The product management job market has been through tumultuous changes the last 5 years. Starting with the transformations brought on by COVID, to "The Great Resignation" of 2021, followed by rapid hiring growth between 2021-2022, and, most recently stymied by a seemingly endless string of tech layoffs from late 2022 and through 2024. Job candidates, hiring managers, and recruitment partners each face new and evolving challenges. Today, each of these groups are navigating through a gauntlet to land, or fill, a role in product management.
Over the last 3 months, I’ve interviewed nearly 50 product managers, hiring managers, and recruiters. I talked with people across North America, Europe, and Asia, from start-ups to scale-ups and even big tech. My goal was to uncover what's different about the current job market for product managers, as well as how and why it has been changing. Today’s product management job market could have lasting effects on the field while impacting the viability of businesses and deserves attention. My research included 1:1 interviews with candidates, including product managers, principal product managers, heads of product, and chief product officers, as well as recruiting agencies and hiring managers at varying levels of scale and seniority.
In this article series, I outline what’s changed, the problems candidates and employers are facing, new solutions and emerging opportunities, what role experimentation plays in the market, and more. This is intended to equip you with information to help you reach a successful outcome for your career and your business.
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If you’re a product manager, you’ve likely heard or read about how challenging the job market has been over the previous two years. This new market is in stark contrast to a few years ago when getting your next role required only a handful of applications (or you were approached by a recruiter and didn’t need to search at all). Interviews were predictable and heavily emphasised storytelling. Candidates were getting multiple offers in a matter of weeks. The allure to chase higher compensation, diversify your product experience, change your environment, or all of the above seemed almost too easy. Employers were keen to keep you because they knew how costly it would be to replace you and the competition for talent was fierce. In today’s market, the balance has shifted dramatically and it is now much harder than before. But it’s not only candidates who face new challenges.
Much of these changes have, in some ways, emerged from the impacts COVID has had across the world. From jobs moving from on-site to remote, conducting interviews over video conference, to massive hiring on the upswing of what proved to be temporary growth, and followed by unprecedented layoffs that still continue well into 2024.
If you’ve been responsible for hiring product managers, your job hasn’t gotten any easier—you’ve traded one set of struggles for another. Previously, finding candidates felt like a slog, roles would be posted and get very few applicants, you had to conduct regular outreach, tap deeply into your ever-growing network to find candidates to interview, only to lose out on a candidate due to offers you couldn’t compete with or the candidate’s employer made a dive and save, so you had to start again. Salaries kept increasing due to the perceived importance of filling product manager roles so engineering teams could benefit from their output, ultimately leading to revenue growth. In today’s market, you’re swimming in a sea of CVs (many qualified, many more unqualified), time to hire isn’t any shorter, and new recruitment tools intended to make your job easier aren’t leading to better hiring outcomes.
The biggest changes beyond the number of open roles being substantially lower than 18-36 months ago (<24K open roles globally as of September 2024), are the level of competition, the barriers to applying, as well as the tools and mechanisms used for moving candidates through hiring pipelines.
The level of competition is the easiest signal to observe—job postings on LinkedIn regularly receive hundreds of applications. Some recruiters shared that they have opened Product Manager roles which receive thousands of applications. The mix of applicants range from unqualified to highly qualified, with the majority being unqualified (e.g., don’t meet basic, minimum job requirements but apply anyway). This volume leaves many qualified and highly qualified candidates from even having their CV screened.
This is relatively unheard of until recently. While it is easier than ever to syndicate a job role to multiple job boards, thanks to Applicant Tracking Systems and their integrations with many of the top job search boards, this means candidates can generally choose a job board that suits their needs and still find roles to apply to. Hunting employer job boards doesn’t necessarily equate to finding opportunities you would have otherwise missed. It also means that job boards that don’t or can’t afford to deploy protections against job application spamming can be easily exploited.
As a result of the overall growth of product managers worldwide, coupled with the waves of layoffs from Q4 2022, there’s a larger volume of highly qualified candidates on the market than possibly ever before. In this context, a highly qualified candidate is someone who has previously held a role as a product manager and met or exceeded expectations at their job. Many who were made redundant or voluntarily resigned (instead of being laid off later) were not poor performers. Instead, they became job candidates in the market due to more macro-economic forces that I’ve intentionally left out of scope for this research. This also contributed to the level of competition for roles—with some candidates considering roles that are a level or two below what they’ve done in the past just to get back to work. Meanwhile, employers typically pass on these candidates for fear of future attrition should market dynamics change in the near future.
