How to Get Hired as a PM in Today's Job Market

Good morning. I'm doing well. How are you today?

Very good. Very good. All right. I see people are already starting to trickle in. Folks from Spain, folks from London. The usual, I guess, bias of the audience. So welcome everyone. I'm gonna cut straight to it. We are here because James has kindly offered to volunteer an hour of his day to pack as many of his tips on how to navigate the product job market in 2026. So I guess this one is going to be slightly different if you've been to the other. Community webinars we've had in that I'll basically stay quiet for more time to let James go through more bits. I'll probably comment here and there, and of course we're— we'd love to get questions and comments from people too. If you're dialing in from LinkedIn and you're feeling a bit shy about sharing job search related troubles, you can also find this live stream on YouTube. And without further ado, James, welcome. Start us off. Tell us a little bit about who you are, because I'll butcher your introduction. Maybe I'll mention one thing, which is that James joined one of our data product management community meetups in the very early days. I think it was maybe like the second or third one, and you've been coming to the meetup since. But also, I meet a lot of people that say they've joined because you've sent them our way. So thank you for that.

My pleasure. And thank you for having me and hello to everyone who's joining us on the stream, whether that be LinkedIn or YouTube, but yeah, so I'm really big on community. And so a couple of years ago when I had just moved to London, it was really important that I build a network here. Right. Cause I had learned a lesson in my career after I left the US where I'm from that building a network outside of your workplace is highly valuable. And it wasn't until I left one of my previous jobs and then moved to a new country, I realized just how difficult it was without a built-in network. And so I spent a lot of like the end of 2023, early 2024, just going to lots of different events. And I'll talk more about how you can leverage your network in the context of the job search. But Nick just wanted to acknowledge just how much work I know goes into putting on things like this, things like the live events that you do, the in-person events. And so thank you for what you do for the community. And of course, happy to continue sharing your group with others who are again looking to do the same thing, connect with others and learn about things that can help them in their careers. So who am I? What am I here to talk to you all about? So my name is James Ganaka. I'll do a bit of an intro for you in just a bit, but what I'm really here to talk to you all about today is how to successfully get hired as a product manager in today's job market. So while the 2025 market is pretty much winding down at the end of this week, I still have clients who are actively interviewing this week, actually. And so whether you're already on the job search or you're thinking about getting started next year, I've packed in lots of information that's going to help you along the way. So what's the agenda? What are we going to cover? Well, I'm going to go through some of the steps that I think are critical to help you land your next role. I'm going to start first with just giving a bit of an introduction of who I am, what I do, a little bit more about my background if we've never met. So like I said, I'm James Ganaka. I'm a product management career coach, right? And what that means is that I help product managers achieve career outcomes that matter to them, right? Why am I able to do this? Well, it's because I have the experience as both a PM for over 12 years and an overall career of 20+ years across product and marketing. But I've also been coaching people for over 6 years after taking a coaching training back in 2019. And at this point now, I've helped over 1,000 different product managers, whether that be through events like this, through one-on-one coaching, through group coaching programs, through other webinars I've taught. That's just a QR code that goes to my website. I write a free newsletter. I've just launched some YouTube videos this week, and I've got more content coming to help people. So whether you're looking for some hands-on support or you're just looking to learn along the way, I've got you covered. So that's a bit about me. I've also worked at Amazon for almost a decade. I've done products in partnership with Apple and Microsoft, Adobe and others. Worked with a couple of different companies back in the United States as well before moving to Europe about 6 years ago. I also regularly write for Mind the Product. So I've actually published some research with them for the job market, some things I'll actually include today. And I'm also an organizer for another product meetup called Product Tank here in London. So that's me. But you're here to talk about landing your next role. And so I'm going to just quickly show you the 6 things that we're going to cover today. So we're going to talk about understanding the job market. And so this is something that I've spent a lot of time getting really close to, and I produce probably the most comprehensive job market report for product managers anywhere else in the world. And I do it every month, and I've been doing it for, I think, 18 or 19 months now. So I'm going to share some of those deep dives with you today. Then I'm going to talk about the concept of candidate market fit, which if you haven't heard of it, I'll explain what that is and why it's important. Then we're gonna get a little bit more into depth about optimizing your artifacts, right? So what things do you need to be working on to get more interviews and succeed in those? I mentioned tapping into your network, so we'll talk about that. It's building a story library, both what that means and why it's important, and then close with talking about practicing interviewing. There's a whole lot more to potentially cover when it comes to the job search, but I think these are probably some of the most important things, whether you're just getting started or you're already kind of in the job search. But let's first start with understanding the market. Now, I know we've got some people from Barcelona and London here, and so while I do have data cuts across different parts of the world, I wanted to show what's been happening specifically in the UK job market today. So what is shown here is a view of the number of job— active job listings in the UK over the last 18 months. And so you can see Around middle of last year, it was just under 1,400 jobs, and then it kind of plummeted towards the end of 2024 before picking back up in February of 2025. This year, however, we've seen 5 consecutive months of month-over-month growth on new job listings, and that is actually a standout of the entire world in terms of any of the other markets or regions that I track. So I thought this was really interesting to kind of observe. I was expecting by December we would see a dip, but actually it increased. Compared to November. Now I have additional cuts like this. I don't have one specifically for Spain, but I do have them for the European Economic Area, which has also had some good year over year growth numbers compared to other markets like the U.S., which were pretty much flat year over year. Asia, which is also something that was down a little bit year over year. So really being in Europe right now is one of the better places to be in the product management job market. But when we dig a little bit deeper, let's look at how this is trending in terms of the work environment. So a big thing that people consider when looking for their next job is whether. they want it to be remote, hybrid, or if they're going to be forced to, or maybe they're open and they prefer a complete onsite experience. So over the past couple of years, there's been a big story about, you know, some companies, including my former employer, really forcing people back to the office 5 days a week. And the perception some people have is that that's somehow a trend and the days of remote work are going away. This chart represents what's been happening in the UK in terms of share of jobs across these different types of work environments. And what I've consistently seen is that remote and hybrid are here to stay. Now, there are sort of some changes and swings throughout the year, but there's no story that says that onsite is kind of eating back into hybrid and remote. It's been pretty stable for the last year and a half at around 45 to 50% in terms of total onsite positions. Now, I know that we've got a data community here, and so while I don't consider myself to be a data expert by any means, I always appreciate feedback on ways I can better represent this data. So if you have any thoughts or suggestions, just send me a message. Next is leadership level, like level of experience. So what's been happening here? Now, at the start of 2025, I started tracking junior PM and associate PM roles. I was getting a lot of questions about that. Up until that point, I'd been just tracking PM, senior PM, and product leadership. And so again, with the story here, at least in the UK market, is that the product leadership level roles have actually grown quite substantially. They were up. I believe 31% year over year from December 2025 to December— sorry, from December 2024 to December 2025. And so again, like there are things that you read online about, hey, the rise of the super IC, I think is a topic that I've read a lot about from 2024 to now. But like, what does the data end up showing? Now, while this is just the UK, I've seen this trend happen in other regions around the world as well, where there's a growing number of leadership positions that are being opened. And so I think that's a good sign for people who maybe were affected by redundancy and restructurings of the last couple of years. But again, it kind of counters some of the narratives people walk away with just by reading things online. That's part of why I put together this report. So those are some of the job market stats or in terms of like number of job listings, all that data is pulled from LinkedIn. If you have any questions about how I pull it or, you know, how I source it, et cetera, just again, send me a message. At the start of this year though, ran a survey to understand a little bit more about what hiring managers were thinking when it came to making hiring decisions. Right, so here is a question around the balance between hiring PMs who are generalists versus specialists. And this was sort of backward looking for 2024. And what we found is there was still a heavy emphasis towards more generalist hiring rather than specialists. But when asked a follow-up question around, okay, what are your key criteria for screening candidates? Overwhelmingly, number one was years of PM experience. So when I encourage people to optimize their artifacts, which I'll talk about later, this is the number one thing that needs to be crystal clear. first thing someone learns about you is how many years of relevant PM experience do you have. Next was domain expertise, and then third was the caliber of former employer. This was like over a range of different selections that they were given to talk about what criteria they were looking for. So what does this mean in terms of actions and inputs you should take away? Well, number one, it's be clear about what domain you've got experience in, and if you're trying to switch domains, know that you need to kind of lean more into the relevant experience of the types of things you've done in the past if you want to kind of break in through to an interview at those types of companies that are maybe different from what you've been doing in the past. I'm going to pause here before I go on to the next section. Nick, any questions or anything that we've seen from folks that I can address that has to do with the job market stats?

