Evgeny

I'm originally from Russia, and I spent seven or eight years building my IT career in the US — starting as a quality assurance analyst and working my way toward project and product management, solving IT problems for customers across a variety of industries. After earning my MBA at Boston University, I joined Amazon, where I spent the last five years. I started in an ops-facing role at Amazon Fresh automating warehouses for grocery delivery, then moved to SCOT, the supply chain optimization technology team, working on demand forecasting. After a couple of years and a lot of organizational change, it became really hard to grow, and I decided it was better to start looking before the next round of layoffs could impact me. That's when my search began.

I came into this with an MBA, so I assumed I was equipped — I knew how to build a CV, I knew how to network. But I'd spent five years doing almost nothing to build my network or rehearse my stories, and I quickly realized that interview skills are actual skills that have to be practiced, and I was really bad at them. The market was brutal — late 2025, endless layoffs, fierce competition in product management, and everything shifting under AI. I understood I simply didn't have the skills to land the level of role I wanted in the timeframe I wanted. I was very strategic about choosing a partner, because this was a big investment. What made Intentional Product Manager stand out wasn't the promise of "we'll find you a job" — everyone says that. It was the clarity of the message: we develop this skill in you, and we give you access to the network. It's like a ticket to the tennis club — you're not just talking to one coach, you're joining a community of talented people who know what they want.

The first thing that struck me was how structured the program is — clear things to do on day one, day two, week one, week two, all the way through the search. What confused me at first was that I wasn't immediately writing my CV or jumping into mock interviews; that's what I thought I came for, and for a few days I felt anxious about it. But I slowly realized that without clearly understanding what you want, who you are, and what your stories are, none of the downstream steps work. It's upstream problem solving — get the narratives right and the resume writes itself and the interview answers land. The clarity session also forced me to name what mattered to me, and I discovered culture had to be near the top; I'd watched people get so excited to join a company only to be drained by its culture, and I didn't want that. Then came a very flat phase — November, December, essentially zero results. January and February I prepared and started applying, and in March it skyrocketed. I had weeks with ten to fifteen interviews, and you have to be the best version of yourself in every single one. I used every resource IPM offered — every class, mock interviews with coaches, mock interviews with community members. No recruiter ever told me no; my conversion rate from recruiter call to hiring manager was 100%.

I landed at Lyft as a Senior Product Manager in the fulfillment organization — the team responsible for matching drivers and riders as efficiently as possible. Think of it as the heart and brain of Lyft, a genuinely critical role, and the culture is exactly the kind of friendly, open environment I'd prioritized. My advice for anyone considering IPM: don't assume every program will land you a job — that's false — but even if it were true, ask what you'll be left with afterward. Not every program gives you a community and resources you can keep using, and there's real support after you land, too. And on the AI question: this isn't a program where you just chat with a bot. There's AI that helps drive things further, but it's paired with human judgment — and AI is only as good as your prompts, which are only as good as your understanding of what you actually want.