“There’s no doubt that we’re in an exciting time but also a challenge, because tech has become so slick and frictionless, with a press of a button, a person can apply for a job without having read it.” - Recruiter, North America
While an overabundance of candidates on the market is one factor, the barriers to discovering and applying for roles have never been lower. From Easy Apply on LinkedIn to AI-powered tools that can fill out applications for you, it’s easier than ever for candidates to apply to hundreds of roles in a short period of time. Although this is seen as a win for candidates, it contributes to the excessively high volume of applicants per role—an issue that affects candidates and employers alike. When there are hundreds to thousands of candidates for a single role, a recruiting partner or hiring manager is likely to find the 15-35 they want to conduct an initial screening call with and stop reviewing applications altogether assuming one of those shortlisted will make it through to the end and receive an offer. This leaves countless qualified candidates to receive eventual automated rejection emails, or worse, no response at all despite matching the job descriptions’ qualifications, or possibly being a better candidate than those shortlisted.
On the employer side, the evolution of Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS) capabilities has been driven by these market dynamics. More than before, ATS need to help manage that overabundance of candidates, enabling recruiters and hiring managers to move at pace to fill important roles. Many popular ATS (Greenhouse, ICIMS, Zoho Recruit) have attempted to meet this need by improving ranking features to surface candidates that best match a job description, removing potential bias by excluding or obfuscating any demographic data, or by maintaining a level of friction in the application process to deter less qualified candidates (what other possible reason could there be for Workday to maintain its near-universally derided candidate experience[JG5] )? This has not gone far enough, nor has it been perfect.
“I know ATS is being used, but it’s a complete mess. I’ve modified my resume so much—it was a waste of my time.” - Former Head of Product, Europe
There’s more—the role AI is playing in has evolved, too. This year, an AI recruiter was introduced to handle the process of filtering out candidates, setting up screening calls (conducted solely by an AI), and giving feedback to candidates as well as recommending individuals to move ahead with. Given AI and ML algorithms history of bias, we will no doubt read stories in the future of additional biases being introduced by these tools. This of course goes without saying anything about the effects of removing humans from a process that is intended to ensure the humans that are hired work well with other humans (e.g., companies still evaluate candidates based on their ability to integrate well with other employees under the banner of ‘cultural fit’).
All of these changes in today’s Product Management job market would lead many to believe that roles should be filled faster and more effectively, as more qualified candidates are on the market. The barriers to apply are lower, and new tools and mechanisms available make it easier to move candidates through pipelines. The reality, though, is that time-to-hire (a commonly used measure of the number of business days between a role being opened and then closed after an offer is accepted, or candidate starts) is actually longer than it was before according to many of the recruiters and hiring managers I spoke with. What is going on, then?
The dynamics of the market, macro-economic factors at play, and changes afoot have all contributed to this perfect-storm where there is no clear winner in the job market and everyone faces problems or challenges.
The most common problems I hear centre around interviewing techniques, length of the hiring process and communication throughout, as well as feedback. These are in addition to the general frustration of having to apply to 10’s to 100’s of jobs and the general length of time it takes to land a role being many months, rather than weeks, and sometimes more than a year.
“It’s just disgusting….I don’t think there’s a magic bullet. Many people up to SVP are having problems. Even referrals aren’t working.” - Former Principal PM, North America
Historically, interviews have relied heavily on generic questions probing on theory (e.g., “how do you go about building a roadmap?”) then later evolved to more behavioural storytelling (e.g., “tell me about your most recent product roadmap and how you built it”). Today, interviewing techniques have grown to include more hypothetical working exercises, deep exploration of a candidate’s personal history, and various test-based assessments. Some of these are intended to test for what is commonly referred to as “Product sense”. Others serve a different purpose. Here are some of the interview techniques candidates are now facing:
Case study prompts: These interviews include a prompt at the start, where the candidate is given an ambiguous statement, such as “Say you’re the Product Manager for Google Maps. How would you go about creating a new parking feature?” or “How would you 10X growth for Spotify?” and then spend the next 30-45 minutes talking through that case study and how they would approach it. Some candidates spend hours to days, or longer, preparing for these types of interviews.
