Ben Erez

In >1 year as a PM @ Facebook I've created zero tickets/tasks. We don't do sprints either. PMs here focus on vision, strategy & partnerships. Less on project management & tasks. Engineers carry most of the project management responsibility & create their own tasks. It's great.

I'm excited to share that our Netflix PM interview guide is now live! this was a fun one to build 🚀

If you start a job and realize it's not the right fit, it's okay to leave within the first couple months. A PM I've coached accepted an offer under company deadline pressure and ~ 2 months after starting, an opportunity that was a better long-term fit showed up. The PM accepted the new offer and resigned after a short tenure. It was a hard conversation but the manager and team understood. They wanted the PM to be happy and successful. I told the PM they did the thing a lot of people don't have the guts to do: they admitted they made the wrong long-term decision. Honestly a lot of people in that situation just suck it up. They double down because the story in their head is that they have to finish what they started, don't want to burn their reputation, and want to avoid having a weird short stint on their resume. If you accepted a role that you realize isn't the right fit for you and have better options... it's okay to leave. Even if it's only been a couple months.

I bring you today’s “subtle UI nudge” winner: @X Literally took over the whole mobile screen 😂

If you love fixing dumpster fires, you shouldn't apply to published roles. Here's why: As a role gets more ambiguous and chaotic, it becomes harder for a hiring manager to even craft a JD. If a hiring manager has a burning problem, or an area where responsibility is abdicated, they're dealing with a moving target. By the time something is perfectly manicured and structured and defined into a JD, it's almost like the phase in which that ambiguity and chaos existed may have passed. Or they just kick the can down the road and decide not to hire anyone. Those opportunities still could exist at companies with clear JDs, but your chance of finding the roles that are a really good fit for you should not be limited to just what's posted. If you talk to senior enough people, you can get a role created that is shaped like you. So spend less time on job boards and more time talking with senior leaders about the problems they don't know how to hire for yet. * this post is tailored for people who love jumping into ambiguous, messy areas and getting this into shape over many months

Frontier AI labs are hiring people to do the jobs they already created for themselves. Two recent examples: 1) @yourgirlhils joining @AnthropicAI to work on AI fluency programs after building her own successful business educating managers how to leverage AI through her courses and workshops 2) @HamelHusain joining @OpenAI to work on applied evals, helping companies debug, measure and improve their AI products after building a massively successful evals course business on @MavenHQ If you focus your energy on what you’re truly great at and prove that the market values it, opportunities will emerge that are both (a) perfect for you (b) impossible to decline The advice to “be so good they can’t ignore you” has never been more relevant than it is today. My slight addition is that I think it’s important to be unignorably good in areas where you’re also authentically excited. There will always be demand for people who love what they do while being world class at doing it.

Mock interviews are a huge waste of time until you're confident in your ability to come up with strong content. I recently coached a PM who kept failing case style interviews despite being very comfortable with a framework. They simply struggled to come up with substantive content. My assessment was that this person just wasn't doing enough heads down reps, working through questions in real focus blocks. For context, I coach people to break their interview prep into 3 phases: - Phase 1 is content i.e. filling out my practice templates. - Phase 2 is delivery i.e. talking it through out loud with AI. - Phase 3 is delivery with a timebox i.e. mock interviews. You can't skip to Phase 3 and assume your content chops will be strong. For someone in Phase 1, the optimal interview practice is spending time on content generation. Literally answering questions at their desk. For folks using my templates, generally 3 to 5 questions gets them in great shape during Phase 1. If you're starting to prep for interviews, I suggest prioritizing heads-down time getting the content in good shape before doing anything else. And yes, this means no live mocks until you've gotten comfortable generating the content. Once you can work through a real question on your own, start thinking about verbal delivery and mocks. One phase at a time. Trust the process.