Yeah, I was about to ask a question about that last slide you showed. So how do you— how have you seen years of experience as a dimension, but not necessarily, you know, experience in a job called product manager. Like, for example, how much does a hiring manager care if someone's had a lot of years in consulting, where a lot of management consulting roles, the work you do overlaps heavily with that of a PM, but it's not the same. And is it important to also tell that story and explain the transferability of, hey, I've been a transformation manager or an analytics manager, There's no product name in that title. But actually, when I look at the work I do, the roadmaps I create, the discovery workshops that I run, I'm doing PM work. It's just not called that. Because I think it's especially relevant for data product managers, where most of the time when you're doing the work of a data product manager, you don't have the title yet because your company and you didn't even know that this title existed.

So I'm hearing like 2 questions. I'm going to address both of them. One is like, what do you do when maybe you have adjacent experience, but you don't have the title. And the other is like, how do people who maybe have a heavy consulting background, who've done some of the product management work, how can they kind of either break in or how should they be positioning their experience? So I've worked with people in both of these cases. The first one in terms of your prior work experience, where maybe there's some product adjacent, or you've been doing the product managey things you read about, but you don't have that title. What I've actually encouraged people to do And this, take this on a case-by-case basis because it gets a little controversial at times depending on who you talk to. But if I've worked with people who like, hey, I had a business analyst position, and so I start asking them questions, right? Hey, did you, did you like write a roadmap? Were you working with engineers? Were you like building and shipping things? You know, were you like getting input from customers? Were you doing discovery? Like, are you— think about it like a checklist of product management things you read in a book. And if you're checking lots of those boxes, like, you shouldn't be restricted by what your company called you. If you're playing in the job market, you want to be representing your background in a way that tells the market, like, what you're going to be good at and what you've done. And so, and I've applied this practice myself, right? There was a role that I had at Amazon that was called Manager 3 Product Management. Like, what does that even mean? Right? And so the reality though was I was Like leading a team of product managers and product marketing managers. I had another manager under me who managed some of those people. And so I was like, when I need to frame this experience to the market, like group product manager, right? This is something that's more easily understood in terms of the work that I was doing and also communicated level a little bit. And so I use that. And I think that's completely fair for other people to do. So if you were a product owner, but you were doing a PM's job, like just change your title in your CV and your LinkedIn to product manager. The second question around consulting background, I think— and yeah, go on.

I want to comment on this because I think some people might be approaching this and thinking, oh, is it okay if I lie? You know, if I put something that isn't factually 100% correct on my CV? And I think from what you've said, I would challenge, if that's your thinking, to flip the question and go, am I confusing the hiring manager by being like, I am finance analyst to, I don't know, and a few other words? And because I sometimes see CVs like that, I'm like, sure, I get it. Your company internally for org structure reasons called you that, but that title means nothing to someone from the outside. Think about what is the objective description of your role, not just what's in your contract.