Writing exercises: These involve giving a candidate a written assignment, typically with vague or incomplete prompts. Occasionally there is guidance on format (e.g., written doc only) and sometimes they leave it up to the candidate (e.g., use whatever format you want, doc, slides, or even video). Sometimes these assignments are done outside of an interview, other companies give these writing prompts at an in-person interview and the candidate is given a time constraint to do the writing exercise. One particular employer asks candidates to do two such exercises, within 1 hour, with no access to the internet, on a Chromebook they’ve never used before. Candidates might spend between 2 and 50 hours working on such exercises depending on their circumstances, regardless of guidance given by the employer.
'[We] previously tried case studies but in many respects it’s unfair for the candidates, it’s a huge amount of work.' - Head of Product, Europe
Top grading: These interviews can last 1-3 hours (with 1 or 2 interviewers, plus the candidate) and go really deep on the candidate’s entire work history, sometimes going back as far as High School (or Secondary school), leading up to present day. Candidates are advised not to prepare for such interviews because their purpose is to identify people who are considered “A players” as well as identify potentially dishonest candidates. These are not considered common, though, from a sampling of over 100 employers across North America and Europe.
Agility & personality assessments: While assessments have traditionally been used for more technical roles, some employers now ask candidates to complete questionnaires that assess their mental acuity and agility. These are typically in the form of a time-limited online test not too dissimilar from standardised testing recent High School graduates may be familiar with. There are even personality assessments which ask situational questions to grade candidates for ‘cultural fit’ and find potential problem areas before making a hiring decision.
This all says nothing of the fact that nearly all interviews are still being conducted virtually over the phone or video conferencing. Even for local roles, on-site interviews are rare, with video conferencing acting as a barrier for building rapport, but creating opportunity for candidates to leverage software tools to aid them, like note applications, AI assistants, web browsers, and more.
Some candidates have reported hiring processes taking anywhere from 4 weeks to as long as 12 weeks, with as many as 12 interviews for a single role. Even though the advancement of calendaring tools like Calendly and ATS scheduling make it easier, getting interviews scheduled continues to be a bottleneck for moving quickly.
The time for candidates to progress through the interview pipeline is also affected by the employer’s approach. Today, many interviews are gated, meaning candidates get scheduled for 1 interview at a time, wait to hear if they’ve ‘passed’ the round, and then prepare for the next until reaching the end. The alternative approach still includes 1 or 2 gated stages (typically a phone screen with a recruiter, and maybe another with the hiring manager) before being scheduled for all remaining interviews typically handled on a single day. The latter method is employed by larger companies (e.g., Amazon and Meta are well-known for their ‘loops’) while the former is more commonly used by smaller companies who concurrently run multiple candidates through these gates. It is obvious which one leads to shorter turnaround times for candidates.
Perhaps the most difficult challenge to navigate in the current market for candidates is feedback—either the lack of it, the confusion it creates, or the quality of feedback. Product Managers understand the importance feedback has in helping us improve our products, as well as ourselves in our careers.
Many employers are not providing any feedback, leaving candidates to question themselves and what they could have done differently, even after lengthy interview loops. Sometimes feedback contradicts with the candidate’s reflection on the interview itself. What’s worse, occasionally the feedback demonstrates a poor understanding of a candidate’s background. One particular example I encountered was a Lead Product Manager from Apple who literally launched the iOS App Store, a $1T product, and were told they lacked “sufficient mobile experience”.
Candidates also continue to report instances where
This can push beyond frustration, candidates can often also be customers and these poor experiences lead to erosion of the customer relationship and employers can expect to see this reflected in customer satisfaction and NPS metrics.
Finally, if the above wasn’t enough, there is a growing trend of employers creating ghost jobs: a job listing for a role which doesn't actually exist, that the employer has posted publicly with no intention of hiring. Three in 10 companies currently have a fake job listed, according to a survey of 650 hiring managers in May 2024. There are multiple reasons they do this, including looking open to external talent, making it appear the company is growing, signalling employee workload will be alleviated, making employees feel replaceable, and more. What’s worse, some employers even report interviewing candidates for these ghost jobs with no intention of making an offer. This is separate, and on top of, scam job listings which may act as phishing attempts by bad actors.
On the employer side, the challenges they face include the pressure to reduce or completely mitigate the risk of ‘bad hires’, managing more candidates with less resources, and needing to look below the surface of a “Product Manager” job title. These are compounded by the sheer volume of applicants ranging from the 100’s to 1000’s for every job posting. Like candidates, employers are taking nearly double the amount of time to fill roles.