My biggest takeaways from our convo with @austenmc (former Meta hiring committee chair): 1/ Your job is to guide the interviewer "towards the parts of your career that provide the most signal." Answering the question is the floor. 2/ Run every question through decode, select, deliver. Figure out what it's really testing, then pick the story that shows it best. 3/ "Tell me about yourself" is where you plant flags. Use it to point the interviewer toward the projects you most want to discuss. 4/ Build a set of core stories that really represent you before you touch AI-generated question lists. 5/ Structure long stories like a table of contents. Each chapter is one takeaway the interviewer can write down. 6/ The clock speed of your story has to match the clock speed of the company. Your three year project may be older than the frontier lab you're targeting. 7/ If a round felt shallow, tell your recruiter. Hiring committees look for chances to run follow-ups. 8/ Start prep early. You can't improvise an answer that requires you to "go journal by a lake" about a tough moral choice. full convo: youtube.com/watch?v=pO0AZlil…

The most rewarding moment in my career was getting an email from a cancer patient who discovered my app while getting chemo. The app was called Breathe and reminded people to breathe throughout the day. We launched a year before Apple launched their own Breathe app for the Apple Watch... which also reminded people to breathe. We only had 65,000 lifetime downloads, which I know isn't a lot by today's standards. We didn't build a business around the product, and shut it down after 5 years. But it's still one of the things I'm most proud of. It made a meaningful difference for some people in the most challenging moment in their life. For many years to follow, whenever I was interviewing for PM roles, that's the story I told for "Tell me about something you're really proud of." It showed what I care about most: deep human impact. And honestly, that's still what drives me. Every day I help people land their dream job. Each email I get thanking me for the work I do gives me a huge dopamine release. This has been the most meaningful chapter of my career and I feel like it's just getting started. If you're a PM and you get asked about your proudest achievement in an interview, I encourage you to go deep and talk about the work you're truly most proud of from an impact perspective. It's the only way the interviewer can find out what you actually care about.

3 years ago, I had no idea interview prep would pull me in. It happened one small step at a time: - Coaching friends led to paid coaching. - Paid coaching led to my Maven course. - The course led me to develop my practice templates. - The templates made my Copilot better, which made the course more valuable. - My course got featured on Lenny's List. - That led to two popular guest posts on @lennysan 's Newsletter. - That secured my credibility in the space. - Then came inbound interest about interview tips at other companies. - That led to Insider Loops. - Now Insider Loops is a top featured interview prep resource on Lenny's Jobs. This all makes perfect sense looking back. But there's no way I could have predicted any of it up front. I would have also never guessed, starting a podcast with @MarcBaselga , that we would end up going into business together. But it makes total sense now. I see the same pattern with people exploring their next chapter. Most try to reason their way to the perfect next step. But your brain is just extrapolating the historical into the future. What works is tinkering. You tinker with things to sell, with business models, with partners, with price. The ideas don't need to be ambitious. They're little wedges, little doorways that can lead you into a path. Every step in my journey started as one of those. If you're not sure what's next... tinker and find out!

If you're making it to final rounds and not getting offers, your qualifications aren't the problem. It's so easy in this market for a company to get 3 or 4 finalists who all look equally good on paper. From convos with hiring managers, my sense is that the decision of who to hire is increasingly boiling down to vibes, something hard to quantify. But none of them can say it openly because it's an HR liability. The truth is that hiring managers already believe every finalist is qualified for the job. They just need to decide who they'd most enjoy working with. If you play it safe in interviews, you're limiting your ceiling for culture fit because the hiring team is getting to know a manicured version of you. You can't win on vibes without taking some risks that showcase your unique edges. Don't play not to lose. Play to win.

I've seen many PMs interview for a role at Anthropic or OpenAI in recent months, only to see it filled before their loop was complete. Some candidates had this happen with multiple roles. Each time, they went back to square one. The process at these labs is very zig-zaggy and unpredictable, but I noticed that the PMs who land roles despite all this chaos have some things in common: - stayed warm with the most senior person they met and the recruiter - were proactive when they saw a new role posted - didn't take it personally when a role filled up - had a "whatever it takes" mindset If you're determined to get into a frontier lab, my advice is to treat it like a long enterprise sales cycle. Plan on at least 6 to 12 months to even get in the door and don't stop hustling. Hot companies are messy and unpredictable, but not impossible to join. I got rejected 3 times in 4 years before landing my Facebook offer. I just never stopped trying.