Right, exactly. And basically, don't be constrained by the way your company decides to give you a title about what you do. It's not something that needs to be a limiting factor. Now, I want to be clear that I don't advocate people misrepresent what they do, right? That is a line I never suggest people cross. It will come back to bite you. You will get an interview and you'll fail if you're saying that you've done product management things and you haven't actually done them. So you're wasting your time if that's what you're doing. It's not just that it's ethically wrong to misrepresent the facts about the work and the outcomes that you've achieved, but it also means your chance of success will also be hindered as a result. So thanks for that, Nick. The second thing that you were talking about in terms of consulting background, so I think what I'll suggest here applies to anybody really, including those who are maybe trying to do domain switches. Is to focus on the types of problems that you've been able to solve, the types of outcomes that you've been able to drive for businesses. On consulting, generally what I find is many of them are really good or have a lot of experience in doing discovery and strategy work. So there's going to be companies who really value that as a skill set. And consulting people also have a unique perspective because they may be seeing lots of different companies operate in different ways, maybe lots of different businesses, and that is an edge versus maybe someone who has spent 5 to 7 years working at maybe 2 companies and maybe focusing on like one type of customer. So there's a lot of potential value that they could be bringing, but not every company is going to value it the same way. So that's something you have to kind of think about. But it also applies to people who are maybe trying to do domain switching. Think about, are the types of problems you're solving from the customer journey, where is there similarities? So if you've focused on onboarding successfully for customers, like how can you be finding other businesses and maybe a different vertical where like onboarding is the problem they're trying to solve. You're gonna encounter some people who really care about that domain experience, but that domain doesn't always just mean industry. It could also mean like part of the product or the development lifecycle or part of the customer journey. I'm gonna move on 'cause we've got a few other things to cover today, but feel free to again leave some comments in the chat and we'll see what else we can get to. The next, I wanna talk about the concept of candidate market fit. So what is that? It's really the intersection of a candidate's skills, experiences, values, right? And their goals with a company's role, their needs, and their values, as well as what it is that they're offering, right? So it's really like this intersection. And why is this important? Well, for candidates, like when you find a role that's a fit, this will lead to greater job satisfaction, higher growth in that role. And there's a better chance of you succeeding in that position. But then for companies, right? If, when they find someone who's a fit, like that will lead to better performance in that role, higher engagement, less attrition or turnover, right? So there's benefits on both sides, but what does this look like in practice? Okay. Take a candidate, 7 years of product management experience, really loves shipping mobile apps, really values their work-life balance. And maybe they also want to lead people. That's sort of a growth opportunity for them. Then you got a company who's looking for someone with 5+ years of product management experience. They develop a consumer app, they support hybrid work as a work environment, and their product team is growing, right? All these things match, right? That is where there is candidate-market fit. Let me give you some examples of how you can summarize this in like a single word in terms of what it is that you're looking for to find if there's companies that are offering something that aligns. So maybe you want to find a senior PM role in a medium-sized financial services institution. Right? That's a very crisp example of what you should be focusing on if that aligns with what you're looking for. Or I wanna find a PM role in an AI startup with a social mission. I'm sure they're out there somewhere. Or this other one, this is quite more detailed. Someone wants to find a VP of product role in a larger company. Then they wanna move into a general manager role once they're inside. And then after a couple years, find a CPO role in a scale-up. So they're thinking like multiple steps in advance and they're thinking, how can this next position help me get to where I want to go over the long term? So those are just some examples of candidate market fit statements. How do you obviously go off and build one of these? Well, first you wanna take stock of the skills that you have. What are the things that you feel like you're really good at? What are the things that you think you should be improving on? And using those to define your next role. And I've actually written about this. I've shared a complete guide on how to go through this reflection exercise in my newsletter, which I'll share a link to later. Completely free to subscribe. But also archive posts are available on my website. But really getting clear about what it is you want in your next position. What do you love? What do you hate? What are your must-haves? What are your must-nots? And what are the, like, top 10 attributes of your next role stack ranked, right? All of these will inform then the one-sentence candidate market fit statement that you want to be focusing your search around, right? Too often, people that I encounter who are struggling on the job search is because they're trying to be too many different things. They're trying to reshape who they are. Yeah. Or reshape how they frame their experience based on the jobs that they find rather than focusing on the type of job that they want and being very specific and then finding out, are companies actually offering those types of roles where they align? And then how can they continue to optimize down that path? And so people who come to me and they've applied to 200, 300, sometimes 500+ jobs, when I ask them like, hey, tell me about the kind of job you're looking for, they're just like, I just want a product management job. I'm like, you got to be more specific than that because companies are being more specific than that. So you should too. And going through this candidate market fit exercise is a way to get that precision. Nick, any questions on this one before I move on?

Not so much a question. I just want to say the quiet part out loud that you should be doing the work that as a product manager, you already know how to do. Everything you've just said is taking the PM skill set that that people should already have and applying it. Just like we work to figure out product-market fit and product positioning, what's the positioning we should have as a candidate? Just like how we prioritize strategically what features we should build and what features we shouldn't bother building because we don't have infinite time, which employers do we spend time going after instead of just apply to 1,000 places and wonder why a generic application isn't landing?

