The Most Frequent Job Search Advice I Give: Unicorn Candidate-Market Fit

How do you create your market of one? This is the unlock in today's brutal market

Let’s rewind to October 14, 4pm pacific.

I just got off a call with Priya, a PM with 8 years of experience who’d been job searching for 4 months:

• She’d applied to 312 positions

• Got 3 interviews

• Zero offers

When I asked her to describe what kind of PM she was, she said:

I’m experienced in B2B SaaS, but I’m also interested in consumer, and I have some marketplace background, plus I’m learning AI...

That’s when I knew exactly what her problem was.

She had never written down what she actually offered the market.

And she definitely hadn’t asked anyone else what THEY thought she offered.

This is the mistake I see constantly. PMs jump straight into applying, interviewing, and hoping something sticks.

They skip the most important step: getting crystal clear on who you are as a candidate and having others validate (or correct) that view.

So after talking to Priya, I immediately sat down to write today’s newsletter. (We’ll circle back to what happened to her at the end.)

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Want to stop guessing and start landing interviews at top companies? I’m running a 10-week live bootcamp starting Monday where I personally help you land roles at companies like Google, OpenAI, and Stripe.

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The Problem with Most Job Searchers

Most failing job seekers have one thing in common: They think it’s about volume. Apply to more jobs, send more cold emails, do more interviews.

But that’s backwards.

The PMs who land great offers fast don’t apply to more jobs. They apply to the RIGHT jobs. And they figure out which jobs are right by doing something that sounds simple but almost nobody does:

They write down what they want and what they offer. Then they ask 5-10 people to tell them if they’re right.

This approach comes from Phyl Terry’s book Never Search Alone, which I covered in my Candidate-Market Fit guide and in this podcast episode:

Phyl uses the example of Allison Mnookin, a Harvard Business School professor who used this exact method to land a role running a division at Intuit that eventually led to her becoming CEO of a spun-out company.

What she did was create what I call the Mnookin 2-pager.

And then she did something even more powerful: she asked for feedback on it.

This is not a straight-forward process. Today, I’m going to show you the next layer deeper on how to do that well.

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What You’ll Learn in This Piece

We’ll cover:

• How to use the Mnookin 2-pager to articulate what you actually want

• The 360 feedback system that reveals your actual superpowers

• How to combine these with Ikigai to find roles

• Real examples from PMs

By the end, you’ll know exactly what roles to target and how to position yourself as the unicorn candidate.

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The rest of this deep dive is for paid subscribers. You’ll get my Notion Mnookin 2-Pager template, copy-paste 360 feedback questions, and real examples in a step-by-step guide.

Plus: Access to my complete PM Interview Guide, How to Get Interviews System, and 120+ other PM deep dives.