Here are my first impressions and setup. 🐎

🌟 First impression

Super cool setting it up and then watching my agent, “Cleo,” hatch. It was easy (more below), and I have everything working from Telegram, but I have yet to do anything that I truly can’t do in Claude already. I know there’s a lot more I can enable, but I’m being cautious before I hand over the car keys to Cleo, as it were. 🔑 It’s fun to see that I can tailor every aspect of her personality (she’s supposed to be like a foal).

It’s also amazing that I can connect Cleo to so many different products and models (eventually). Cleo has a lot of potential, but she’s very much the foal I described when I set up her personality. The OpenClaw command line (CLI) reminds me a bit of Claude Code.

Cleo’s MacBook has no personal data and is not signed into any of my accounts yet.

🧪 Test 1: Talk to Cleo from my phone

Connect Cleo on my MacBook to Telegram and be able to talk to her from my iPhone. Works perfectly, and it’s amazing to think I’m communicating with her at home while I’m out and about in the world on my phone. 📱 That said, because she’s powered by Claude, I know a lot of the work is actually happening in the cloud and Cleo (sorry, my little girl) is but an intermediary. When I install my own models locally, this will no longer be true, but then again, I won’t have the same capability as Claude’s state-of-the-art (SOTA) models.

🧪 Test 2: Calendar management

I granted Cleo’s Gmail account access to my GCal and our Child Care Calendar. 📅 Cleo uses web tools to successfully manage our calendars. While this is very cool, I can do this today without burning so many tokens via direct calendar access in Claude. Which raises the question: why does she need tool use to access my GCal at all? 🤔 Direct integration is faster, and more efficient than having Cleo wade around on my computer.

🛠️ Setup

• 💻 Hardware: 14” MacBook Pro M5

• 🔒 VPN: Tailscale. Works like a charm no matter where I am! It’s almost hard to believe that Tailscale gives such awesome capability away. (Shh, don’t tell them! 🤫)

• 🖥️ Screen sharing: Mac Screen Sharing. I remote desktop into my MacBook from anywhere as long as I’m on my VPN.

• 💬 Messaging client: Telegram. I chose not to go the WA it could run afoul of WA’s rules, so I just didn’t want to go there and then be locked out of WA. Telegram works like a charm and was designed as a messaging client that handles bots. It’s fun being able to talk to my MacBook from my iPhone.

• 🔑 Accounts: I’ve set up dedicated Apple and Gmail accounts just for Cleo, and granted her read access to the calendars I mentioned above.

• 🤖 AI: I pay for the $200 Claude Max plan, so why not start there? Well, I can tell you why not: simple requests burn through hundreds of thousands of tokens. I’m not near my limit, however this feels inefficient compared to how Claude Code manages token “spend.” I use a Cleo-dedicated API key I generated in the Claude Console. I chose this over direct auth because I was having issues with the browser auth.

• 🌐 Browser: Cleo is using Chrome and is signed into her Gmail account (but notably not mine or anyone else’s! 🙅).

• ⚙ Set up instructions: I used Claire Vo’s excellent article on Lenny’s Newsletter for guidance, the in-product command line prompts, and Claude Code to help debug issues.

What’s next? I’m open to ideas, but I will probably try a brain transplant where I run an open source AI model instead of Claude. Share your ideas. I don’t yet feel as though I have a single, vexing problem I can point Cleo-at. But I am going to continue to fiddle and I hope that changes. Excited to learn more.

It launched at Google I/O, became the most-adopted accessibility app Google ever shipped, and came preloaded on 2 billion Android devices. Today, it has hundreds of millions of active users.

I was one of 2 PMs on it. This past Sunday afternoon, I rebuilt it for iOS. 📱

Google never shipped Live Transcribe for iOS, and the iOS ecosystem never fully-filled the gap. There were and are lookalikes — but none of them are truly free, private, or multilingual. Most charge, upsell, push you into the cloud, or harvest identifiers.

💡 Having a disability shouldn’t be an excuse to charge people or erode their privacy.

So I built Earshot Live Transcription for iOS:

✅ Free — no sign-up, no sign-in, no ads, no upsells.

🔒 Private — everything runs on-device. The only network call is to download and update the local model, OpenAI’s Whisper.

✈️ Offline — works without a Wi-Fi or cellular connection.

🌍 Multilingual — 99 languages, all translatable back into English.

🔊 Ambient-sound aware — recognizes 300 environmental sounds.

Earshot makes one key improvement over most other live transcription apps: all speech transcription is done locally via OpenAI’s Whisper automatic speech recognition system. Its accuracy — measured by word error rate (WER) — is an impressive 8.6% for the “small” model (English), though this will be worse for other languages, especially “long tail” ones.

I also ship the tiny and base models, which are blazingly fast and work better on older iPhones. In my testing, they did well on accuracy too.

♿ Accessibility tools shouldn’t themselves be inaccessible. Free should mean free. Private should mean private. That’s the standard the original Live Transcribe set on Android. iOS users deserve the same.

🚀 I’m working with Apple now on getting it approved for general availability, which should happen very soon. If you’d like to join the early-access program to get the latest build and help shape the app, send me an email or DM.

More at www.briankemler.com/earshot

There are two flavors: deep-dive case studies and short-form situational questions. I’ll focus on the latter and why every PM should keep a living story bank ready for when recruiters call. 📞

There are hundreds of behavioral questions out there, but they boil down to a handful of archetypes:

🤝 Conflict How do you resolve interpersonal or cross-team friction?