Absolutely. Thanks for that. Yeah, I love that you brought that up. Some of the concepts I lean on in my work with clients are like product management principles and mechanisms. So candidate market fit as a proxy for product market fit, thinking about your career as a, you know, a roadmap, what are you focused on right now? How does that lean into or contribute towards a strategy, which has some of the big components that you want to be achieving In the quest for some vision, some future outcome. So I have given talks about that as well earlier this year that are broader in scope than just the job market, but I'm glad you brought that up because like the next thing I'm gonna talk about is optimizing your artifacts. Okay. And so when you're building things to then share to customers, right, who are your customers in the job search? Recruiters, hiring managers. So you really need to get in the heads of them as customers, understand what they're looking for, what they care about, how do you show it to them so they get what they need. So you get what you want. So how do you do that? Well, let's talk about the most common artifact first. That's your CV. What things matter? Here's a list of all the things that matter. I'm just gonna tick through them because I could spend an hour just talking about the CV. I ran a workshop on improving CVs earlier this year. I'm gonna run it again next year. I've also built custom GPTs to help with things like this, but I'm just gonna hit the highlights for you. Number 1, length. 1 to 2 pages can be either. Never should be more than 2 pages. No one's gonna read more than 2 pages. Structure. Contact details, experience, any certifications, awards, or affiliations, education. That's it, right? You don't need a skills section with a bunch of keywords. That's not helping you beat the ATS. Impact. This is the most important part when it comes to the content itself. Everything that's talking about what you've done or what you've achieved should be framed in terms of the impact it's made to the business. 5 things businesses care about: making money, saving money, getting new customers, retaining those customers, increasing shareholder value. That's it. If you work for a company that is a for-profit company, those are the 5 things they care about. Every single thing you do as a product manager should connect to one of those 5 things, even if it's one or 2 steps away. So it needs to be really clear the impact that you've had. Achievements. If you maybe won an award, if something that you've worked on has won an award, if maybe you've been recognized in some way, that should be mentioned somewhere on the CV. Verbosity. Like, you want to be really concise with your language. So it's not just about length, it's how much content are you putting into different sections. So you can really pack a lot of information if you're really concise with your words. This is where an LLM, if prompted well, can help you take maybe 3 sentences and turn it into 2, and it still says the right things. So avoid things like speaking in the first person in some of your language. This will cut out on the word count. Progression. If you've been promoted, right, that needs to be super clear. So if you have been working at the same company for 5 years and you're just using the most recent title, even though you got promoted there, they don't know that. They need to know. So if you were a PM and then a senior PM, like, that should be easily identifiable in just a couple of seconds. If you've moved from like program management to product manager, if you've moved from business analyst to product manager, like, that also should be something that they can easily see. And then when it comes to the company details, I tend to be on the side of framing more around the titles and the impact that you have versus the company itself. You can mention the company, but Too often I find people are spending time trying to explain what the company does rather than what you did. So the CV is a marketing artifact for you, not necessarily about the companies you've worked for. I'm going to show some examples. Here's example number 1. Here's page 1 of a 3-page CV, and you can see on this particular example they've got all these like skills and competency sections, which actually doesn't differentiate anything, doesn't tell me what this person did. Then they have a duplicate like area of expertise section, which is just basically more keywords. And then they only have like their professional experience down on the bottom third of the first page, right? So this is all friction in the way for your customer to understand a bit more about the impact that you've had, right? This was page 2 of this person's CV. I've obviously blocked out some of the identifiable information. Then they've got education, they've got a bunch of additional experience, but then they even Packed some more things onto page three with some certifications and some languages. Right? So no one's getting to page three. What does a good example of a CV look like? This one converted at thirty percent. This was for a senior product manager in fintech that I worked with. I think it was a little bit over a year ago, and so I had to block out a bunch of the specific stats, but they got it all into one page. Right? They've got four roles here. They you know have almost every single. I think every single one of their bullets is a single line with impact statements, and this was converting as I. like around 30%. So for every 10 jobs they applied to, they got 3 first-round calls. Now, I'm not saying you have to model everything off of this, but this is like what to strive towards. But also just know that even at 30% conversion rate, that still means 70% of the applications are either rejects, ghosts, or just don't materialize. One last example that I've sometimes shared is my own. I can put whatever I want in here and share it without needing anyone else's permission. I've also shared this example in my newsletter, so that's something else that you can get for free if you want to take a look at it. This one got me interviews for different product leadership positions. Again, single page, despite having over a decade of product experience that I was reflecting. There's also a lot of other things I did in my career that I don't mention here because they're not relevant. If I included every job I ever did going back to when I was 13 years old, like, it probably would be a few pages, but also it would have a bunch of stuff that nobody cares about. Your CV's a marketing artifact. Your customer, hiring managers and recruiters, they don't need to know everything about you. They just need to know the right information about you to make a decision to interview you or not. And they're making that decision in just a few seconds to either keep reading or to move you into the reject pile. So that's the CV. Next, I wanna talk about LinkedIn because we really can't get away from the fact that it plays an important part in the job search. So what are the things that matter? Your profile, how you actually find jobs, outreach that you're conducting. And I wanna talk about the topic of engagement. So I'm just gonna rapid fire go through some profile things here for you. Number one, just make sure that you have like a good profile photo. I've seen profiles that don't have a photo and, you know, in the world of 2025, people are immediately thinking, is this a real person or is this a bot? Right? If it's a bad photo, it's hard to see if I'm gonna get on a call with you. Am I talking to the person that I saw online? These are psychological things that your customers are thinking about, right? So clear color photo, looking either straight at the camera or doing like, you know, the business pose, whichever can be something you just take with your phone if you want. Your candidate market fit TLDR, right? This is the headline on your LinkedIn profile. It shows up on your profile, in search results, and in every comment that you make on the platform. Right? So being really clear about like who you are, what problems you solve, types of impact that you've been able to create. This stuff actually matters here because it's how you show up on the platform. Show you some good examples to start. These are all real ones. Product and experience lead at whatever company. I've anonymized that bit. Product leader. They've worked across B2B, B2C, and B2B2C, startup and corporate, 15+ years in product. Here's another one. Senior PM. AI, health tech, internet of things, right? Flagging that they're open to new opportunities in their profile statement. And then here's another one. Senior PM, 8+ years in data-driven product strategy, AI-driven insights, and on and on and on. So these are really good statements. I even created a GPT for this as well. You just upload your CV and then it will like spit out a suggestion for you. What are some ones to not do though? Also real examples. Someone just put building. And this is someone that I know that was looking for a job. Another person said alumni at school 1 and school 2, also someone looking for a job, trying to really lean into their, their education experience versus their work experience. This was not someone who was just recently out of school. Another one said UX designer/product manager. You gotta pick a lane. You can't be everything. Companies don't wanna hire people who do 5 people's jobs. They're gonna have a job listing that says one thing, not multiple. So as soon as you put multiple things in there, people aren't clear on what it is that you want to do, what it is you're trying to achieve with your career. So be specific about the types of roles that you're looking for or the types of work that you've done. Your about section, this is just your professional summary. So on your CV, you'll usually want to have a statement at the top that says something along the lines of X years of experience in product management, delivering these types of outcomes in these types of industries. You can just repurpose that in the about section. But you also have this skills, this top skills, right? This ends up being metadata that's associated with your profile so that recruiters who are doing searches on LinkedIn are more likely to find you. So be clear about which of those top skills you should select. If you don't have them, you should add them. Here's an— here's a better example of a good professional summary because the one that I showed before, let me actually pull that back up. Someone says, I once said I don't know what I'm going to do, but I definitely won't be working in computers. Fast forward, and while that's technically true, And I've stopped reading because like this doesn't really tell me much about this person. It does show a bit of personality, right? And I get that. And I think that that is a good way to help me understand a bit more about your humor and who you are as a person. But it's important to learn that maybe later in the process, not when I'm deciding, should I interview this person? So keep that in mind. Versus the alternate here, right? 13+ years in B2B SaaS, 10+ years leading and scaling cross-functional teams, and on and on. It explains some of the things that they've actually done from a professional background standpoint. And they mentioned some top skills here. Now you can have up to 100 skills associated with your profile. You can attribute most of those skills to different jobs that you've had, and you can pick top 5 that are associated with your profile. And this is basically telling LinkedIn, hey, prioritize my profile for searches related to these types of skills and jobs. So that is LinkedIn and CV. When it comes to engagement on LinkedIn, this is the other thing I wanted to talk about. And outreach, sorry. So I don't have slides for this, so I'm just gonna put that away for a minute. Outreach. I strongly encourage people should be connecting with others. You're here right now in this live chat. There are people in here watching and listening. Connect with them, right? They're on a similar journey as you are, and they're likely in a position where they could use some help. And they'd be willing to help. And so connect with them. Just say, hey, here's my LinkedIn. Just drop it in the chat, right? Also, you could be reaching out to people who work at companies that you're targeting. So send them some connect requests, prioritize second-degree connections. Once they've accepted, send them a message. Don't lead in with, hey, I know you work at this company. Will you refer me? Please don't do that. No one likes that and it doesn't work. Instead, it's, hey, I see you work on this. I'd be really interested to learn about what it's like. Or maybe they've made a transition that you're trying to make. That's something you want to learn about from them. There's going to be people out there who are keen to have these conversations, and there's people who will just ignore you. Like, you're not worried about the ones who will ignore you. You're worried about finding the ones who want to have a conversation. And as product people, like, we tend to be more empathetic, so reach out to them. And then lastly, on engagement, uh, you may read that, you know, hey, you need to go build a personal brand. You got to be posting on LinkedIn. I've worked with, like I said, hundreds of product managers and helped them land their new jobs. And zero of them, you know, have had to be posting on LinkedIn regularly to get there. Right. You don't have to do that. It's really hard to be successful. It takes a ton of work. Nick and I can both attest to this. Uh, but in your following probably isn't made up of your target customer. Right. And so there are better, higher value things you could be doing than posting on LinkedIn to get a job. I'm gonna move on to other ways to more effectively tap into your network next, unless we have any questions or anything to address, Nick.

