What's Standing Out in My AI PM Hiring Loop This Week

Notes from inside an active hiring process, with a fresh L7 role on the table.

This week, Coinbase announced it’s cutting 14% of its workforce and rebuilding the company around what Brian Armstrong calls “AI-native pods” - small teams, sometimes a single person, directing AI agents across what used to be the work of an engineer, a designer, and a PM. The middle management layer is getting flattened. “Pure managers” are out. “Player-coaches” are in. It’s the most explicit version yet of an org redesign other companies have been signaling for months, and it arrived in the middle of a year that has already seen 92,000+ tech layoffs.

It is, to put it mildly, a lot.

In the wake of that news, Claire Vo posted a sharp take for anyone laid off from a company that cited AI as the reason. The most interesting move on her list: open Codex or Claude Code and say “this was my job and how I spent my day - how can you help me automate it?” Push the resulting skills to GitHub. Build a portfolio site. Ship it. Allie K. Miller picked it up and extended it for millennial/gen-X business professionals with more granular tactics on the portfolio, the social posts, and the network play.

And on the hiring side, Akash Gupta packaged up the hiring series I wrote last fall into a timely infographic that’s been getting a lot of traction. The five questions in his mock are the same five take-home questions I wrote about in Part 3 of that series - the Vision Pitch, the Commoditization Crisis, the System Deconstruction, the Undervalued Opportunity, the Leap of Faith Narrative. They map back to the six core characteristics I look for in an AI PM (Part 1) and the resume signals I look for first (Part 2). If you haven’t read the series, those three posts are the most thorough thing I’ve written on how I hire.

As it so happens, I’m in the middle of an active hiring loop right now for a couple positions, including a fresh L7 PM role I just posted. So I want to add the live view from inside that loop, because tactics are even more useful if you know how they actually land with the person reading / listening / interviewing. So, here’s what I’m seeing…

What’s working

Several candidates I interviewed recently have pulled up a prototype they had built and walked me through the actual product decisions they made along the way - why this layout, why this prompt structure, why these series of steps, why they ended up rejecting an earlier version, and what they’d do differently if they shipped it again. Fifteen minutes into any of these conversations, I knew more about how a candidate actually thinks about building products than I would have learned from an hour of traditional interview questions (which are also important but give me different signals).

Candidates who pull up something they built and walk me through it. This is what I meant in February when I said show, don’t tell. The shift from “here’s what I would do” to “here’s what I built” is the biggest unlock I’ve seen for standing out in 2026. If you’re prepping for a PM interview right now, build the thing and bring it with you - we’ll have a much better conversation.

Candidates who style their prototype like the product they’re applying to. A few have done this and it’s striking every time. They don’t just build a prototype - they build something that looks and feels like it could live next to the product on my team. It’s a small move that signals taste, attention, and a real understanding of what we’re building. Quietly, it’s also a sample of how they’d think about brand and consistency on day one.

This is also why I care more about the thoughtful prototype than the fastest one. A five-minute vibe-coded prototype shows you can move quickly. A five-hour vibe-coded prototype - the kind with intentional choices, real product taste, decisions made and unmade - shows me how you think.

Warm intros from people I trust. Not as a replacement for the process - I still do extensive interviews across multiple rounds with the team. But when someone whose judgment I respect flags a candidate, it sharpens my attention earlier. The people who know your work are an asset that you should use as a candidate.

What’s not

Resumes that go on for pages. Yes, I’m still saying this. I covered it in detail in Part 2 of the series and somehow it remains the most common miss. I’m not reading the third page in 2026. I want a sharp opening line that tells me what you do, then evidence. Cut the rest. These days, it’s really clear what is outdated - focus on the things that still feel relevant today.

Missing the form link. I have a short form linked in some of my job descriptions with a few questions I want candidates to answer before we talk. It’s not buried, but it’s also not the only thing on the page. Some candidates find it and fill it out. Some don’t. The ones who don’t are telling me something they didn’t mean to tell me - that they didn’t read the description carefully enough to see the link. It’s a signal I don’t love, but it is one.

Why the process is this long

A note on the shape of all this. My interview process is long. Resume scan, take-home questions, first interviews, a product “take home” assignment, then a panel with the team. Some candidates question if it should be this long (I get it, it’s a LOT of time to ask from candidates).

Here’s why I do it anyway. A PM who isn’t a good fit for the team can be the difference between a product that ships and one that quietly stalls out. The cost of getting this wrong is high for the team or the company, but it’s also high for the PM - nobody wants to land in a role where the fit isn’t right and have to start over six months later. So the length of the process isn’t about gatekeeping. It’s about making sure the PM I hire is excited about the job, that I’m confident they’re the right fit for what we’re building, and that the team they’re going to work with every day has been part of the decision.

That last piece matters more than people realize. I’m not the only one who has to work with this person. The engineers, designers, researchers, and other PMs on the team need to feel bought in. When the team is part of hiring, they’re part of onboarding, they’re invested in the new PM’s success, and the PM walks in with allies on day one. That kind of buy-in is something you can’t manufacture after the fact.

So yes, the process is long. It’s long on purpose. It’s long because I’d rather take an extra week now than spend an extra year later wishing we had.

The thread

Claire’s tactical list, Allie’s extension, Akash’s infographic, my hiring queue - they all keep pointing me back to the same trait: agency. The candidates standing out right now aren’t waiting for permission. They’re building, sharing, networking, reading carefully, paying attention to the details nobody told them to pay attention to. They’re doing the work of figuring out what AI changes about their job before anyone asks them to.

If you’re job hunting this week, I’m rooting for you. And if you read this far and you’re an L7 PM with conviction, taste, and judgment when the framework breaks - the role I mentioned is here. I’d love to talk.