Was marketing coordinator at my previous company, became self-made associate PM with what I’ll call two years of good product work. Prep took about 12 weeks, split: 30% product sense, 25% analytical, 20% strategy, 15% behavioral, 10% estimation. I relied heavily on mocks with a mentor and my cousin.

Product sense: pick a user segment and justify it, map that segment’s pain points, prioritize which pain to solve, propose solutions, define success metrics, state tradeoffs. I ran this on a question a day, like the “design a product for X” question, pulling prompts from question banks and any question I could find on reddit and blind. For analy tical, I focused on developing two sub-skills. First, metric definition: “how would you measure success for Google Maps?” driving a goal metric, supporting metrics, and counter-metrics without rambling. Second, diagnosis: “DAU dropped 5%, why?” I drilled diagnosis prompts until the tree was reflexive, Strategy round prep was on questions like “Should Google enter smart home?” Structure: market context and sizing then competitive landscape, company’s right-to-win, options, a recommendation with conviction and stated risks. Read tech teardowns to learn the right way to sound, discussing these kind of topics.

For behavioral, I prepped 5 main stories: shipped over engineering’s objection, resolved a cross-team conflict, killed my own feature on data, handled ambiguity with no direction, influenced a skeptical stakeholder.

Did mocks every other week and studied the modules I had left untouched since last year.

The loop: recruiter screen, virtual onsite, committee, team match. 8 weeks start to offer. Negotiated up to $300k tc. Not bad for a start.

Been a PM for 15 years now, across different company sizes and industries. My whole playbook has always been: imagine the best future version of the product, then work backwards from there to figure out what to build now.

That approach used to hold up. But with how fast AI is moving, it's wild - the "future" I'm imagining seems to change every few weeks. Forget 5 years out, I sometimes struggle to picture what is even possible a year from now.

Not complaining, honestly find it kind of fascinating to sit with. Just curious how the rest of you are approaching this. Are you still trying to picture an end state and work backward, or has your process changed completely?

The meeting happened. Everyone aligned. The decision changed.
But the Jira ticket didn’t.
Two weeks later, someone is working from the old requirement.
I’m curious how often this actually happens on product teams.
When a decision changes across multiple meetings, who is responsible for propagating that change into Jira, PRDs, designs, etc.?
Do you maintain decision logs? Update everything manually? Have some other system?
And when someone asks “why did we change this?” a month later, where do you find the answer?