I don't see any. Well, actually, no, we do have one question. I wanna quickly spell one thing out, which is why the section you just talked us through, or the section you talked through before, matters in light of the artifacts you talked about. If you've not figured out your product market fit, or if you refuse to kind of niche down a little bit, then your CV is gonna be trying to be everything for everyone, to talk about both your UX and product experience, your B2B achievements and B2C ones, or your individual contributor versus manager ones. So you're diluting the things that'll matter specifically to the roles you're applying for with things that are for roles either that you're also applying for or that you don't actually want to be considered for. Now we've got a question for Anna around kind of the impact that AI is having on junior roles. So there's a lot of kind of more anecdotal reports that entry-level positions are being reduced because AI is taking on the more junior and operational tasks. Is this something you've seen? I mean, from the chart you showed with the number of junior roles anyway, it's very low. But I guess there's a lot of junior PM roles that might be called Product manager. Any insights there?

Sure. So first caveat, uh, I started tracking the associate and junior level roles at the start of 2025. And so next year I'll start having year over year comps. So we'll be able to see what kind of a trend is happening there. At least looking at the seasonal swings this year, Q3, Q4 is where there was growth in associate and junior level positions, but overall they represent like, you know, 1 to 2%. Of total product management job openings I've seen. Yes, there also is the possibility that some just are called product manager and they're looking for zero to three years of experience. So that's some noise in the data as well. There's no like perfect analysis on this type, this this specific specific situation. That said, a lot of what I've also learned this year is that many companies won't publicly advertise that you're recruiting for those types of positions. They'll only do them. through internal transfers. And so they'll focus first on someone having been successful within the company and transition into that position. So people who are maybe further along in their career, but that are trying to break into product management, the golden path is try to find a job within your company to make that transition. And if that's not viable, go get a job doing your current job at another company who will support such a transition. Playing in the open job market for those entry-level positions is highly competitive and there's a very low number of opportunities. I think in the UK alone, there was somewhere between 15 and 25 associate or junior PM roles open at a given time all year long. That's 2 dozen in a country of 50-something million people and with at least tens of, if not hundreds of thousands of product managers working at any given time. So highly competitive, not a lot of opportunities, so difficult to play in that open market. I

would also say

Oh,

sorry, Nick.

I was just gonna say around the impact of AI, there haven't been any like broad studies about this to really substantiate if, if that's happening or not. There have been plenty of studies to show that companies are experimenting with AI and not finding lots of success. And so we'll see what happens over the next year in that regard.

I, I was just gonna add that for me, aiming for an entry-level PM role as someone that's not done product work before, I wouldn't even recommend it as a strategy for most people because to succeed as a PM, you're typically leaning on your years of previous experience. It might be on the business side, it might be on user experience, it might be on software engineering or data science. That's what makes you great at being able to have that connecting role. That's kind of the bridge between those different functions. Like someone I know, he really wanted to break into product. And so he taught— he identified his dream companies. And went in through customer success because he knows that's where he wants to end up, but that he couldn't start today as a PM at his dream company. Maybe he could at a company that's far from that dream place.

Yeah.

