🎧 2026 Product Management Job Search Playbook
LinkedIn would have you believe that PM jobs are disappearing, AI is replacing everyone, and you need to know how to code to get hired. 😱
But that's not the full story…
The market has changed, but PMs are still landing great jobs.
The key is knowing what companies want and how to stand out. ✨
In this episode of AFTER THE CERT, I'm breaking down what I'm seeing firsthand in the 2026 PM job market, including:
Which PM backgrounds, industries, and skills are in the highest demand.
Why your unique experience and specialization matter more than ever.
How AI is changing what companies expect from PMs and how they interview.
Where hiring is happening and how remote vs. hybrid roles impact salary.
Why being the most qualified candidate isn't always enough to land the offer.
Ready to land your next awesome Product role? ✨
SPRINT helps you position yourself as a top-tier Product candidate so you can land high-quality interviews consistently and confidently - without guesswork, burnout, or wasting months applying into the void.
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Jess Sherlock (00:00)
Your job search at the end of the day is a sales and marketing exercise. The people who get the job.
are often not the most competent. We don't, I don't want to believe that that's true. I want to believe that the most competent person gets the job. But the fact of the matter is the person who gets the job is the person who instills the most confidence in the hiring team in their ability to get the work done.
Jess Sherlock (00:20)
Welcome to another episode of AFTER THE CERT the career podcast for product managers who've collected all the certifications and taken all the courses and still feel stuck in their product career. I'm your host, Jess Sherlock, product management career coach. I know firsthand what it feels like to be overwhelmed, lonely, and stuck in your product career. And I'm on a mission to help you feel confident and empowered to take the lead in your product career and achieve your unique career goals.
on me for practical and actionable advice, plus relatable stories from PMs navigating the messy middle of their career.
And remember, if you're feeling stuck with your product management job search, worried about making a great impression during your first 90 days in a new product job, or you want to position yourself for a promotion at work, I'm here to help. You can check out my coaching programs at jesssherlock.com/apply.
and book time on my calendar so we can chat.
Let's get into it.
Jess Sherlock (01:17)
As a coach, what I do is help people navigate job searches and most importantly figure out how to market themselves and their unique set of experience for an effective job search.
all that to say, I spend a lot of time around PMs every day. And I spend a lot of time seeing how the role is evolving and and what the role actually looks like inside of organizations, big and small. my clients have been at, companies you've heard of Stripe, LinkedIn, TikTok, Tinder.
all the all the household names, all the way down to, legacy businesses like JP Morgan Chase and credit unions all over the country and United Airlines and Frontier, and then these sort of like tech enabled businesses and as well as AI native companies that are just starting out to, help automate the work of lawyers or know, other professionals. So,
I welcome your questions and hope this is helpful because I realize these these types of conversations are a reminder that many of you don't get exposure to other PMs, let alone exposure to how product looks in other organizations. And if you're feeling overwhelmed by the messaging on LinkedIn and everywhere, that you know, our jobs are going away, or that PM isn't real anymore. Or if you're not committing code to code bases, you're not actually a PM. Like
I think the some of those things are true, but it's not telling the whole story of what is happening in product careers all over the country. So I know we're here to chat about job searches, but my DMs are open if I can be helpful in any other way. So with that, let's talk about job searches.
so first thing I want to talk about is just kind of a high level view of what's going on with the product management job market overall. if you are job searching right now, you you may be picking up on these sorts of signals. If you haven't job searched in a while, I would encourage you to listen closely because if if your last job search was let's say three to seven years ago.
It was an extremely different market and not just because of AI. the most obvious thing that's going on in the market right now is that there's obviously a high supply of candidates and a relatively low demand for roles. So in any market, when that happens, what we will see is that companies can be more selective.
So that's not to say, right, that you are not a valuable candidate or you cannot get a job, but changes the dynamics of job searching. So something I say often is if if I'm you know, if I was a PM five years ago, it's like you could find a PM job just accidentally because someone would be handing them out on the corner. It was like, you know product great. Come on in. And you know, it's become not only is there higher supply, but it's also
The career field has become a bit more clear on what sorts of skills and experience it's looking for. So we're seeing a choosiness that I've never seen before, to be honest. Like interview processes a few years back were pretty haphazard. And now companies like I get to see take home assignments and case interviews from all sorts of companies. I have a whole repo of them that people in my program get to look at. And it's just amazing to see how they have matured and they're starting to coalesce.
