Ray

I spent the last eight years in the HR space as a principal product manager, working in B2B SaaS — always in compliance-heavy, highly regulated, multi-stakeholder environments in the back and middle office. I landed at Iron Mountain as a Principal Product Manager working on their digital HR agentic solutions.

Before this, I was laid off in February — and that was actually the second time I'd been laid off in a year. The first time, I was on my own, sending out resumes and applications and not knowing where they landed. It was like dropping something into a hole and nothing comes out. The second challenge was never knowing how my interviews went — because of legal reasons companies can't share actionable feedback, so I was constantly wondering whether I was doing well or not, with no way to qualify it.

I started looking for external support, because we don't know what we don't know, and those unknown unknowns are our biggest gap. I reached out to a number of coaching programs and chose IJS for two reasons: it was more affordable than the others, and the program works with you until you land your job. My aha moment came once I joined and actually saw the process — a step-by-step program to get ramped up and prepped, starting with the angle of mastery and building the fundamentals so everything else sits on top of them, the same way we build as product managers. Instead of vague, wishy-washy coaching, it helped me shore up my weak areas.

This company reached out to me on March 1st — I was still optimizing my LinkedIn profile — because of the activity I was doing on LinkedIn. Following our LinkedIn coach's recommendations, I was posting relevant content and generating engagement, and that's what got me noticed. When I pitched my angle of mastery and TAM to the recruiter, she literally said "wow" on the call and pushed me straight to the hiring manager. I used the same approach with him to build rapport. What sustained me throughout was the community — there were always group activities I could jump into, ask questions, and have discussions. That constant reinforcement kept my confidence up instead of sitting alone for days feeling down. I came into every interview bringing my best energy from start to finish.

If I were sitting down with someone in the spot I was in before IJS, I'd tell them this: it's a committed program and community that acts as a sounding board for reflecting back on yourself — something I haven't found anywhere else. It's really hard to see ourselves internally, and IJS helps you identify your strengths and where you thrive. It helps anyone in a job search, especially product managers, and it keeps up with how the role is changing with AI — training you to think about agentic AI and the problem space, which makes you far more attractive to any company you interview with.