Anyway,

I encounter this sometimes too, people trying to achieve 2 big moves in a single job switch. And, you know, that would be great if it was realistic. And maybe for some people out there, they've been able to do that. Congratulations to them. But in many cases, it's going to take at least 2 swings, right? First being, like you said in that example, switching to your target company or your target domain or industry in a job function where you have demonstrated expertise and experience. And then once you're there, what can you be doing intentionally to make that transition? This does take thoughtful career planning. Having something like a career roadmap, or what am I working on this month or this quarter that's gonna help me build more of the skills that'll make this transition more successful? So it does take some intentional work. And just relying on signals you get from the job market to tell you whether or not it's realistic, I don't think is a successful approach. I see Anna's left a comment in the chat. Glad it was helpful, Anna. Okay, I'm gonna move us on now to tapping into your network. Right. So you've probably heard this, uh, you know, hey, most people find their jobs through their network. Right. I think that there's some truth to that. Uh, but you certainly should be leveraging and growing your network as part of your job search. So how do you do that? What are some things that you should actually go do? Number one, like go connect with old colleagues. If you haven't had a conversation with people who you've worked with in the past that you had, and maybe a good working relationship with, the job search is like the perfect time to go and reconnect with them. Maybe they're further along in their career than the last time you spoke with them. Maybe they've switched companies and now they know more people who work at companies you're interested in. You'll be surprised how wonderful people will feel to be connected and like reached out to, to connect with someone that they worked with and had a good experience with. But they can also help you when it comes to reflecting on experiences you've had. They're gonna remember things that you don't. You're gonna remember things that they don't about the experiences that you've had. And just having a conversation with them is going to elicit more memories that should go into stories that you'll tell, which I'll come back to in a bit. But you also need to be building new relationships. So I talked earlier about sending some connect requests to people who work at companies you're targeting. You should also be connecting with people that you meet either online events or in real life. Like build those new relationships, be open to connecting with other people that can open new doors for you, but you can also learn about what it's like working at different companies. A lot of people will build a perception about a company having never worked there. And they'll like read stories about, oh, this team did this amazing product thing. So it must be great to work there, but you really don't know what it's like until you talk to someone who's worked there. And even then still, you're just getting one person's perspective. And if you're only relying on input from people you're interviewing with at a company, they're going to be a bit biased and not going to tell you how much the hippo makes decisions at that company. Right? They're gonna, uh, they're gonna give you a little bit of a sanitized version of what it's really like. But if you go get on calls with someone who works at that company or has worked at that company, multiple people, you'll get better signal. And so this is again, some of the outcomes you can get from those relationships. Now, a great outcome from tapping into your network can be referrals. Just know that they're not sort of the power-up that you may have experienced in the past. I've seen people be referred to jobs and still not even be able to get interviews, right? I've seen people get referred to interviews but still like fail that interview round. So it's not a golden ticket. It's helpful, but it shouldn't be the only outcome that you think about when it comes to tapping into your network. So think about learning about what it's like at the company. Think about understanding what the interview process is like. Think about maybe experiences they've had and challenges they've overcome at that company. Right? This can help you both prepare to interview with a company, but validate the ones that you're looking for or interested in really align with what's important to you. On to Story Library, which I kind of alluded to before. In your interview process and just in the job search in general, you're going to be telling a lot of stories. The most common interview type you'll face is a behavioral type interview where you're asked questions where you're told to basically talk about your prior experience. So how do you do that? Why is that important? So first, you want to be reflecting on these experiences you have. You've probably already done some of this on your CV, right? But you need to be able to have more depth to the things that you're talking about to your, again, your customers, the interviewers on the other side. And so you could use a framework like STAR. I think it's quite appropriate and things people are familiar with. In fact, just this past Sunday, this one specifically, I wrote about like how to— what makes a great interview story. Because as an interview bar raiser at Amazon for over 8 years, I've also interviewed hundreds of product managers. The thing that really stands out the most is people who have properly prepared stories and can communicate them clearly, concisely, with the right level of detail and handle follow-up questions. That is how you will stand out. To do that, you need to reflect on your experiences, you need to write down that story, and you need to be creating more over time. I recommend my clients create 20 stories, right, that cover a range of different topics from doing product discovery, doing product strategy, delivering some things, iterating, experimenting, working with cross-functional partners, overcoming challenges, working with difficult stakeholders. Product successes they've had, product failures they've had, personal failures they've had, right? All these are common stories that you will tell in interviews. And so you wanna be prepared for those. If you're improvising in every interview you go into, you're going to fail because there are people who are spending lots of time preparing and then they will stand out. So I get that this is a lot of work to do, but it's also an asset that will appreciate over time. When you build a story library and you get in the habit of reflecting on the work and the experience and the outcomes that you've had, those are both helpful during the job search, but they can also help you during like your performance reviews, right? So if you're every 6 or 12 months, you're like, all right, what are the big stories? What are the big things I've achieved this year? And you're writing that down and you can just hand it over to your boss when it's time for performance management reviews. Like not only are you making their job easier, which they like, but then you're positioning yourself better for that promotion. And you're preparing stories that you might need should you find yourself on the job market again in the next 6 or 12 months. So you want to be creating more of these over time. And because your story library probably only will have relevant things from the past 5 years, you don't want to go a few years without adding more stories because the ones that are, you know, 5+ years in the past become less relevant, and companies normally don't want to hear things that are that further in the past. Last thing I wanted to talk about was interviewing practice. Okay, and there's a ton of content online about this. I'm also contributing to that, uh, that fact because it's so important, but also because it's so difficult and because it's changing. If you haven't been on a job search in the past couple of years, it's gotten really different, right? There's different types of interviews. There's behavioral, which I've talked about as the most common still, but then there's product sense interviews. A lot of times there are case study interviews, like where you're given a task that you have to complete on your own or come in and give a presentation. I know there've been some mentions of vibe coding interviews, but of the, again, hundreds of product managers I've worked with, not a single one yet has been tasked with a vibe coding interview yet. They've been asked questions about vibe coding. They've maybe used vibe coding or created prototypes as part of a take-home task. But no one's been asked inside of an interview to like, hey, pull up Lovable and like create something. There's, you know, rumors of this happening in some places, but it's not widespread. I have my own opinions on the validity of that in terms of making hiring decisions, but just know that at least from my perspective, it's not as common as, again, some people might lead you to believe who want to sell you vibe coding software. So what do you do when it comes to practicing interviewing? Okay. Well, number one, as I said, you should be doing this. You could do it with or without AI. If you do practice with AI, right, doing a voice chat with ChatGPT or Claude, just know that you're getting the reps in, right? You're relying on it to help create a conversation, a dialogue, right? 'Cause it's, it's, it is hard to find someone else and get some time, and I'll talk about that in a bit, right? And so doing a lot of practice by yourself, like just talking into the void is not helpful. So you got these chatbots you can talk to. Great. It'll ask you some questions, some follow-ups, but don't trust its feedback. Don't rely on it for feedback because unless it's a highly calibrated tool, which there are some out there, I've tested some of them including Super Interviews. There's also another one called the Master the PM Interview Gym. Like these are on a range of quality when it comes to feedback. Again, speaking from an example of someone who's interviewed and hired lots of product managers, those systems Are not great yet, but just expecting good feedback from a vanilla version of a ChatGPT or a Claude, like, it's going to mislead you. And so don't rely on it for feedback, but you can use it to build the muscle memory in the practice. But the person you know, also a form of just doing practice and building the, like, the muscle memory and just anticipating or being able to handle follow-up questions. But again, if you're gonna get feedback from someone, You wanna make sure that their feedback is coming from a place of like strong calibration. If they've never been a hiring manager before, just know that their feedback is probably not representative of what a hiring manager will say. So with someone experienced, like this is probably the hardest one to get access to because those people's time is either quite constrained or like there's a paywall in front of it, right? But these can also be really valuable to help you understand what you're doing well and what you could be doing better. Right? And then that is action that you can take based on those insights to get better at what you're gonna do. So those are all the main things I wanted to cover with you all today. What do you kind of do from here? Like, what are some next steps that you might be able to take? Well, number one, like I've said a few times today, I create a lot of content to help people on their job search. A lot of it is free. There's the newsletter that I write every week. I now have videos that I'm sharing. I also I have like a 7-day email course that goes into more depth. Like all that stuff plus more can be found on my website. But I've also launched a— it's called a Job Search Accelerator that I wanted to just briefly talk with you folks about. So I just ran the first cohort last month and I'm going to be running it again in February. And what this includes is 5 90-minute live workshops. We go into depth on applying, interviewing, negotiating, and more. And like we You go hands-on and create and improve your artifacts. I share a lot of the custom tools that I've built, and you get feedback from someone who's again been helping lots of people on the job search. We do weekly group coaching calls, right? Where just last Friday we kind of debriefed on some interviews from some people, but also talked with someone who received an offer on Friday, and we even do some negotiation calls together as well so that they can again get the best offer possible. There's on-demand access to all of those workshops for people inside the community. Plus on-demand access to over 50 different mock interviews, CV workshops I've done with people, other negotiation calls, as well as exclusive resources like some of the custom GPTs I've built, a growing library of PM case studies, both the assignments given by companies as well as some people's completed tasks that they submitted to companies and progressed through interviews and more. Uh, if you're interested in learning more about that, that's the code again to just go to my website. You can subscribe to my newsletter. That's where I'll make the announcement. Last time that I ran this, I pretty much only talked to my newsletter subscribers about it and people who joined a workshop that I ran. I didn't even talk about it on LinkedIn because I sold out. And so that's really what I have to share with everyone today. I want to thank you all for your time, and I know we've got a few minutes left. Happy to answer some more questions.