“A good quality search would typically take 2-3 months. Now it’s definitely longer. We worked on some assignments that [took] 4-5 months.” - Recruiter, Europe
There is a clear indication that employers are more reluctant to hire than they were in years past. Despite economic growth in some regions of the world, many countries continue to face high interest rates (which affects lending, profitability, investment, and thus innovation), some are still in recession, and startup funding remains tight with VC funding still on a downward trend for 9 consecutive quarters.
For hiring managers and Product leaders, there is hesitation towards advocating to hire in fear of having to make roles redundant. Many Heads of Product, CPOs, and other Product leaders have either been directly affected by layoffs & redundancies and been on the market themselves, or they’ve taken an emotional toll from seeing the effects of those staffing changes on people they’ve built relationships with over time. This in turn makes them more cautious to even advocate for new hires as they’re not in a rush to have to lay someone off again (or put their P&L at risk as investors and executives heavily emphasise the importance of profitability over growth).
These factors have also put pressure on hiring decisions for roles that do ultimately get opened. I’ve repeatedly been told of the importance of avoiding ‘bad hires’ because of the cost and work associated with hiring. The belief held by the people I spoke with is that they are OK with taking longer to make a hiring decision, and adding more hurdles to the hiring process to create more confidence that the hiring decision they make will lead to better business outcomes. Sadly, not a single one has been able to validate that such changes have made a measurable difference.
Product Management wasn’t the only function affected by layoffs and redundancies. In addition to other roles like Product Owners, Program Managers, Designers, and Engineers, Talent Partners (e.g., internal recruiters) have also been impacted as the number of roles to hire for have been slashed. During the hiring boom of 2020-2021, Talent Partners were also in high demand and many had their jobs made redundant as hiring ground to a halt across tech companies. As hiring has picked back up, though not at the scale of years past, Talent Partners have also found themselves stretched, with a growing number of active roles they’re managing. While Talent Partners may have been managing anywhere from 20 to 40 roles at a time, at larger companies this may increase to 50 or more–meaning the ability to provide a better candidate experience becomes more challenging.
“I’m getting 600 applicants and first ~10 that look good get through”
ATS have helped offset some of the manual overhead of the recruitment process (e.g., many ATS offer scheduling solutions to manage calendar access, can automate emails, and produce talent summaries for Hiring Managers) but the sheer volume of applicants supersedes these advancements. Also, many employers vary in their adoption of these seemingly tablestakes features. There are still enterprise-level employers who exchange availability over email, sometimes costing multiple days of time, and leading to scheduling conflicts that are not easily resolved. These are just some of the challenges that Talent Partners face which contribute to poor candidate experiences.
According to LinkedIn, there are over 2.4MM individuals around the world with “product manager” roles. The growth of the product manager role, which spans longer than the last few years, has also contributed to the challenges of today’s job market–especially for employers who need to assess fit for a role where a job title doesn’t tell enough of a story.
First, there is product manager vs product owner. Some employers use product owner as a proxy for entry-level PM roles (e.g., associate or junior product manager) while others may use it as a role that is senior to a product manager, or it is used in its more traditional sense as part of a scrum team. Putting aside the challenges this introduces on its own, the job title carries perceptions by the people reviewing CVs and deciding to interview a candidate. This can make it harder for recruiters and hiring managers to better assess a candidate's experience from the CV alone.
This problem extends at the leadership level too. There is ambiguity about whether a principal product manager is an individual contributor (IC) or manager role. Head of product and group product manager can be used interchangeably, director of product may lead a team of 2 or an org of 200, and so on. These aren’t inherently new problems, but it is compounded by the other issues employers face when trying to find candidates with relevant experience where years and job titles alone are not enough to go by.
“Challenging” does little to illustrate just how much is wrong with today’s product management job market. There are problems all over the place for candidates and employers alike. While there are perceptions about what direction the market is heading, many of those have proven to be untrue. Many people I have spoken with for nearly the past 2 years kept speaking of 2024 as a year when it would turn around. Now that we’re nearing the end of the 3rd quarter, it’s safe to say that has not happened. The same is now being said of 2025 but the truth is nobody can predict what the future will bring in terms of the jobs market, for product managers and otherwise.
In part of 2 of this series, I’ll cover some of the new solutions that have emerged to help solve the problems plaguing today’s job market, outline the role experimentation continues to play in the hiring process (for candidates and employers), detail how success is being measured with hiring (and how it should be improved), talk about the long term effects this market may have, and what can be done to change it.
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