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For this session, I sat down with three hiring managers at companies that are highly sought-after: Mckenzie Lock, GM at Netflix; Sam Stone, VP of Product at EvenUp; and Sarah Koo, Senior Director of Product at Rippling.
Most interview advice is written from the candidate’s perspective. How to prep, how to tell your story, how to follow up. This conversation is the view from the other side of the table. The three companies represent genuinely different models: Netflix’s debate-heavy, freedom-and-responsibility culture where hiring managers design their own loops; Rippling’s hyper-standardized process where VPs get the exact same case prompt as ICs; and EvenUp’s hypergrowth startup trying to double the product team in a year. Despite those differences, the convergence in what they’re looking for was striking. The questions going in:
“I’ve been told the PM interview is about frameworks and structure. Is that still true?”
“How much do referrals actually matter? Is it worth applying cold?”
“What’s the thing that quietly kills strong candidates? The mistake people don’t realize they’re making?”
The short answer: the playbook most candidates are running is two years out of date. AI has made the old signals (polished decks, crisp frameworks, rehearsed stories) table stakes at best and red flags at worst. Below are the top insights from the conversation. The full podcast goes deeper on case study mechanics and how AI is reshaping the bar in real time.
The PM Role Has Shifted: From Picking the One Thing to Expanding What’s Possible
“What’s the single most important thing you’re evaluating in a PM interview right now?”
The old PM job was about choosing. The new PM job is about expanding what can be achieved.
For years, the core of product management was selection: here are ten things we could build, here’s why we should do these three, here’s how I’d sequence them given the team we have. The best PMs were the best editors. They could navigate tradeoffs, explain constraints, manage incoming requests, and know when to compromise. That entire skillset, the tradeoff-navigator archetype, is being displaced.
Sam (EvenUp) put it directly: the expectation now is “I’m going to figure out how to have our cake and eat it too.” The default assumption should be that you can do all five things until proven otherwise, not that you need to pick two. Sarah (Rippling) described the same shift. One of Rippling’s leadership principles is “pushing the limits of possible,” and it’s the one they screen for most aggressively in PM interviews. Mckenzie (Netflix) used different language but landed in the same place: “manifesting impact” and “driving momentum” are what her team spends the most time evaluating.
AI is a big part of why. When your team can ship more, prototype faster, and run more experiments in parallel, the bottleneck is no longer “what should we build next?” It’s “how do we drive progress across a broader strategy at once?” The PM who can see how five workstreams connect, keep them all moving, and know which ones are paying off is more valuable than the PM who picks the single best thing to focus on. All three companies are screening for this: not whether you can choose well, but whether you can expand what the team is capable of delivering.
The Case Study Is the Center of Gravity, and AI Changed What “Good” Looks Like
“How should I prepare for a take-home case study? What are interviewers actually looking for?”
Structure and polish are no longer signals. Depth-of-research and response-to-challenge are the differentiators.
All three companies use take-home case studies. Netflix gives candidates several days and pairs the take-home with live case questions to test thinking on the fly. Rippling gives 24 hours and uses a standardized prompt across all levels. EvenUp gives a few days with guidance not to spend more than four hours.
What’s converged is what they’re actually testing, and what no longer matters. AI makes a well-organized 30-page deck trivial to produce. Sam described the tell: candidates who used AI for structure will “abandon the structure” the moment Q&A starts, because they never internalized it.
The real differentiators are depth-of-research and how you respond to challenge. Sam said it’s “shocking” how few candidates do any user research, despite it being easy with AI tools. Go use deep research, scrape Reddit, talk to someone in the target persona. Sarah said the same: candidates jump into solutions without understanding use cases, and when you pressure-test against a reasonable scenario, they crumble. The candidates who stand out are the ones who understood the problem before they started designing the solution.
On challenge: Mckenzie described Netflix’s panel as a screen for second-order thinking. When an interviewer gives you new information that invalidates an assumption, can you say “oh, that changes things” and walk through updated logic? Or do you dig in? The ability to incorporate new information fluidly, showing both conviction and flexibility, is one of the highest-signal moments in the entire loop. (We heard the same thing from the candidate side in Three Job Searches, Three AI Roles: prototypes are table stakes, depth behind the prototype is the differentiator.)
Pedigree Has Shifted from Brand Names to “Do You Know What Good Looks Like”
“I don’t have FAANG on my resume. Am I at a disadvantage?”