🪞 Feedback Giving and receiving. Up, down, and sideways.

💪 Tenacity Shipping without resources or formal authority.

📉 Failure Missed goals, blown deadlines, broken deliverables and lessons learned.

🫱 Helping others When you stepped up for a struggling colleague.

🚀 Innovation Exceeding expectations or shipping something new.

Tips for building a story bank that actually works:

1️⃣ Write them up in advance. Don’t improvise under pressure. Use STAR (Situation, Task, Action, Result) and aim for 90-120 second responses, but be prepared to go deeper when prompted. Put the headline and the stakes first - else you will put the interviewer to sleep if you wait till the end. Script it, refine it, internalize it. Jam with Claude or ChatGPT.

2️⃣ Subtly map to your target company’s values. Every company has core principles they hire against: • Amazon Customer Obsession, Ownership, Invent & Simplify (17 in total) • Google “Organize the world’s information…”, “Don’t be evil” • Meta Be Bold, Focus on Impact, Move Fast. “Nothing is someone else’s problem.”

Research them. Tailor your stories. Show you’ve already internalized how they operate. You don’t need to directly say, “Google’s ethos is ‘don’t be evil’, here’s how I did the right thing for the user.” Instead, signal values alignment with your stories and adapt them each time you interview somewhere new.

3️⃣ Diversify across your last 3 roles. Don’t lean on the same hero project for every answer. Range of context shows range of capability.

4️⃣ Use recency bias in your favor. For questions about failures, it’s best to use stories from earlier in your career. The converse is also true, for stories about innovation and resounding success, it’s best to use stories from your current role.

5️⃣ Contextualize. Your interview doesn’t know or care about the details of your growth funnel. They only care that optimizing it was important to users and your company and that the stakes were high. Use a high level framing altitude for setting the stage (situation), but be sure to be specific about the action and quantify the result.

6️⃣ Agency. It’s always “I” never “we” or “the team”. This is a super-common red flag. You’re here to talk about you and what you did. If you’re being too generous with sharing credit or discussing what the team accomplished, you’re leaving your own agency on the table and this will be a red flag for most interviewers (including me). Balance agency with humility and leave ego on the table, but make sure you’re the prime mover in all of your stories by stripping away the second person plural pronoun and the noun “team”.

The PMs who land offers aren’t winging it. They’ve done the reps. ✍️

Build the storybank once. Update it quarterly. Thank yourself when the call comes.

My full set of PM guides are available to paid subscribers of my substack, multiplier.pm.

What archetype trips you up most? 👇

Within a few minutes, I’d surfaced edge cases the PRD missed and stumbled into ideas I hadn’t considered. Whether “my code” ever ships isn’t the point. The point is that walking into a design or eng review with a working UI moves the conversation faster and produces a better feature than the same review with a Google Doc.

That’s the shift. And it’s why I think most PMs are negotiating for the wrong thing right now.

The old playbook is misfiring

PMs are trained to optimize. So when it comes to comp, the standard move is to line up competing offers and use them as leverage. That worked in 2021’s seller’s market. In today’s buyer’s market with fewer offers, longer searches, more candidates per req, it can be a shot-to-the-foot, especially if you’ve been out of work for a while.

Here’s why: in a labor market reshaped by AI, the most valuable thing on a PM’s resume right now isn’t comp history or title progression. It’s reps as an AI practitioner.

If you’ve been out of work for six months, you probably haven’t been using AI inside a real PM workflow. You don’t have stories about prototyping a feature in an afternoon, automating your weekly status, or running a virtual program manager to manage mundane execution. Hiring managers can tell the difference between “I’ve used Codex” and “I shipped this with Codex.”

The PMs in demand in 2026 and especially in 2027 are the ones who can tell the second story.

What an AI-practitioner PM actually does

It’s not writing PRDs faster. It’s:

• Building working prototypes to pressure-test specs before design or eng touches them

• Automating toilsome parts of the job that used to eat a week; status updates, competitive scans, user research synthesis, TPS reports

• Spinning up agents to absorb program management overhead

• Shipping small features and bug fixes yourself

Minimally, every PRD should be informed by a prototype. That’s the floor, not the ceiling.

Why experience beats comp right now

If you’re holding out for a 2021-style bidding war, you may be passing on something more valuable: a year of real AI shipping experience while the rest of the market is still figuring it out.

I’d take a down-level offer at a company with serious AI surface area over a lateral or up-level at a place where I’ll be writing PRDs the old way. One step back, two steps forward. The PMs who bank a year of AI practitioner reps in 2026 will be the AI PM leads every company is vying for in 2027… and the comp will follow.

What this looks like Monday morning

• If you’re interviewing: weight roles by AI surface area, not just by level. Ask what the team actually ships with AI tools today, not what’s on the roadmap.

• If you have an offer: don’t reflexively chase the highest number. Ask which role will let you build a portfolio of AI practitioner stories over the next twelve months.

• If you’re employed: pick one feature this quarter and prototype it before you write the PRD. See what changes.

The asymmetry is real. A year of comp differential is a number. A year of practitioner reps changes what jobs you can get for the next decade.

Most people prepare for interviews the same way they studied for exams: re-reading notes, highlighting bullet points, and hoping it sticks. The research says this is almost useless.