The biggest comp negotiation mistakes often happen in the first recruiter call, long before an offer. In this market, many candidates go into interview loops with a scarcity mindset after searching for months with no luck. They just want to get an offer and I empathize with that. But my tough love to the PMs I coach is that they need to go into interviews behaving as if things will go well from the first interaction. An abundance mindset. When they do, the recruiter screen is where their compensation negotiation starts because recruiters always ask about $ expectations. This is a trap. Do NOT share a number with a recruiter. You'll anchor the whole process on that number before they've seen how awesome you are. That number can also unintentionally set your level. If you come across as mid-level in that first call (partially due to the number being too low), it's hard to get leveled up later, no matter how well your loop goes. To be clear: abundance mindset doesn't mean being cocky. It just means playing the game like someone who expects to have offers at the end. If you wait until you have the offers, trust me you'll wish you acted like it earlier.

If one round of your onsite didn't go well, tell the hiring manager before they hear it from someone else. Here's what I tell the PMs I coach: after your final meetings, send the hiring manager a short note. Say you really enjoyed the conversations and learned a lot about the company with a couple of specifics. Then, flag the one round where you don't feel you got to fully show your chops, and say you're happy to find time for a follow-up if it would help. Ideally include some evidence of said chops you didn't get to demonstrate. That kind of note signals self-awareness, low ego, and genuine excitement about the opportunity. Most importantly, it starts to establish a one-on-one communication channel with the person who has the final say (and who will be your boss if hired). It's never too early to start building that relationship.

Senior candidates steer the interview. Junior candidates follow the interviewer's lead. Someone I know was recently asked in an interview, "Tell me how you built a team in the past." The easy move was to just tell them about that team. Instead, this person said: "I can tell you about that, but why don't I tell you how I'd build this team?" They got the offer. As a candidate, that sounds kind of scary. It's a big risk. But it's an immediate signal that something's different about this person. A perfect story about a team you built in the past has a ceiling on the signal it can generate for an interviewer. Steering the convo towards how you'd build THEIR team raises that ceiling. I see many candidates do the opposite. I recently coached someone who got feedback that they didn't have enough experience. When I asked how they show up in interviews, it was clear to me that they're playing it too safe by only answering the exact question asked and never steering the conversation. While that person was a bit earlier in their career, they definitely had relevant experience. It just wasn't coming through, because they were only directly answering the question. And after answering, they were just waiting for a response from the interviewer. My advice was to finish every answer in an intentional way to steer the conversation toward the stories about their most relevant experience, even if it's not verbatim what was asked. You have more agency over your interviews than you think. After you answer, steer toward what you want them to remember about you.

My biggest takeaways from @NolanChurch (former Head of Talent at DoorDash and Chief People Officer at Carta): 1. The market for elite executives has never been more competitive. Great candidates have more high-quality options—and more leverage—than ever. 2. The “clearing price” for top talent isn’t just compensation. It’s life design: impact, flexibility, family, location, and how the work fits into the life they want. 3. The era of the “empty suit” executive is over. Today’s best leaders can operate at 70,000 feet—and still get into the details alongside their teams. 4. A great executive does three things: helps set company strategy, attracts world-class talent, and motivates that talent to exceed its potential. 5. Hire for the problems you need to solve over the next 9–12 months—not for the imaginary final form of your company. 6. Even the “Michael Jordan of executive search” only gets it right two out of three times. Until you’ve worked together in a specific context, every hire is an educated guess. 7. The best executive search removes information asymmetry. Both sides should understand exactly what they’re signing up for—including the tradeoffs. 8. Companies often start a search without knowing exactly what they need. The answer becomes clearer as they meet candidates and update their mental model. 9. Relationships come before assessment. Companies frequently lose exceptional candidates by switching into interview mode before earning enough trust. 10. Interviews provide less signal than most people think. Simulative work, thoughtful references, and time spent solving real business problems together reveal far more. 11. At the executive level, the goal isn’t to prove someone is universally great. It’s to understand the conditions in which they’ll flourish. 12. One of the saddest things is watching people with high agency choose not to express it. Watch our full conversation: youtu.be/iKLLIEChGzg?si=xT7e…

Many companies now transcribe interviews with AI, but candidates are still largely prohibited from doing the same. The company gets a full record of what was said. The candidate gets nothing. Candidates put 20, 30, sometimes 40 hours into these interview processes, and often get a rejection along with "no feedback policy, sorry." This isn't about fairness. It's legal and HR covering their backs. If your company won't give candidates feedback, at least let them transcribe the interview so they can go back and review their own game tape. It helps them figure out what to do differently next time. Otherwise they're just shooting in the dark and going in circles. It's brutal.