Editor's Note
Welcome! I’m glad to have you here again, this was a great week. I landed my first interview for Product manager intern
🗓️ The Search
This week I landed my first interview. And oh boy, was it something.
What was tried: It was for a PM role in the public sector. It started like most behavioral interviews do. Introduce yourself, why here, strengths and weaknesses. Standard stuff. I felt okay.
what happened: Then came the part I completely underestimated: domain expertise. The interviewer started going deep on industry specific frameworks and technical nuances of the sector. Stuff I genuinely had no idea about. I tried my best but they were upfront with me, my inexperience in the domain would slow the team down.
I went in thinking I'm just an intern candidate, how hard can it really get? Pretty hard apparently.
lessons learned: Prepare beyond the general behavioral stuff. Yes watch the YouTube videos but then go one level deeper and actually research the industry, the specific problems the company faces and the frameworks people in that space use day to day. Even as an intern they want to know you can contribute.
And to the interviewer who took a chance on me despite my background, genuinely thank you.
I'll be back.
The Craft
Be high agency.
Here's the part most people don't know. I didn't get this interview from a cold email.
I attended a webinar the company hosted. After it ended I jumped into the office hours and had a one on one conversation with an employee there. A few days later we had a coffee chat. And through that relationship he gave me the opportunity to interview.
None of that happens if I don't show up and put myself out there.
High agency means you don't sit around waiting for opportunities to find you. You find the door, you knock on it and you introduce yourself before anyone even asks. Attend the webinar. Stay for office hours when everyone else logs off. Follow up. Be the person who actually shows up.
Cold emailing works (we covered that in week 1) but real human connection still unlocks things that emails just can't.
Be cringe. Be different. Results will follow.
The Opportunity
A couple of you DM that the NVIDIA deadline I mentioned last week was cutting it close so I did some digging and found two community maintained GitHub repos that track Summer 2026 internships in real time.
We're standing on the shoulders of giants.
Huge thank you to everyone maintaining these, this kind of community work genuinely helps people.
This Week's Action
Find an event hosted by a company or someone you follow and actually show up.
Not just register. Show up. Ask a question. Stay for office hours. Introduce yourself to one person.
Online applications are crowded. In-person (or live virtual) presence is not. Use that.
Check out Luma.com to find these events
That's it for this week. If any of this resonated, I'd love to hear from you.
I read every email or connect with me on Linkedin - always down to chat
Bryan :)
P.S. If you know someone trying to break into PM, forward this to them. Let's figure this out together.
Till next time,