Cognitive science has consistently shown that active recall forcing your brain to retrieve information rather than passively review it produces dramatically better retention. One analysis found students using retrieval practice remembered 57% of material vs. just 29% for passive readers. Another found active recall techniques led to 10-12% higher test scores. The mechanism is simple: recognition tricks your brain into overconfidence. Retrieval actually builds the neural pathways you need under pressure.

Interviews are a retrieval task. You’re not reading your notes to your interviewer. You’re pulling structured stories and sharp thinking out of your head in real time. So why would you prep by reading?

Here’s what works instead 👇

Frontier models like Claude Opus 4.6 and ChatGPT 5.4 are remarkably good interview coaches. Feed one your target job description, public information about the product and company, and anything available about the hiring manager or team. Ask it to generate the questions you’re most likely to face behavioral, product sense, analytical, leadership.

Then switch to voice mode and answer each on the fly. Jam with AI. Tell it to act as a world class leadership coach. Then ask and to grade you on your strengths and weaknesses. It is not shy about giving you feedback. You can do this while taking a walk or sitting at your desk. Did you quantify impact? Were you concise? Iterate until it gives you an A-.

This is the critical shift: moving your prep from input (studying) to output (performing). You’re training the actual skill the interview demands.

Once you’ve done this for a dozen or so questions across key competency areas prioritization, leadership, cross-functional collaboration, ask the model to compile your best responses into a single document.

Now rigorously edit that doc. Tighten the language. Sharpen the results. Make sure every story has a clear situation, your specific actions, and a measurable outcome. Then practice aloud again, not reading, reciting from memory.

📌 For behavioral questions, aim for 60-90 seconds. No more. This is especially important for senior product leaders where conciseness signals executive presence. The hardest part is not getting across all the detail, it’s omitting all but the most essential signal.

Stop studying. Start answering. 🎯

That started to change last year, and last week, I did something I never expected: I shipped an app on the Apple App Store! 🎉

Vibe Coding: The Early Year (2025)

About a year ago, I went deep comparing AI tools for anything I could throw at them; I tried ChatGPT, Gemini, NotebookLM and even tinkered with xAI. But I kept coming back to Claude. Something about its voice and writing style resonated with the way I think about problems. Then, I discovered tools that changed everything: Lovable, Cursor, and eventually Claude Code.

I started with Lovable and Cursor, vibe coding my first few websites. I built a few cool prototypes, including one I’m still a little heartbroken about: a PM interview grading app called Robin that used voice diarization to differentiate interviewer and candidate speakers. It actually worked.

Unfortunately, I switched laptops and I didn’t back it up and showcase it on my (now active) GitHub page. Lesson learned. 😅

Then I hit a wall. I tried to deploy a To Do list app to the App Store. Yes, I know everyone has had this idea. But I couldn’t get it across the finish line with my existing setup (Cursor and Xcode).

Something wasn’t clicking.

Going to the Source

Since Claude already powers both Cursor and Lovable under the hood, I asked myself: why not go directly to the source?

I cancelled my Cursor and Lovable subscriptions and upgraded my Anthropic sub to the Max Plan. One of the things I love about Claude Code is that I don’t need to fuss with an IDE for most tasks, and I have options: web, desktop, and CLI.

I was hooked immediately. I’d already saved $336 on hosting by using Claude Code to port my personal website from Wix to Cloudflare Pages (free and blazing fast). The ROI was proving itself. 💰

The Challenge: Ship Something I’d Actually Use Without Human Help

I gave myself a constraint: build an app I would personally use every day, and ship it to the App Store.

The idea for Now Meditation came from a book I read years ago called The 8 Minute Meditation that kickstarted my meditation practice (a habit I’ve mostly maintained since). The premise is simple: eight minutes of meditation per day is all you need to start a lasting practice.

Here’s the thing about meditation: you’re not supposed to worry about how much time you’re spending. That’s where a timer comes in. Sure, I could use the timer app on my iPhone, but it isn’t designed for mindfulness, it doesn’t help me track my practice over time, and I don’t get mindfulness minutes as credit.

I looked at what was out there. Most meditation apps are either expensive, cluttered with influencer content I don’t need, or both. I wanted something minimal, private, and focused. 🧘

What I Built

Now Meditation is intentionally simple, minimal, private and free.

• Clean a meditation timer. No guided sessions, no ambient sounds, no subscription upsells.

• Private everything stored locally on-device. No data leaves your phone.

• Optional Apple Health integration to track mindfulness minutes.

The Surprisingly Easy (and Hard) Parts

Building the app with Claude Code? Surprisingly easy. I jammed with Claude creating markdown-based input instructions for Claude Code. The AI handled the native Swift code, the UI layout, and the logic with impressive fluency. I could describe what I wanted in natural language and iterate fast.

The hard parts had nothing to do with AI:

• Xcode Apple’s IDE is powerful but dense. Navigating it as a first-timer was a learning curve unto itself.

• App Store Connect The submission process, provisioning profiles, certificates, and review guidelines were also difficult, but I figured it out.

My first submission was rejected. Apple was pretty good about reviewing Now quickly and providing actionable feedback on why they rejected it. I worked through the issues Apple flagged with Claude Code, then I resubmitted, and got approved. ✅

What This Means for PMs

The barrier between think and do is vanishing before our eyes. If you’re a PM with strong opinions about what should exist in the world, just build it. The cost of experimentation has collapsed and the feedback loop between idea and artifact is nearly instant.

