Pranathi

I've been a product manager for about 12 years, starting as a category manager at Flipkart in India before it became part of Walmart, then moving through Amazon India, Amazon US, and now Apple, working mostly on large-scale platform products.

Two things brought me to Intentional Job Search. First, I'd moved from India to the US a few years earlier, and job searching here works completely differently — nobody cares which college you went to back home, and a lot of what felt like common sense there doesn't apply here. Second, I'd had a baby about a year and a half before, and between recovering from pregnancy and ongoing illness, I needed help figuring out how to keep moving my career forward rather than putting it on pause.

What convinced me to join was a conversation with one of the coaches, Sarah — she understood what a product manager actually does and where PMs get stuck, in a way that felt genuinely useful rather than a sales pitch. Other programs I evaluated felt disconnected from what PM hiring is actually like.

The road map was the first thing that stood out: I didn't have to plan my own prep, I just had to execute against a plan that was already there, picking up small chunks whenever I had time. Because of my son's health, I ended up taking a lot of breaks, but I could always come back and pick up exactly where I'd left off — that flexibility mattered a lot.

The behavioral structure changed how I approached interviews. I practiced "tell me about yourself" enough times that I could deliver it without thinking, which freed up the rest of the conversation. As the market shifted and AI picked up, the program's content shifted with it, which helped me piece together how to position myself for what was changing in the industry. I did a lot of one-on-one networking to find people who could refer me, had a few introductory coffee chats, and eventually landed my AI product management role at Apple.

There was no time pressure from the program, which mattered more than almost anything else — life was already hard enough without adding a deadline on top of it. Whatever effort I put in, I got real value back out.