Amazing, James. Thank you so much. This has been Awesome. Like a real, real masterclass. And I love just how many different gems you've shared with everyone. I think even if someone watched this live, I'd encourage you to go back and like re-listen and take notes and think, how can I actually apply this to what I'm doing now? Not just, oh, this sounds nice, but I'll forget it by the end of the day. I wanna, I wanna comment on, on, on something that touches a, a few of the different sections that you covered, starting with the story library. So earlier you mentioned that people don't need to become basically LinkedIn influencers and constantly post on LinkedIn if they wanna just, you know, have a strong personal brand. 100% agree. Like, don't do it. It's a lot of work. And if you try to do it the easy way out of just creating crap ChatGPT-generated content, you're gonna look bad. So just don't do it.

Yeah.

But for me, if you are building that story library, I think a lot of that could become not just, oh, this could be posted on LinkedIn, but this could be really valuable content to share either in a longer article, like a case study of something you learned, or a shorter LinkedIn post. And for me, that's something that could be read even if you don't have a big LinkedIn presence already, you're not gonna have a huge following, but also it's not about quantity, it's about quality, right? So I wanna share an example, not of a product manager, but a friend who's a B2B marketer. And about a month ago, she decided, you know what, I wanna start posting on LinkedIn. So she's made 4 posts. They're about her kind of, some of it is lessons learned. Some of it is about individual stories of what she's learned as a B2B marketer. So it's already kind of specific and like B2B SaaS marketer more specifically.

And

she's only written 4 posts, like one a week. They're quite long. They're not just generic, you know, she's talking about real things that she's done and learned, not just bragging about achievements. And from— and maybe this is unrepresentative, but she's already had 3 people, like 2 founders and 1, uh, like senior mentor, reach out to be like, hey, I saw your post, it was great. Uh, by the way, we're looking for someone, are you interested? And, and a couple of those people were people that were vaguely in her network. I think one was a former colleague, one was someone that knew her already. So it's not necessarily a brand new person, but the post is kind of a reminder of who you are. And maybe like for me as well, LinkedIn has been a great way to advertise what I do. Most of my first few customers were people I used to work with, but I used to work with them so many years ago that I wasn't an expert data product manager in the way I am today, but they were seeing my content and kind of learning and being reminded of that. I'm making this partly as a comment that, hey, if you've got cool stories, for me it's great to share them and have others learn from them. It also forces you to really think about how to present that story because you're putting it out in public. You need to think it through. It needs to be a coherent narrative, all that. But I also want to frame it as a question to you, James. Like, to what extent do you agree with that, or do you think it's actually, no, just Focus on making stories just for an interviewer. Don't bother making it a public-facing artifact.

Sure. So thank you for sharing that. And I'm glad to hear that, you know, there are, there is evidence that it can be a successful strategy depending on the outcome people are working towards. And I agree, like, look, I post on LinkedIn predominantly because it's a like flywheel driver for the business that I run. So for job seekers, It's more about like investment in time versus the return that you're gonna get. And so it's the question I typically start with when someone asks me, hey, should I be posting on LinkedIn? My question is, are you gonna keep doing it after you get a job? If the answer is no, then it's like, then there's probably other things we wanna make sure we've solved that are in a good state before investing in that. 'Cause it takes a lot to write a good post. It, you know, you could spend 30 minutes crafting a story, a post on LinkedIn, right? And then you share it and then you get like 100 impressions, maybe a few hundred impressions, right? Because if your following is— if you've got a few hundred connections, maybe 500 connections, maybe you're up to like 1,000, right? Okay. You post something, maybe you get a few hundred to a few thousand impressions tops. How many of those are your target audience? Right. It's hard to know. But that 30 minutes that you spent writing that post, and that's just one post, right? If like you take one swing and it works, like it's luck. It's not necessarily because you just knew exactly what you were doing or you had to do a bunch of research before, which is also time. So if you're doing that, but you know, only 1 out of every 50 jobs you apply to, you get an interview, like you're solving the wrong problem. Go solve this application conversion rate problem. What's going on with your CV? Is your LinkedIn profile helping you be discovered really well in terms of just the way that it's constructed? And so it's more common that I find that there's other problems to solve first than going to the LinkedIn, like content creation space. Because again, it's just, it's a lot of work. You could take, like, you could write 20 posts before you find one that you feel is like you're motivated to write and it's good and it drives engagement. Only for the chance that you potentially get a response from someone. But if there are outcomes other than more interviews that you're looking to achieve by writing on LinkedIn, like then yeah, it, it, it's worth considering further. And you've actually kind of given me an idea that's like, hey, if I've been writing these stories for interviews, is there a way to repurpose that for a LinkedIn post? That I think is, is a good strategy because then you're prioritizing the thing that you know you're gonna use in an interview. And then you're saying, how can I extend the value I get from that work? to something else beyond just an interview. So that could be a good strategy worth considering as well. I saw we had another question in the chat. Do we have time for that? Yes. Or— yeah, all right, let's do it. Reflections on fractional product management. Do I recommend creating an agency and having some freelance PMs to work with? So there's a company that does this called Product People, and they basically are like a product management consultancy with a bunch of people who like will get slotted in as a PM in a company as and when they need it. I don't think there are a lot of companies that actually do this. I also know that it requires a lot of business development work to find these types of opportunities. It's not something that companies traditionally are in the habit of doing, of being like, hey, I need someone to just give me a little bit of their time. You're almost expecting companies to start changing the way they think about getting additional support. Traditionally, it's been either I hire someone, right, to come in and do this job, or maybe I do a fixed-term contract and bring in someone because someone's taking medical leave or someone's, you know, we've got a short-term problem, we don't need a full-time employee to solve it. And so they're in habits. But if you're saying, hey, I'm gonna bring this new offer and this reframed concept of consultancy and just calling it fractional, Right? That's now friction that someone else has to overcome to consider you to come in and help them. And so from like a career perspective, do I think there's a huge market in fractional product management? I don't think there's a huge one. I think there is one, but I think that it's also really hard. And so I actually, you know, considered doing like fractional consulting work when I was kind of starting my journey of working for myself. And what I quickly found was like, I have like zero sales funnel and there's a big, a big jump companies have to make to number one, like be open to hiring someone in that capacity. But then how do you also find them? Right? What's business development look like? There aren't a lot of companies who are posting online saying, hey, you know, we don't know what we're doing about product management. Can someone help us? But meanwhile, people are saying like, hey, here's a problem I'm trying to solve related to finding a job or making this big change in my career. And they're sort of like hand raisers online, whereas businesses normally are not raising those hands. So you have to do a lot of prospecting.