I'm seeing just so much more consistency now across companies, whereas, you know, a few years ago there was sort of the FAANG way of doing interviews, and then there was the like non-FAANG way of doing interviews. And there's starting to be much more alignment across different types of companies and the interview process, which I'll talk about shortly, but also the the skills that are in demand. And so I think that that's really interesting and that's creating.
I guess some clarity for job searchers, but it's also creating much more, competitive market across all companies. Whereas it used to just kind of be easier to get a job at a non-tech company. And even the types of talent that are working at companies you might not consider like a tech company is still pretty amazing to me. anecdotally, I know there's lots of product leadership moving into these companies you might consider.
legacy companies, like
legacy global payroll companies that now have a CPO who came from Facebook. Like what? So I think as you see this shift in leadership, that shows up in the hiring trends. It shows up in the the bar of hiring.
what that means for the market in this moment, and I would say this has probably been true since about the beginning of 2025, and it just continues to be stronger, is there is a higher market demand for experienced candidates, period. Like this is a horrible market for people who have not yet had their first PM title, or at least some.
PM adjacent experience - it's really difficult for those folks. So if you're in the three to 10 year range, that's fantastic. And I guess anecdotally, if you're in the over 10 year range, it can also be difficult for different reasons. Because of the preference towards individual contributors and hands-on product talent. So that kind of three to 10 year range anecdotally is where I see the most demand because you're someone who
has a ton of experience and you know, probably a range of experience, but you're not necessarily perceived as someone who only wants to be a people leader. So tough market for more junior PMs, for people who are trying to pivot into product, better market for individual contributors and hands-on leaders. So if you're like a, you know, hands-on product director type, where you're really experienced and willing to be hands-on, those are all really positive.
elements for your job search. in general though, this market is just creating the most demand for candidates who are able to ramp up quickly and create value fast. That will, you know, what that means in
I love having folks, out there actively applying in September because those are the folks who tend to get their start dates in either, you know, November, December, usually early Q1. So if you're wanting a job by Q one,
now's a great time to start. Our average in SPRINT is about a hundred days across all of my clients, all industries, all locations, US, Canada, and Europe, about a hundred days from starting SPRINT to getting an offer. I've had folks get something as fast as a few weeks, right? Those are the exceptions. But around this time of year, I tend to see faster cycles. So where is demand the strongest? This is
A question I always get is
like, am I hireable? How hireable am I? Is questions I always get. So in general, my data is showing that, and and what I see on the job boards as well, is in general, specialization is where there's demand. We'll talk about what that means in a moment. But the demand specifically that, you know, if you have these things, I would say you're you're in an extra good spot, but it doesn't mean that if you don't have these things, you're not hireable.
It's just kind of an extra positive for you in the columns. So anything fintech, payments, fraud, like we are living in the age of transactions constantly happening and brick and mortar shops struggling and you know, everything going online, which sounds like such a 1900s thing to say. But like, I don't know, I thought everything was online five years ago and now all of a sudden even more is online. And so
Anything fin tech payments, fraud detection, those are booming. Lots of demand. Health tech is another area, right? Like the consumer expectations and patient expectations around the quality of healthcare is increasing, which is causing so much innovation in health tech. And when we think about those two industries, those are extremely unique. They have their own languages and acronyms and
Compliance requirements, right? So those are just areas where if you have that experience set, it can be very helpful. If you don't, you're still employable, right? But just know that there tend to be a lot more jobs in those sectors and a more of a desire for experience. So those are some areas where I generally notice in in my client base when I get people coming in with those types of experience, and I would say maybe a third.
