Jason Schwannecke

My career really started out as a civil engineer. I did that for five or six years working for consulting engineering companies in the oil and gas energy space, then went back and got my MBA because I wanted to focus more on business and customer problems. I landed doing that in the automotive space, working for large companies and small companies, and really found my niche wanting to focus on customers and bringing customer value — which is how I entered product management. That's where I developed a love for creating human-centered design products.

Then my employment situation changed. I'd been at a job for a couple of years, and through all the downsizing going on in the economy, I found myself looking for the next opportunity — but I really didn't know what that was going to be. For the first month, a former co-worker and I were going to start our own business. Then our wives told us we needed to get a real job. So I tried the search on my own for about a month and just realized it's hard to do it by yourself. My maturity as a professional over the years has taught me when to ask for help, and I realized going at the job search alone was just too hard. I wanted direction and support from a community.

Two things convinced me to invest. The first was access to the community — other participants going through the same thing, some of whom I still keep in touch with now that I've graduated. The second was access to coaches who are currently working in hiring manager positions. Having mentors you wouldn't otherwise have access to, who can tell you in real time how an interview response actually lands and how they'd approach things in your shoes, accelerates the process enormously.

Because I was out of work, I went at it full time, and the surprising part was how hard it was to get the pacing right. Even with all that free time, human nature is to procrastinate. The roadmap gave me the organization I needed, and the different coaching roles mattered more than I expected — the support coach especially, because in a job search you feel so isolated and sometimes you just need a thought partner or an encourager to come alongside you.

One of the hardest things to do on your own is create the narrative about your best self. All the right stories are in there, but you need help extracting those threads out, and doing that with multiple people is what makes it work. The most surprising thing I learned is that I'd put a lot of pressure on myself to get it right perfectly the first time, when really it's iterative. You write something down with a coach, then you change it a dozen times — every mock interview, every real interview. Doing it enough is what makes you good at it.

What ultimately pushed me to join was an interview where I got through the hiring manager round and then did really badly on the product sense interview. Through the community I learned how people were using AI to prep for it, and I built my own approach with the different AI tools out there. From there I got real traction: within one week I had eight different interviews across three different companies. I poured everything into that stretch and ended up with two offers, then used the negotiation tactics the team suggested to get the best offer of the two. It landed me in a role that's been a great fit.

I'd describe the program as an accountability program and a community. Accountability first, because what I needed was someone to hold me accountable, get rid of the procrastination, and also come alongside me and hold my hand through the process — that's what a good coach does. And the community part is where the unplanned things happen. One relationship started as just doing mock interviews together, then turned into comparing which companies we were targeting, and then into building AI tools to showcase our skills on the side. That side project is now one of the main value-creation pieces I bring to my new company. I never would have thought to do any of that; it just happened organically.

My advice to anyone weighing the decision is to look at it with both halves of your brain. On the human side, you need someone to help you — it's valuable to have more than one person working on the same problem as you. On the practical side, yes it's an investment, but think about how long it takes to land a job on your own and the opportunity cost of not working. If you can get back into the workforce faster and upskill along the way, the likelihood of not getting a better job or a better salary than you had before is extremely low. The probability is on your side.

One honest caveat: this isn't a passive program. You have to be proactive and drive your own progress. They hold you accountable, but you have to initiate.

Looking back, it was a great personal growth experience in a lot of ways. The lessons about perseverance, asking for help, and mindset went not only into my current role but into other parts of my life. I have young children, and those were unexpected benefits.