I think this means neither PRDs (the traditional PM artifact), nor traditional product development teams (Design, Product, Eng) go away. But I do think not only based on what I’ve seen, but based on what I’ve been able to produce that product development is on the precipice of a dramatic overhaul.

If PM, or design for that matter, can create and prototype powerful, high-fidelity applications in hours without engineering support, we can accelerate user feedback, iteration, and literally anyone with a good idea can be the next founder of a unicorn company.

Does that mean engineering goes away? Absolutely not. I still believe these applications need careful and expert curation to ensure they’re safe, efficient and scalable for subsequent iterations.

What’s Next 🔜

The app is functional and needs some polish, as I focused on the problem of deployment over app-polish. I focused on deployment because any app I build will require this step. I’m continuing to iterate on the app, adding streaks and exploring what “just enough” gamification looks like to use technology to create a healthy habit.

If you’re a PM sitting on an idea, my advice is simple: pick the smallest version of it, open Claude Code, and start building. You might surprise yourself.

Have you tried building with AI tools? I’d love to hear what you’re working on, drop a comment or DM me. 💬

The prompt was simple: “Make me a playlist on spotify”, then I pasted in the list of songs.

What happened next genuinely surprised me:

🔌 It first tried accessing Spotify’s APIs directly

⏱️ When it hit rate limits, it attempted to throttle itself and even use batching to be efficient about its API calls

🖥️ Then it pivoted, taking control of Chrome, navigating Spotify Web, and building the playlist track by track

📸 It even took screenshots to verify its own work every time it added a song!

The whole thing felt like watching someone problem-solve in real time. Adapting, retrying, self-checking.

Tonight, I can reply to our friends with a link to an actual shared playlist! 🎧 A small moment, but it’s these kinds of unexpected uses that make me most excited about where agentic AI is heading.

I’ve been paying Wix $28/month to host my professional coaching website for a while now. It works fine. But as someone who’s spent nearly two decades building products at Google, Meta, and DoorDash, the lack of control always nagged at me. I couldn’t easily version my content, the performance wasn’t great, and I was locked into a platform for what’s essentially a six-page static site.

So I decided to try something: could I use Claude Code, Anthropic’s command-line AI coding agent to fully replicate my website and migrate off Wix in a single sitting?

Spoiler: yes. And I cancelled my Wix subscription that same day. ✂️

The Challenge 🎯

My site (briankemler.com) is a professional coaching and portfolio site with six pages: a homepage with multiple sections, PM interview guides, coaching packages and rates, a portfolio of accessibility work I shipped at Google, an about page, and a contact form. Nothing wildly complex, but enough moving parts — navigation, responsive layout, background images, external integrations with Calendly and Substack — that rebuilding it by hand would have been a tedious multi-day project.

The question wasn’t whether I could rebuild it. It was whether AI tooling had reached the point where I could do it fast enough to make the migration worth the effort.

The Process 🛠️

Step 1: I used Claude to scope out my existing site. I gave Claude my URL and asked it to crawl every page and produce a detailed project brief capturing the content, structure, design patterns, and all external integrations. Within minutes, I had a comprehensive Markdown spec document covering all six pages, the shared layout, design tokens, and deployment instructions.

Step 2: I opened Claude Code in my terminal. Claude Code is Anthropic’s CLI tool for agentic coding — you run claude in your terminal and it can read, write, and execute code in your actual project directory. 💻

Step 3: I fed it the brief and said “let’s build.” Working through the spec step by step, Claude Code scaffolded an Astro project with Tailwind CSS, built out the shared layout and navigation, then constructed each page one by one. When something didn’t look right, I’d tell it what to fix and it would edit the files directly. The back-and-forth felt less like prompting an AI and more like pair-programming with a very fast junior engineer who never gets frustrated.

Step 4: Deploy to Cloudflare Pages. Claude helped me deploy the site to Cloudflare Pages, and had a live site in under five minutes. Free hosting. Global CDN. Automatic HTTPS. ⚡

What Surprised Me 🤔

The thing that impressed me most wasn’t the speed though going from zero to a fully deployed site in an afternoon is genuinely remarkable. It was the quality of the workflow. Claude Code doesn’t just generate code; it operates in your file system, runs your dev server, catches its own errors, and course-corrects.

It’s not perfect. I still need to fine-tune my contact me form and get the video previews working. But easily 90% of the work was done by the AI, and the remaining 10% was the kind of polish work I actually enjoy.

The Math 💰

• Wix: $336/year, locked into their platform, limited customization, difficult interface

• New stack: $0/year hosting on Cloudflare Pages, full code ownership, version-controlled in Git, deploys in seconds

That’s not a tough decision.

The Bigger Point 🔮

We’re at an inflection point with AI-assisted development. Tools like Claude Code aren’t replacing developers, they’re collapsing the time and friction involved in going from idea to shipped product. For a product leader like me, that’s transformative. I can now prototype, build, and deploy without context-switching into a no-code platform that charges me for the privilege of simplicity.

If you’re a PM, founder, or anyone paying for a website builder to host a relatively simple site, I’d encourage you to try this. The barrier to owning your own code just got a lot lower. 🙌

Last night, I attended an Apple invite-only event for product managers, and what I learned about how Apple builds products fundamentally challenged conventional PM thinking. If you’re a product manager curious about how one of the world’s most influential companies approaches our craft, here’s what you need to know.

