👀 LinkedIn APM: Application to Offer – iykyk

Amy: Cal Poly, Hackathons, Product Management

Could you give us a short intro about yourself and your background?

I’m Amy and I’m currently an APM at LinkedIn working on the Pages experience team. I went to Cal Poly State University San Luis Obispo where I initially started off studying business as a freshman.

However, I attend TreeHacks (Stanford University Hackathon) and was introduced to the idea of product management later that year. Before that, I thought product managers were those people who walked down aisle 7 of Home Depot, like checking if there's traffic cones left and like the inventory, haha. And I thought to myself — "I probably don't want to do that, but might be worth checking out!"

From there it was history. I ended up interning as a PM at a startup for 3 to 4 months and actually really enjoyed it.

Some fun facts about me:

• I was a beta tester for Pokemon Go! Had unlimited balance, haha

• I've previously been a judge for an Olympic event

• I love making travel videos with my DJI Mini drone

Ideate, Prioritize, Connect

In 3 words, could you tell us what you do as a LinkedIn APM?

Ideate — I work on a team that is pretty new and is one of the top three strategic pillars for Linkedin moving forward into the next fiscal year. We’re trying to create things that haven’t been done before, so there’s no point of reference as to what I should be building off of. A lot of it are venture bets or brainstorming (would this work in the market?) and then test, test, test and verify, verify, verify.

Prioritize — Because we are a big company, we have a lot of stuff we need to do. And we won’t always have the headcount or time to finish everything. So our job as a PM is to identify: what are the most pressing concerns at the moment? Not only why do we need to solve this problem, but why do we need to solve it now?

Connect — As a PM, you are the subject matter expert of whatever product line you’re working on. You go to meetings and take notes, so your engineers can focus on heads down work instead. Design, marketing, or legal may come to you with questions and your job is to make sure these different stakeholders, internally and externally, are all on the same page.

The program: 2 years, 5 orgs to choose from

For those who are unfamiliar, how is the program structured and run?

Rotations + Lengths LinkedIn APM is a two year rotation with each rotation being one year long. After graduating from the program, you can get placed on team you previously rotated in or ask to join a completely different team as a PM.

Team Matching Process For the first rotation, you get placed in one team that is specifically chosen by the APM committee. So you don’t get that much of a say, but you can provide input to your recruiter and they will try their best to match your background to a team you’d be a good fit for.

And then, your second rotation the next year, you’ll be placed in a team that is in a different organization of the company. For example, if I’m placed in LinkedIn Learning my first year, I can’t be placed again in LinkedIn Learning again for my second year.

There is an informal interview process with different managers on different teams at LinkedIn. Both APMs and managers will put down their top 3 picks, and whoever has mutual preferences will likely get matched together. The only constraint is you can’t be in the same organization you were previously a part of before.

Types of Product Teams: There are a couple different categories of products you could be placed in as a LinkedIn APM:

• LinkedIn Marketing Solutions: advertisements

• LinkedIn Talent Solutions: recruiting tools + LinkedIn learning 

• LinkedIn Flagship Experience: feed, creators videos, live events, pages, etc

• Flagship Growth: growth product management (ie. growing the user base)

• LinkedIn Trust: preventing safety, scams, abuse, etc

LinkedIn: The most trusted social media company

As a senior in college (or new grad), what attracted you to the program initially?

I really liked LinkedIn is a trusted social media network. I think about this a lot working in Silicon Valley. I feel like you're always working at a company that dabbles in some gray area of like, ethical concerns. And just like picking from lesser poisons — LinkedIn is just really trying to get people jobs at the end of the day.

Can't code? No problem.

Is there anything the program landing page doesn't tell us about the APM program?

There's two things that come to mind.

The first is a lot of people in our cohort are international students. People always say, oh, it's really hard to get a job, and especially in Silicon Valley, when you don't have visa sponsorship. I think that's a huge concern for people who aren't US citizens. But at LinkedIn, I think 80% of our cohort is sponsored to work here. Not a lot of companies would do this.

