Insight certainty 4/5 debate potential 2/5

Treat PM interviews as customer discovery to solve the hiring manager's problem

Nan Yu · Linear’s secret to building beloved B2B products | Nan Yu (Head of Product) · Jan 30, 2025 · at 1:05:05

Nan Yu, Head of Product at Linear, discusses his strategy for interviewing for product management roles.

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“Everyone who's hiring PMs, just like when they're hiring execs, they're kind of hoping that they bring them on to solve some burning problem that they have. And so it's your job when you're in the interview process to figure out what that burning problem is. Right, so like put on your discovery hat. Right, and you go figure out like what is the actual sort of like job to be done of the hiring manager when they're bringing on a new PM onto their team. And if you can do that, right, and then make a good case that you are the person to solve that problem, then hiring you becomes a sort of like binary choice between do I hire the solution to my problem or do I hire someone else?”

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