The Unconventional Truth: PMs Live in Marketing

The first revelation was structural and surprising: at Apple, product managers don’t report into a traditional product organization. They sit within the marketing organization—specifically, MarCom. This isn’t just an org chart quirk; it reflects a fundamental philosophy about what product management actually means at Apple.

The slides presented at the event framed this beautifully with three interconnected pillars:

Product: “The customers’ voice to Apple”
This is where PMs spend significant time on customer research, competition and industry trends, development tradeoffs, and the product roadmap. You’re the conduit bringing customer needs and market realities into the company.

Marketing: “Apple’s voice to the customer”
Here’s where the marketing org connection becomes clear. PMs own the product story, launches, product naming, and ensuring consistent messaging. This isn’t about handing off to marketing—you are the marketing brain trust for your product.

Business: “Guiding the business”
PMs also drive worldwide pricing, long-range forecasting, lifecycle management, strategic partnerships, ecosystem development, and long-term profitability. You’re not just building features; you’re steering a business.

One PM, One Product, End to End

Unlike many tech companies where product management is fragmented across specialties, Apple operates with remarkable simplicity: a single PM owns their product from the earliest research phases all the way through go-to-market. You’re not a “growth PM” or a “platform PM” or a “technical PM.” You’re the PM for iPad, or Apple Intelligence and Siri, or Creative Apps Core Experience.

This end-to-end ownership means you can’t hide behind complexity or hand-waves. You need to understand your customer deeply, articulate the technical tradeoffs, craft the narrative, set the pricing strategy, and guide the product through its entire lifecycle. It’s daunting, but it’s also what makes the role so powerful.

PMs as Editors, Not Authors

One of the most striking metaphors shared was that Apple PMs function like editors. They don’t necessarily write every word or design every pixel, but they refine, fine-tune, and shape the work into its best form. This editorial mindset requires a particular skillset: taste, judgment, the ability to see the forest and the trees, and knowing when something isn’t quite right even if you can’t immediately articulate why.

The best editors make good work great. They push teams to clarify muddled thinking, to simplify complexity, to find the emotional core of a story. That’s the job.

Technology and Liberal Arts: Not Just Marketing Speak

The event concluded with Apple’s famous intersection metaphor—a street sign showing “TECHNOLOGY” crossing “LIBERAL ARTS.” This isn’t just Steve Jobs nostalgia or clever branding. It’s operational philosophy.

Apple believes the best products emerge when technical capability meets human insight, when engineering excellence serves emotional resonance. As a PM, you need to speak both languages fluently. You’re translating between engineers who think in systems and customers who think in experiences, between what’s technically possible and what’s humanly meaningful.

Storytelling: Your Most Critical Skill

Perhaps the biggest takeaway: storytelling isn’t a nice-to-have soft skill at Apple. It’s the core competency. And for two distinct reasons.

First, every product needs a compelling narrative for customers. Why should they care? What job does this do in their life? How does it make them feel? Apple products succeed because they have clear, emotionally resonant stories that people want to be part of.

But second—and this surprised me—storytelling is essential for internal influence. If you want to get a product idea funded and prioritized at Apple, you need to articulate its value so compellingly that executives and cross-functional partners become believers. You’re not just managing a backlog; you’re selling a vision. Again and again.

What This Means for Your PM Career

If you’re considering Apple or just thinking about your PM craft more broadly, here are my reflections:

Embrace the ambiguity of ownership. The single-threaded owner model is powerful but demanding. You can’t specialize your way out of hard problems.

Develop your editorial eye. Learn to make good work great. Study taste. Understand why certain designs, messages, or features resonate while others fall flat.

Practice storytelling relentlessly. Write. Present. Refine your narrative until you can make someone care about your product in two minutes or two seconds.

Bridge worlds. The technology-liberal arts intersection isn’t about being mediocre at both. It’s about achieving fluency in human needs and technical possibilities so you can find the magic in between.

The roles presented ranged from Director of Product Management and Marketing for AIML Technologies down to Product Manager Intern for iPad, all reflecting this same philosophy. Whether you’re driving Apple Intelligence, refining iPad experiences, or shaping Apple Care, you’re an editor-owner-storyteller working at the intersection of what’s technically possible and what’s humanly meaningful.

I came away thinking the Apple PM model is molded in the image of Steve Jobs. While he may or may not have been identified as a PM, he was clearly one of the most successful product builders in history.

As a product manager, understanding the nuances of job titles and levels across different companies is essential for career growth and job searching 📈. Titles like "PM," "Senior PM," or "Product Lead" can mean very different things depending on whether you're at Google 🔍, Meta 📘, or elsewhere in the industry.

Read more

Most job seekers waste time on generic interview advice when the actual companies they're targeting have already told them exactly what they're looking for. It's like studying for the wrong test when the answer key is sitting right there.

Here's a sample of the official prep materials from a bunch of top tech companies. I'll also show you how to discover this information for yourself (because there are way more companies doing this than you'd think).

Company-Specific Interview Prep Resources

Amazon 📦

Their Focus: Leadership principles and complex problem-solving ownership mentality

Official Resources:

• PM-T Interview Prep

• General Interviewing at Amazon

• AWS Interview Tips (Logistical)

• AWS Interview Tips (Excellence)

What They Want: PM-T candidates who understand their 16 Leadership Principles, can handle technical product lifecycle questions, use the STAR method for behavioral questions, and think like owners.