It's fintech, health tech are kind of tied. And then my like honorable mentions are anything growth related. So growth PM roles that are either supporting product-led growth motions in companies or anything conversion rate. So this could be e-commerce product manager roles. This could be
booking flows, like how do we get people to book a flight, but then add on other things to it? And you have experience managing the funnel, getting people unstuck, increasing those conversion rates, super in demand. and yes, what I will tell you is certainly there's more roles than ever for AI PM, product builder, anything that kind of looks and sounds like that.
Here's my two cents on this.
mark my words
or take my bet, however you want to do it, I think that we are going to see a lot of shifting in what those titles mean in the coming months. Because if you spend any time in the job boards, which I do, I kind of giggle because any role that has AI in the title, they're kind of all over the place. so I'll tell you what I want you to have in a moment, but I'll tell you what I'm seeing, which is there are absolutely like product builder roles. These roles are interesting because
Sometimes these are roles where they want you to come in and just kind of be a tripod of your own, where it's like we want you to design a thing, build a thing, launch a thing, roadmap a thing, and just launch it and like go over there on that island and don't talk to anybody and like here's your repo. Good luck. And that's neat if you're not trying to collaborate. But there's these other product builder roles that I keep seeing that are embedded in the business. So you'll be like a product builder in the marketing team.
where you're going in and you're like working on internal tools essentially to streamline that department's abilities. So it kind of like reminds me of back in the day when you had kind of a crafty engineer who could write really good scripts and you'd be like, hey, go over and help the customer success team like automate some of their tasks. It's like the modern day version of that. And I like I don't hate it, but I'm also like, do PMs want to do that?
And also, that's kind of an expensive role. I don't know. and then you have what I would call like true AI product roles. So this is you are building an AI product, you're coming in to build an agent, you're coming in to build a chat bot, you're coming in to build, you know, AI-enabled features in this existing product. Like those are happening and are certainly growing. What's interesting though is they're trying to source.
talent from a pool of people who There's not that many people who have actually launched AI, true AI products into production. And those of us who have, it was, you know, image recognition products or ML products eight years ago before Chat GPT was like a thing.
But what's interesting is like I think we convince ourselves that everyone who's applying is like per that there's some perfect candidates. And there are some people, but there's like this many.
So
it's just interesting, right? Like they can demand it all they want, but when they get that stack of candidates, especially if they're not paying what those people are going to truly ask for, those are challenging roles to fill. So, you know, there's there's demand for those. if you've had the experience launching something into production, that's great. I would encourage you to to be pitching that, of course, and you know, really announcing that because that is a major differentiator.
but at the very least, very least, I expect every single PM to have real experience using AI as a force multiplier. This is like the best language I can use right now is like, how are you using it as a force multiplier? That, you know, hopefully is more than just having it help you write an email response that where you're like, does this sound like kind and not rude?
That's good, right? But better yet, is like, are you using it for analysis? Are you using it to draft a PRD? Are you using it to draft your user stories? Are you using it to do deep market research and saving yourself, you know, 12 hours of Googling? Like, if you're not able to name specific tools and use cases where you're using it as a force multiplier, that will block you right now. That is the concern. But not having had launched an AI powered
feature or product into production for a real company. Like, yeah. Many, many, most PMs have not. Great. Right? 45% of you have. My next question, if I, you know, if we really wanted to dig into this, is like, that's higher than I would expect. And I bet the grand majority of those are features, not products. Right. Which is still not at the scale that some of these are asking for. And the sophistication of those is probably relatively low for many of you. So
the point is for those of you who are going, God, I haven't done it yet, it's okay. Use it as a force multiplier. And then I would say find ways, you know, get your company trying to use it, pitch ideas for it. Like if you can get launching things into production, that's gonna be great. But if it takes you a year, join the club of the other people who want to do it and just haven't had the chance.
that's a great question. Does shipping a product and having it on your GitHub work? what I'm referring to in this example is not those vibe coded things, but the business, like you know, for your company, like a real company launching it. but certainly it's not a bad thing if you can show vibe coded things.
That is certainly a plus for some of these roles, especially product builder roles. Okay. So some location
trends. This is probably not going to come as a surprise, but I just feel like it's worth sharing. there's of course lots of hiring activity in our tier one cities. New York, San Francisco, no surprise there. Tier two cities, still really strong hiring activity, but
Less competition overall. So what's interesting is I see my clients in these tier one cities getting a lot of traction, right? And the the salary ranges are high, but those are more competitive areas. so tier two cities, my LA, Austin, Denver, Chicago, Boston, Seattle, Really strong hiring activity, relatively less competition.