I want to add to this because, I mean, some of what I do is fractional product management. I don't even— I don't usually call it that, but that is what it is. 2 things to note. The first is, like James said, You will need to start doing B2B sales, basically. If you've never done that job and done that work, one, prepare to be kind of surprised and shocked, but also to figure out like, do you even like this? I know several people that decided they wanted to start it off as freelancers and as fractionals in the last like 12 to 18 months. Most of them by now have gone back to full-time corporate jobs. And that for me, it's not a failure, right? They tried it. They realized they love the product part of the work. They hate the sales part of the work. They'd rather sales be, you know, I interview for jobs, I land the sale in the form of getting an employer, then I don't need to do sales for another 2, 3, 4 years.

Mm-hmm.

Some of us quite enjoy it. I like that actually every week I spend more time doing sales than not doing sales. 'Cause I've come to enjoy that kind of work. And then the second thing is with fractional stuff, exactly because like James said, there's not an abundant market kind of hungry for this kind of talent. You're gonna experience the classic consulting feast or famine. There's gonna be times that are very quiet and very uncomfortable because there's no money coming in the bank, but then you're gonna get a client that's like, we need someone to start tomorrow, not like 2 months from now. And you need to be willing to adapt to that and have super intense periods and super quiet periods, unless if you can, you know, land that dream gig of someone that just, they want you part-time, they're gonna be flexible, it's gonna be a very long-term contract, but those take time. And again, it requires that patience and perseverance of enjoying B2B sales cycles.

I like that you mentioned that that's both a reality of that type of work environment, but also you highlighted it's something that you kind of enjoy doing, right? There's also just the work involved with building a pipeline, experimenting with things to like grow your pipeline. And that can be a very fun and rewarding activity for some, and it can be like very draining and annoying for others. Uh, almost everyone that I've talked to, just to complement what you said, who was like operating in the fractional space, you know, from 2023 to 2025. All, yeah, same thing. The biggest drag was I'd get into a contract, I'd stop working on biz dev, and then when, then it'd be like a scramble to work on biz dev again when that contract's coming to a close. And so while it seems very alluring, like, hey, I could work 3 days a week and then the other 2 days I'm just gonna faff about or whatever they say here in Britain. Uh, you know, it's, the reality is you're doing the work and then when you're outside of the contract work, like you're, you have to do biz dev otherwise, like Your pipeline dries up and then you're like, oh wait, where's, where's the income coming from next quarter? And that itself is like a form of stress. You get to let go of some of the other stress that you get in a full-time job, but there's trade-offs. So I think knowing what matters to you is important.

Oh, like you said, candidate-market fit. Go for the things that you like and you're a good fit for. We've got one more question, but I'm conscious that we're already 5 minutes over. Do you want to take it offline or do you have a few more minutes to answer it now?

I'll take it because I think I know who it's from. Uh, so this has to do with fintechs not knowing much about their users. Is that an opportunity for a product manager? I do think it is. In fact, one of the strategies I've seen some of my clients employing recently, I was actually just, uh, having a mock interview session with someone yesterday who's interviewing with Clio, which is like an AI, I think, fintech tech company. And they're going and doing a case study presentation. And in their dry run, they basically said, hey, I've gone out and I've talked to a couple of your customers to understand a bit more about like, what are the things that are really important to them that they value? What are problems that they're trying to solve? And this is the second or third instance I've seen where some of my clients have done this. They get into an interview process and then as soon as they have been invited to an interview, they go out and they try to find existing customers and talk with them. Now they can just go post into like a WhatsApp community that they're in, or they could go post on LinkedIn saying, hey, I'm looking for people who use this product. Just do a 15-minute call. You'd be surprised how many other product people maybe are willing to get on that call with you and talk with you about the product. That's something that we love to do generally. And so that is a way to then differentiate yourself and say like, hey, as a product manager, I've gone and talked to some of these customers. Here's what I've learned and here's how that insight might inform like what I do differently. So I think that's kind of like a strategy you can employ, but I think going to a fintech and saying, Like presuming what they know about their customers versus what they don't know. It's hard to know that as an outsider entirely. Maybe you've gotten some of that insider information that they don't do any discovery at all, in which case it's coming in telling them that they need to do something that they've maybe made an intentional decision not to do. Is that a good strategy? I would understand first, what is it that they really value? Are they saying, hey, we're looking for someone to come in who knows product discovery because we need to get that started and we suck at it? that's a good way to position yourself. But if they're a company who doesn't feel strongly about doing customer discovery and reaching out to their customers, I don't know that a PM is going to come in and really change their minds. It really depends on the company.

I really love this as an example, though. I've heard many times of like, hey, if you're interviewing for a company, get a trial account, try out the product, you know, have an opinion about it. I'd never thought of go and find users. I think because as you were talking about it, I was like, okay, there's a way to go too far and, you know, go in pretending you're an expert in how to fix the product with your 3 15-minute interviews.

Yeah.

But there's a way to square that circle where you can go, hey, like, I'm obviously an outsider here, but I've spoken to some of your users and all of them, you know, actually this one theme emerged. Is that what you're seeing, you know, in your customer research stuff? And that's a very, for me, open way of Asking multiple questions, because it could be, is this feedback true? But also, had you heard this feedback before? Are you talking to your customers? And, and like you say, if they don't think user research is important, they will kind of signal that and make that clear. If they think it's important, but they've not done it enough yet, they'll be like, actually, that's super interesting. And it'll get them thinking like, this person is already one step ahead of us in terms of listening to the voice of the customer. Anyway, I loved it. I'm going to start recommending it to people.

Wonderful. Well, thank you all so much. And thank you, Nick, for putting this together and having me here today.

Thanks so much for coming, James. I really enjoyed this. I'm going to start sharing it with a bunch of people that I think maybe aren't even in product because a lot of what you said is much more generally applicable. And yeah, everyone's going to get an email with the various links you sent as well. And that's about it. Thanks for coming. Thanks for listening, everyone. And James, I'll see you next time I'm in London.

Thank you so much. Have a wonderful holiday season, everyone, and good luck.