Apple 🍎

Their Focus: Innovation and attention to detail

Official Resources:

• Interview Tips

What They Want: Authentic candidates ready to dive deep into their work, with obsession for quality that makes Apple products distinctive.

Google 🔍

Their Focus: Structured problem-solving and technical collaboration at scale

Official Resources:

• Interview Tips

• APM Interview Stories

What They Want: PMs who can think through products serving billions of users with structured problem-solving approaches and strong technical collaboration skills.

Meta 💙

Their Focus: Fast execution and measurable impact

Official Resources:

• SWE Prep Onsite

• PM Prep Onsite

• PM-L Prep Onsite

• PM Interview Q&A

What They Want: PMs who can demonstrate measurable impact, make data-driven decisions, and thrive in their "Move Fast" culture.

Microsoft 🪟

Their Focus: Growth mindset and inclusive thinking

Official Resources:

• Interview Tips

What They Want: Candidates who embody their growth mindset culture, excel in virtual interviews, and think about inclusive product development.

Netflix 📺

Their Focus: Culture and data-driven product success

Official Resources:

• Netflix Culture

• Product Success Metrics

• Product Careers

• New Grad Programs

NVIDIA 🚀

Their Focus: AI innovation and technical leadership

Official Resources:

• How We Hire

What They Want: PMs who understand the AI revolution, can drive technical innovation, and think about products that enable future technologies.

Pinterest 📌

Their Focus: Creator economy and positive experiences

Official Resources:

• Interviewing at Pinterest

What They Want: PMs who understand visual discovery, creator ecosystem dynamics, and can contribute to positive, inspiring workplace culture.

Salesforce ☁️

Their Focus: Values-driven decisions and customer success

Official Resources:

• How We Hire

• APM Program

What They Want: PMs who understand their V2MOM framework, align with Ohana culture, and can use their Trailhead platform effectively.

Spotify 🎵

Their Focus: Cultural fit and autonomous squad-based work

Official Resources:

• How We Hire

What They Want: PMs who thrive in squad-based, agile culture and understand creator/listener dynamics in the music ecosystem.

Uber 🚗

Their Focus: Marketplace complexity and global scale

Official Resources:

• Interviewing at Uber

What They Want: PMs who can handle complex marketplace logistics, real-world scaling challenges, and operations across different global markets.

How to Find More Official Prep Materials

The Magic Search Formula

Use this search operator: site:[company].com interview prep in your Google Search Bar.

Try targeted searches like:

• site:netflix.com pm interview prep

• site:stripe.com product manager interview

Pro Detective Techniques

1. Check engineering blogs: site:[company].engineering interview

2. Look for APM/new grad programs (often have the best prep materials and scale outside of new grad programs)

Your Action Plan

1. Start with official prep materials for your target companies

2. Use detective techniques to find resources for other companies

3. Map your experience to their specific values and frameworks

4. Practice their language - use company terminology in interviews

5. Prepare stories that align with their culture, not generic PM examples

Key Takeaway

Stop relying on generic interview prep when companies are literally giving you the playbook. Candidates who use these official resources have a massive advantage because they're speaking the company's language from day one.

Imagine having ChatGPT-level intelligence running entirely on your laptop, with zero internet connection required. No data leaving your device. No corporate servers analyzing your conversations. No subscription fees. Just you and your AI, completely private.

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1. Substack gift subs are "free", e.g. I see no revenue from them, but I appreciate anyone who spreads the word.

2. On my end, I'm happy to share the content of the newsletter itself via no-revenue "gift subs"

3. I’ll kindly ask that anyone who's received a free gift sub to upgrade be a paid sub to get access to the PM Guides.

The overview guide is free and always available here. You can upgrade here: multiplier.pm

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In this tough PM job market, Brian worked with AI to land final rounds at 7 major tech companies (e.g., Apple, Roblox, DoorDash) in under a month.

When he shared the news on LinkedIn, I had to know how he pulled it off. Here’s exactly how he did it in 6 steps:

1. Find your candidate market fit

2. Craft your resume around that fit

3. Select companies where your fit i…

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So many of you DM'ed me 📩 to find out more; without future adieu, you can read it now now on Behind the Craft ✨ by Peter Yang. It's an honor 🎉 to be featured on Peter's thoughtful Substack, and it was a pleasure to collaborate with him.

The article details my AI-fueled journey 🤖 to 7 final interview rounds 💼 at Apple 🍎, DoorDash 🚗 and Roblox 🎮. I used simple, but novel AI techniques at every step of the hiring process to hone my strategic candidate-market fit 🎯, improve my resume 📄, and accelerate my company- and role-related deep research 🔍 to ace my interviews.

Now you can do the same.

I did a lot more than I had time to write about in the article, and that will become the subject of posts here on my new Substack 📝; Multiplier 🚀.

PM Interview & Career Guide Collection: 🚀

1. Interview Guide - Overview 📚 (https://tinyurl.com/mryzdebn) - You're reading it now!

2. Product Sense 💡

3. Analytical 📊

4. Behavioral 🤝

5. Comparing Companies; Google, Meta, Amazon 🏢

6. The Interview Process 🎯

7. The PM Resume 📄

8. PM Comp Negotiating Secrets 💰 (It's not what anyone is telling you!)

9. Google Craft and Execution ⚙️

10. Guide to Product Management Frameworks 🧠

11. Google Strategic Insights 🔍

12. PM Leadership Resume Template 👑

13. Leadership and Drive | Behavioral Workbook, Frameworks and Tips 💪

14. Product Management Frameworks Guide 🎨

For access to all guides, become a paid subscriber 💳. It's just $12/month or $100/year for a trove of continually-updated content designed to multiply your career 10x 📈.

