Prabhjot

I've been a product manager for about eight years. I started as a software engineer and then moved into product, but my PM journey has been more of a consulting PM than a product-company PM — which became one of my biggest inhibitions in the US market. I started in the insurance sector in India, then worked with compliance teams in Canada, and spent my last three years in the US in hardware. It's been a real mix-and-match journey, and I'm now a PM at Axon on the body-worn camera team — the device you see on almost every police officer. Axon is leaning heavily into AI and building a bridge into what I call physical AI, which was a big reason I joined.

To be honest, my biggest roadblock was that this was my first time searching for a job in the US market. When you come from India or Canada, you don't realize how much it comes down to your stories — that's a skill in itself, and I wasn't focusing on it. The interviews here go so much deeper into your stories than what I was used to. I was frustrated because, as Shobhit always says, there are ten ways to say the same thing, and I just wasn't hitting the right one.

What kept me going was the structure of the program and the people in it. When I joined, I was given a big list of to-dos, and the mentors had strict instructions: don't apply until you finish them. Looking back, that was exactly right. The questions and the format they gave me forced me to actually think through my stories — I remember seven or eight rounds of back-and-forth with a coach before one answer was finally good enough. Then came the mocks, with coaches and with peers. The early feedback felt brutal, but that's what made me better day by day. Those peer mocks turned into real friendships and referrals — one of them led to an offer. And along the way I discovered things about my own work I never knew how to articulate before.

When it came to landing the role, a referral got my foot in the door while I was interviewing with five organizations in parallel. The thing that made the difference was a presentation I built around one star project — end to end, with go-to-market and pricing. I opened it in every interview, and people could see the actual work and dig into it. My Axon role had actually filled while I dealt with some personal situations, then reopened two months later and they reached back out. I ended up with two offers, and Shobhit pushed me to negotiate for what I deserved — something I would have been too shy to do on my own. Transitioning into AI came down to leveraging my past experience: my previous product was a first-of-its-kind physical-AI product, which mapped almost directly to what Axon and the other companies wanted.

My advice to anyone considering Intentional Product Manager: don't treat it as magic that hands you a job. It takes real work — at least 10 to 12 hours a week on top of your day job — and you have to take the feedback seriously, even when it means chasing people around. But if you put in that work, it delivers.