Secondly, there are a ton of LinkedIn APMs who don't have a technical background. When you consider programs like Google APM, Uber APM, Salesforce APM, etc — all these APM programs want you to be computer science majors. They want you to take your hacker rank assessment, or they want you to explicitly have a tech background. But, for LinkedIn APM that wasn't the case.

How to stand out in your interviews

What do you think made you stand out as an applicant and is there a recruitment strategy that nobody is doing right now, but should be?

When interviewing, I like to refer to the Airport Test — if my interviewer was stuck with me at an airport at 3 hours would they have a good time?

One strategy I did that I found really useful was I would stalk all of my interviewers on LinkedIn once I got my interviewer information. I was able to use the information I learned about them to make the banter and my answers more relevant to my interviewers.

During my LinkedIn APM recruitment cycle, I felt I performed pretty poorly on my final round and second interview. But because my first interviewer and I got along so well, I think that interviewer vouched for me super strongly and may have overridden the second and final interviewer's feedback about me.

What I'm saying is, you can engineer serendipity and make the vibes work if you do enough research and prep well enough beforehand. I’d like to think I'm pretty competent as a PM, but during that interview phase, I don't think I performed to the best of my abilities. Yet, I still got through because I really connected with my interviewer.

Note from Joseph: Are you planning to interview at LinkedIn? To help you kickstart your interview prep process, the Product Alliance team has shared with us the most common product design interview questions asked at LinkedIn:

How would you design a social network for small business owners?

Another most common product design question LinkedIn asks:

Tell me about an app that has a really good onboarding process. What do you like about it?

Product Alliance has more resources on LinkedIn’s culture, product roadmap, strategic overview, as well as interview process and tips and most-asked PM questions as part of their Specific Company Deep Dives course. For the iykyk readers, I was able to secure additional discounts! Use code [JKC1-LD23J-PA50] to get $50 off for Product Alliance courses!

A great program if you want to be a Product Manager

After being in this program, who do you think would benefit the most from this program and who wouldn’t?

Not Benefit — if you don’t know for sure you want to be a PM. On day one, you get thrown into a lot of the granularity aspects of what a PM does. Also know that you’ll have to be in meetings with people frequently as a part of your job. And lastly, if you’re not passionate about professionally connecting people, helping people find jobs, or even just connecting people in general with other people.

Benefit — if you know for a fact you want to be a PM, but don’t know what type of PM you be to become. For example, there are consumer PMs, ads PMs, trust PMs, etc. You get a lot of exposure to different types of products and experience a diverse product portfolio.

The PM → VC career path

What’s your next play after graduating from this program and how has this program impacted his 5-10 year career plan?

I want to stay a product manager until I feel I have a good grasp on how to be a good product manager. I don’t have to be the best PM in the world, but at least to the point where I am comfortably shipping a product.

The program might not be good for you if you’re already very certain you want to go into a specific function that isn’t business operations. For example, if you’re in tech and want to do marketing, product, or data science specifically, then it might be better to just recruit directly for that role to start off with.

At that point, I’d like the pivot into venture capital. In college, I did a couple of fellowships with VC firms, but I think it’d be really cool to sit on the investor side of the table, because right now, I’m sitting on the operator / builder side. But that’s pretty far down the line. I think 5-ish years down is a pretty safe bet. In the meantime, I do want to get better at being a PM and working on those different product skills.

Are you pursuing anything outside of your 9-5?

I feel like there's potential for me to start passion projects, but I just haven't like really leveraged them to the fullest extent. And I wasn't planning to become a content creator either! I was just like, oh, like, so many people are asking me about this. Let me just put these thoughts somewhere so that people can like read them and they don't have to ping me to have like a one on one.

But after like, I started popping out some Medium articles, people were like, wow, this is really good — you should write like more stuff. And I thought “hmm, maybe this would be a good exercise for me to just write down reflections and learnings from stuff that I do in my job that I like don’t forget about it. In the end, it's I think it's also a good way to improve my writing. I think writing is a skill that’s very overlooked for a lot of jobs.