My series of Interview Guides based on my own successful study program for product management interviewing at Meta, and Google 🏆. It is not official advice. Rather, it's reverse-engineered from public material, based on extensive research and sourced from experts in the industry 🔬. While my guides are skewed toward Meta and Google PM interview prep, the approach, frameworks, and question archetypes generalize to other FAANGs, and top, VC-backed startups 🌟.

Once you become a subscriber, I will add you to a Google Group to receive access to the exclusive content in a Google Drive Folder 📁.

Intro: What motivated me to create these guides 💭

When I was coming up as a PM more than 15 years ago at Google, there was sparse information available to help me transition to PM 📍. At the time, the only people who were PMs were people who had gone to "the right" undergrad engineering schools, had "the right" engineering job, and then went on to "the right" MBA program to land in the best associate product manager program (Google's, of course!) 🎓.

For mid-career professionals like myself, there were steep career, organizational, and even psychological barriers to entry 🚧. I had to hack my way in; and figure it out without web-based resources, coaching services, coaches, or formal support 🛠️.

I passed my Google PM interviews on my first attempt which included a software engineering interview ✅. It was hard fought and hard-won 💪. I want it to be easier for you, so I made these guides 🎁.

Today, the problem is the opposite; there is too much, sometimes conflicting information! 🌊 That's why the interviewing process can feel overwhelming. There are question banks, AI bots, online influencers inventing new frameworks by the hour 🤖. There are PM prep services and a cottage industry of people exposing advice, it can be hard to know what framework to pick! 🤷‍♂️

That's where my approach comes in ⚡. I've passed PM rounds and risen to senior leadership at Google and Meta 🏅. I've learned and can share with you the right frameworks and methods to make your transition process more time-efficient and less stressful while maximizing your chance to land your dream PM job 🎯.

Why my approach is unique 🌟

It applies product thinking to the interview process using proven strategies, frameworks, and archetypes will maximize your interviewing outcomes (number of offers, comp) and minimize your prep time ⏰.

Proven: hundreds of people have used them to land level 4 through level 8 (director) roles at FAANGs and top, VC-backed startups 🏆. This includes multiple PMs who have up-leveled and one person who leveled up 2 levels to L7 from L5 📈. They've also helped several non-PM directors transition to PM director including an L9 senior director 👨‍💼.

I have more than 15 years of PM experience at Google and Meta and even more in the industry 📅. I've interviewed 500+ candidates for PM roles and successfully landed PM roles at both Google and Meta (both on my first attempt) 🎯

It is fresh 🔥. Not just in the sassy sense, but also in the sense of being up-to-date with current information based on my own recent research, interviews, and relationships with thousands of people at FAANG companies.

By applying product thinking to the interviewing process, you will learn how to be a better PM in your current job 💡. Think of interviewing as a way of staying fresh, current, while learning from the best in the industry 🌱.

What people are saying about my approach 💬

Hundreds of colleagues have used these guides to transition to PM and land dream PM jobs:

"You've authored impeccably written and very helpful guides." -SN Meta ⭐

"Thanks Brian for putting together the best PM interview guides I've come across (and I've seen A LOT of PM guides" -LZ Meta 🙌

"I'm 5 minutes into reading this, and this is THE BEST write-up I've seen. This has reinvigorated my motivation to study. Seriously, this write-up is so good. I can't emphasize that enough, I am geeking out over it LOL!" -AT Meta 🤩

"I just stumbled on your interview guide for PM and it's amazing. I have been trying to gain more insights and resources to better myself for product manager interviews." -ZM Meta 💯

"Just wanted to shoot you a quick thanks for the PM Interview Prep series you created. It's been so helpful for me and had reduced a lot of my anxiety with the prep process ❤️" - SB Meta

"I have been exposed to many PM readings and interview-prep sites, but only felt so enormously blessed after encountering the guide you have put together." E- an undergrad now PM interning at a software company 🙏.

Caveats ⚠️

While my guides are skewed toward Meta and Google PM interview prep, the approach, structure, frameworks, and question archetypes should generalize to most other FAANGs and startups 🔄.

Be careful to research each company for nuances and deltas 🔍. This guide should get you about 70-90% of the way there for non-Meta or non-Google companies and closer to 100% for Google and Meta 🎯.

Google and Meta's hiring rubrics generalize better than most companies 📋

Companies are constantly changing their interviewing methods 🔄. While I believe this to be one of the most up-to-date and recent guides, be sure to validate this assertion against what your recruiter tells you and the unique nuances of your target company ✅.

Your success is yours - use your own judgment over any guide - including mine! 🧭

Each guide covers 📖

There are 4 interview guides; the overview (this doc), and one for each of the typical interviews including product sense, leadership and drive, and analytical.

Each covers:

• What the PM interview is and is not ❓

• Strategy 🎯

• Question archetypes 🔤

• Frameworks 🧠

• What to study 📚

• How companies evaluate your responses 📊

• Curated Youtube Mock Interview Playlists 🎥

I'm working on a negotiation and a leadership guide as well 🚧.