But they also typically are, 10 to 15% lower in comp ranges. And if you're looking at fully remote roles, lots, still lots of hiring activity. Those are not going away. Many of my clients have landed remote roles. And in fact, a surprising amount of my clients are like not wanting remote anymore. It's interesting. Like for a while nobody even wanted to consider hybrid. And now people are like, God, I can't do remote at all anymore. Like I'm, I have to see humans.
So if you're looking for remote, it is slowing, like the curve on remote roles is slowing and dropping, but the idea that they're going away completely is not true. but they I do notice they have the the comp ranges have dropped pretty consistently, 15%.
There's like a, you know, you get a remote role making less. There are exceptions to this, but in general, remote is slightly lower pay. So depending on what you're trying to optimize for, right? Those are some things you might want to just take note of.
So
hiring process, if whether or not you've been through it, let's kind of like start baseline. So the overall process is still pretty consistent, And like I said, more often than not, it's starting to be more consistent between like big tech companies and like your everyday tech-enabled companies, more so than it ever was in the past. So pretty consistently and predictably.
The process will look like a screener with a recruiter. You'll get moved to a hiring manager conversation. So the screener conversations typically very, very like objective. Are you in the town we need you to be in? Is the salary range good? however, those are starting to change. So we'll come back to that. So we usually go recruiter screen, hiring manager screen to some sort of collaboration session, panel interview, and or take home or case.
Interview. It kind of depends on the company, but there's something more meaningful after the hiring manager. And then every company is different, but usually like a final round with maybe like a senior leader or again with the hiring manager. So what's changing in the hiring process that is worth noting is in general the bar is going up. where we used to think of a screener call as throwaway, more and more the screener call questions are.
Becoming more sophisticated. they used to just be like, hey, good with the salary range, tell me about your, career in product and that and be you're nice. Great. I'll pass you along. Now, like, I recently had a client, one of my clients in London tell me that, I got a rundown of all the questions and they were hiring manager questions. It was like, tell me about a product you launched, tell me about how you're using AI in your day-to-day life. Tell me how you would deal with this situation. so it's
Again, I think reflective of the bar going up and the ability for the companies to get better and better at screening earlier. AI is changing things a bit. LinkedIn will make you believe that every single interview you do is gonna have vibe coding. They do happen. I would say they're not yet the majority.
Okay, so the grand majority of interviews will involve AI questions, but will not involve vibe coding necessarily. expect to get questions, like I said, if you can't answer the question, how are you using AI in your workflows? How are you using AI to, become a force multiplier? which AI tools specifically are using and how are you using them? you have to have an answer to those questions, right?
but being able to actually vibe code live, that's hit or miss. I would say, in my experience, it's been less than 10%. the more common example of how AI is is coming into play is there is an expectation, and in many cases, a written requirement in cases or take-home assignments to be using AI. it varies in how, but for example,
Take-home assignments, you know, two years ago might say, Hey, here's a situation, create a slide deck on how you'd handle it. Or it might say, give us a presentation on a product that you launched recently. Now it'll say, Hey, here's a situation. And here's here's a real example. I had a client who received a zip file full of data and vibe coded dashboards. This is all from the company they're interviewing with, and they were asked to evaluate the data.
look at basically all the information they were provided with and come up with a proposal. And it said in the prompt, we expect you to use AI to help with your analysis. Be prepared to share the prompts and how you used it. So that's, I would say the most common way I'm seeing AI come into the interview process is in they want to actually understand how you're using it in your processes within the case or take home. There are the occasional vibe code situations. Those have happened. I'm not going to tell you they don't.
but it's been, you know, I can think of one, maybe two, in the last year. And they were both fairly recent. So I may have a different experience to share in six or twelve months, but for now, it's not as common, like I said, as every LinkedIn headline would have you believe.
