the truth! If you've been sitting on the sidelines, might be time to let it rip 🌶️
Full session recording available here: https://maven.com/p/79f5f4/how-to-self-promote-without-burning-trust
Here are episodes Marc and I published since my last post 👇
What happens to the PM, the designer, and the engineer when a single person with a great idea can take it all the way to market on their own?
What if you could know whether your product change was going to work — before a single real user ever saw it?
What if the reason you feel like you never have enough time isn’t actually a time problem at all?
NotebookLM’s audio overviews have started to fill more of my listening time on walks and I’m loving this way of consuming content. Here’s a recent one I enjoyed:
5/14: Negotiation tips for candidates targeting $350K+. As my interview prep resources help more PMs land roles, I’m increasingly getting asked for comp negotiation advice. So I’ll be hosting a live session on Thursday 5/14 with my friend Josh Doody, a professional salary negotiation coach.
5/28: Toronto Product Conference. At the end of May, Marc and I are heading to Toronto for a live recording of the Supra Insider podcast in front of an audience of a couple hundred people. It’ll be my first time in Toronto and our first time recording live in front of an audience. Can’t wait.
🕵️♂️ Insider Loops. Company-specific PM interview guides for Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Stripe, DoorDash, Uber, and Figma (more coming soon). Verified intel, rigorously researched and continuously updated.
📚 My self-paced PM Interview Bootcamp: Product Sense & Analytical Thinking. Selected by Lenny Rachitsky as a top product course on Maven (rated 4.9/5.0 with ~90 reviews).
🤖 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 hundreds of PMs land roles at Meta, Google, OpenAI, Stripe, DoorDash, Uber, Datadog, Monday.com, and more. Testimonials on the site.
My most popular free resources:
🧠 My Product Sense Interview Template. 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. 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.
🎥 Useful lectures and panels I’ve hosted as lightning lessons on Maven.
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