Frameworks 🏗️

Frameworks are great at helping us think, structure, and solve problems consistently and in a way that your interviewer can follow 🧭. This makes it easier for them to provide feedback and gives them an insight into how you think 💭.

There are no perfect frameworks; trying to evaluate all of them is a distraction 🚫. Use what you're comfortable with today or what I have below and don't spend precious time to find the holy grail of PM frameworks. It doesn't exist 🏆.

You need to learn to have a baseline, but also to be able to think on your feet since interviews are inherently unpredictable 🎭.

There's only logical, structured communication and its opposite; unstructured, stream of conscious mouth-fidgeting 😵. The latter is an anti-pattern and a sure fire way to put your interview asleep and earn you an SNH (strong no hire) 💤.

If you decide to use a framework, internalize it so it doesn't sound like you're rotely going through it 🤖. Adapt an existing framework or build your own framework (as I did with my proprietary, trademarked CATS framework*) 🐱. Don't spend too much time trying to figure out the best one. Any of these can work ✨.

*joke 😄

Top Frameworks 🏆

• Overall Rule of 3 3️⃣

• Product Sense: CIRCLES ⭕

• Analytical Thinking: AARM, HEART/GSM, CATS 📈

• Behavioral: STAR ⭐

Paid clients get access to my complete PM Frameworks Guide 🔐

About me 👨‍💻

I've interviewed and successfully landed PM jobs on my first try at DoorDash, Google and Meta 🏅. I'm a calibrated interviewer. I conducted something on the order of 500-lifetime interviews, including approximately 200+ product management interviews 📊. At Google, I ladder-transferred to product management from program management years ago and never looked back 🚀. I have helped scores of people transfer into product management from engineering, program management, design and data science at all levels from IC4 to Director 🤝.

Before joining DoorDash as a Product Lead, I was a PM Lead at Meta and before that, I spent a decade at Google as a PM working on making communication accessible, inclusive and private for people with disabilities ♿. I launched zero-to-one products Live Caption, Live Transcribe and Sound Amplifier 🎤. I brought beloved products like Gmail, Google News, and Search to people in underserved countries including Myanmar (Burma), Thailand and Indonesia 🌍. I helped produce independent documentaries such as Angkor Awakens: A Portrait of Cambodia (2016) and Dani's Twins (2022) 🎬. I hold a half-dozen patents, and am based in San Francisco, CA 📍.

I love hearing from and helping fellow PMs and PM-aspirants 💙. Feel free to drop me a line a brian.kemler@gmail.com and connect with me on LinkedIn 📧.

1.YOU MUST HAVE A GMAIL or GSUITE Account. University, AOL, or other addresses won’t work.

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Subscribe now

I’ve wanted to start Multiplier for a long time

The blinking cursor on a fresh blank page can be intimidating, even for seasoned product leaders. But after years of helping PMs break into FAANG companies and 10x their compensation, it's time to scale this knowledge beyond 1:1 conversations. Here's your roadmap for launching Multiplier:

1. Why this, why now

The product management landscape has fundamentally shifted. While most PMs are still competing with outdated playbooks, a small group is leveraging AI and strategic frameworks to leapfrog their peers. I've watched brilliant PMs stay stuck at mid-level roles because they lack the multipliers that separate good from exceptional.

The knowledge gap between those landing $400K+ roles at top tech companies and those plateauing at $150K isn't talent—it's strategy and AI. That gap is what Multiplier closes.

2. What kind of community are you looking to build here

This isn't another generic career advice newsletter. You're building a community of ambitious product professionals who refuse to accept "good enough" careers. These are PMs ready to use AI as their competitive advantage, negotiate like executives, and apply strategic frameworks that most don't discover until they're already in leadership roles.

Think of it as the insider knowledge that VPs wish they'd had as individual contributors—now accessible to anyone willing to level up.

3. What you get

• Free subscribers: Access to PM Overview Guide and regular public posts.

• Paid subscribers ($12/month, $100/year):

  • Full access to all PM Interview Guides; Analytical Interviews, Product Behavioral Interviews, Comparing Interviewing at Google Meta and Amazon, Interview Process, and Product Sense Interviews.

  • Full access to deep dive templates and frameworks: PM Guide for Google Craft and Execution Interview, PM Leadership Resume Template, Frameworks Guide, Google Estimation Questions, PM Compensation Negotiation Secrets, PM Resume, Amazon Questions, a STAR Behavioral Interview Workbook, and Top Questions (Meta, Amazon and more)

  • Regular updates and intel on PM interviews

  • AI Job Hunt Acceleration and Prompt Libraries

4. Why am I getting this now?

You’ve signed up for my Product Management Interview Guides and expressed interest in my newsletter (Which I didn’t have until right now!) If you are receiving this in error, then pardon the interruption and feel free to unsubscribe.

Please note that access to my PM Interview Guides will be via the Google Group productguides@googlegroups.com and a link to a Google Drive folder.

My PM Interview Overview Guide will remain free and accessible to all, however, after I revamp my Product Sense, Analytical Thinking and Behavioral Interview Guides, they will only be available to paid subscribers.

5. Ignore my advice

There is no one true way to go about multiplying your career. Advice is cheap, that’s why there’s the expression "My 2 cents” I strive to provide proven guidance, but you should always trust yourself.

And trust me on the “subscribe” button!