The real question behind most resume screens is whether you’ve seen excellent product work, and whether you learned from it.
Sarah (Rippling) was direct: she doesn’t care about schools or blue-chip logos per se. Not every company produces good product people, and the hiring manager’s job is to figure out whether your past environment taught you real product management or just backlog grooming. She described back-channeling into the culture of specific teams within a company as standard practice. The logo tells you very little; the team tells you a lot.
Trajectory within a company is a stronger signal than the company itself. Someone promoted four times at a slower-paced company proves they found ways to excel regardless of environment. Mckenzie (Netflix) said many of her highest performers came from companies no one has heard of. What mattered was exposure to entrepreneurial decision-making and current ways of building product.
Sam (EvenUp) added a counterintuitive point: they’ve been actively burned by hiring people with domain expertise in legal tech who came in assuming they knew the answer. For most PM roles, especially at vertical B2B companies, stage-match and cultural-match beat domain experience. If your resume doesn’t have brand names, lean into trajectory, the specifics of what you shipped, and evidence that you’ve seen what good looks like.
Referrals Are Binary: They Mean Everything or They Mean Nothing
“How much do referrals actually matter? Is the game rigged?”
A genuine referral is a back-channel. Everything else is treated like a cold application.
Sarah’s framing was the sharpest: a referral from someone who genuinely knows your work is essentially a reference check that happens before the first interview. That’s enormously valuable. A referral from someone who barely knows you, maybe they’re chasing a bonus or you connected on LinkedIn, is treated identically to hitting “apply” on the website.
All three panelists confirmed they take website applications seriously. Mckenzie said Netflix has made most of its hires from website applicants, not referrals. Rippling reviews every single one.
For candidates without strong referrals, Sam described the best hack: email the hiring manager directly with a specific opinion about the existing product. “I looked at your product and I think you should do X with it.” It doesn’t have to be right. But showing you’ve already thought about the actual product skips the small talk and gets straight to the conversation that matters, which is effectively jumping to round two or three of the interview.
Energy, Curiosity, and Genuine Interest Tip Borderline Decisions
“In a tight decision between two candidates, what actually tips the scale?”
The debrief question on borderline candidates is: “Did this person seem like they actually want to be here?”
Everyone knows likeability matters in interviews, but no one wants to quantify it. What all three panelists described wasn’t charm or social ease. It was energy. Mckenzie said it directly: in a period of transformation, candidates who bring energy and signal drive stand out enormously. Sam described how candidates who cold-email with a genuine product opinion, even a wrong one, are “almost always” worth a conversation, because the interest itself is the signal.
In a market where companies have more qualified candidates than open roles, the borderline debrief often comes down to: “Would I enjoy working with this person? Did they seem genuinely curious about our problems?” That’s not a question about credentials. It’s a question about whether you brought the version of yourself that’s authentically engaged, not the version running interview playbook #47 across twenty companies simultaneously.
The Hiring Manager’s Perspective
If there’s one theme running through this conversation, it’s this: the PM interview has changed faster than most candidates realize, and the people evaluating you are screening for things the old playbook doesn’t prepare you for.
If you’re prepping for case studies, stop optimizing for structure and start investing in research. Study the existing product, understand the users and use cases, and dig into the company’s actual problems before you design anything.
If you’re worried about pedigree, know that trajectory, exposure to current ways of building product, and evidence of strong work matter more than the logo. The best hiring managers look past the brand.
If you’re relying on referrals, make sure your referrer can actually vouch for your work. Otherwise, you’re better off emailing the hiring manager directly with a real product opinion.
If you’re in a borderline zone, recognize that energy, curiosity, and genuine interest in the problem are what tip the scale. Bring the version of yourself that’s actually excited about the work.
Above all, recognize that the PM role has shifted. The companies hiring right now want people who expand what the team can achieve, not people who pick the one best thing to focus on.
The bar has moved. But for candidates willing to go deep, do the research, and show up with genuine energy, the opportunity is real. These companies are actively hiring, and they’re looking for people who want to be there. If you’re searching, Skip Coach members get access to job listings from dozens of companies in the Skip Community, including the ones on this panel.
Have your own career question? Get personalized guidance at Nikhyl.AI. It’s where the questions keep coming, and where I’ll keep sharing what I’m learning.