The better examples you have when it comes to AI, the better. So say certainly getting good at prompting. if you've been vibe coding things and you can speak to specifics of like how you handle evals and how you deal with it,
Seeing things that aren't real, like hallucinating, if you have experience or examples, yeah, guardrails, evails, all these things, like sure, that is all great, but the company you're interviewing with is going to be the single biggest determinator of how heavy AI is gonna be in your process. So I can tell you if you're interviewing at for example, Capital One, I've had multiple clients interview at Capital One. there is an expectation that you're gonna be using AI as a force multiplier, but I can tell you.
PMs at Capital One are not committing code to code base. Like it's just that's not happening, right? However, I can tell you, I have a client who's working at an AI fraud detection startup. And this is someone who has never coded a day in their life and they're using Claude Code to commit things. So, you know, certainly the interview process of those companies will be reflective of the type of PM role. there are signals in the job description that you can look for.
this is what I really want to drive home for you today
is the importance of specialization and the fact that specialization can be is not can be is so much more than industry. So if you're sitting here thinking, well, I work at ad tech, that's my specialty. Or, I work in cybersecurity, that's my specialty.
Or I work in health tech, that's my specialty. It might be. It can be, but there are other angles that you will see a desire for specialization in. So I would challenge you the next time you're looking at the job boards, look for these things because I can pretty much guarantee you're gonna see them, especially in the more senior roles. So as you get into, you know, PM jobs that require five plus years, senior PM, principal, lead,
The higher up you go, the more they're going to expect a specialization. Specialization can be industry, but what you'll see in these job descriptions is things like expertise and experience with certain user types, small businesses, developers you know, maybe experience with, I worked with mortgage loan officers, right? Like financial advisor, parents. So this specialization can be knowledge of a customer.
It can be knowledge of certain business models, right? Think PLG, B2B, B2B2C, marketplaces. It can be tech stacks or platforms. So if your entire career has been on mobile apps or SDKs or integrations, those can be specialization areas. And maybe my favorite, I think the most underutilized specialization area for PMs is the types of problems you have solved.
Because this transcends industry. I was just speaking with a client today as we were setting up her job search strategy. And this is someone who has actually never worked for a real product company. She's never had a real product title, but she has spent seven and a half years owning e-commerce websites for clients that do up to five million in annual revenue. These are not small e-commerce sites. And we talked a lot about what specialization might mean for her. And it, you know, to me, it's conversion rate.
It's how knowledgeable this person is about analyzing a funnel, getting someone to move through it, and solving for the things that go wrong. This involves A/B testing. This involves discovery. This involves data analysis. And all of those things would not apply to a PM whose background is in, let's say, fraud detection and payments, or building developer experience platforms.
or somebody mentioned internal tools and workflow automations, right? Like these problem spaces where you come in and it's like you've solved these problems before, you're gonna avoid pitfalls that others won't. You're gonna come in with playbooks that work. You're coming in with good stories that are super relevant to the people that you're talking to. And if that means jumping industry, right, that might be the bridge that gets you there.
Right. Someone who's really good at conversion rates who's only worked in e-commerce. This is a role where this person could consider, let's say, subscription boxes. Right. Maybe they go work at what is it, butcher box where you get your monthly meat delivery. This is a person who could work a live nation or ticket master selling tickets and getting people to buy the different add-ons. Right. Do you want parking? Do you want insurance for your ticket? Airline booking systems, right? Like conversion, that's a conversion rate problem.
if you take nothing else away from this conversation, it's your specialization should be so much more than your industry because that's what allows you to deepen your mastery and ultimately to provide you with that movement you might be looking for.
Your job search at the end of the day is a sales and marketing exercise. Okay. You will not get the job because you are the most competent. I think that bears repeating. The people who get the job.
are often not the most competent. that's a really hard thing to understand and to believe, right? We don't, I don't want to believe that that's true. I want to believe that the most competent person gets the job. But the fact of the matter is the person who gets the job is the person who instills the most confidence in the hiring team in their ability to get the work done.
It's the person that the hiring
team is most excited to get back on the phone with. It's the person that they didn't want to end the collaboration session with because they were genuinely finding it valuable. Those are the people who get the job.
