Interview process: Applied for a Senior PM role on an internal AI product online. The recruiter was candid that the role was brand new and she had limited context from the hiring manager. She described the first round as a "technical interview," which I prepared for thoroughly given my 5+ years as a technical PM with experience collaborating closely with engineering and architecture teams. What actually happened: The interviewer shared their screen within seconds of introductions and asked me to write SQL from scratch. No context, no product problem, no conversation — just a live coding test for 3 questions. When I asked whether dashboards and tooling would be available on the job (a reasonable question for a PM role), I was told no. I was honest that haven't written SQL code in nearly a decade, but I walked through the logic clearly in plain terms. The interview wrapped up in under 20 minutes. A week later I received a rejection citing SQL proficiency as the reason. What was missing: None of this was mentioned in the job description. The recruiter had no knowledge of it either. She was doing her best with nearly zero guidance from the hiring manager. There was no product sense question, no strategy discussion, no hiring manager conversation which is unusual for a PM interview process regardless of level. Expecting a PM to hand-write SQL as a first-round filter, before any conversation about judgment, vision, or customer understanding, reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of the role. Advice to Adobe Brief your recruiters thoroughly before sending candidates into a process especially for new roles. If SQL is a hard requirement for a PM position, say so in the job description. A 20-minute coding screen with no introduction and no follow-up conversation does not evaluate product leadership. It evaluates syntax recall. These are not the same thing.

It was a great process up until the end, when I was completely ghosted. I had been referred and went through every stage of the interview process, making it to the final two candidates. The process took about two months in total. It started when a friend referred me. A few days later, the recruiter reached out to set up a call with the hiring manager for the following week. After that call, another two weeks passed before I had three separate one-on-one interviews with team members, all on the same day. About a week later, they scheduled the final skip-level interview with the hiring manager’s boss, which took place another week after that. (To be fair, Memorial Day and Adobe’s summer shutdown week both fell during this process.) The interviews themselves were pretty easy — mostly behavioral questions that felt more like conversations. However, the skip-level interview felt off from the start, almost like she didn’t want to be there. Immediately after the final interview, I asked about their timeline for making a decision but never got a response. I waited a couple of weeks and followed up, but heard nothing. A week later, my friend who referred me told me they had chosen the other finalist, who was an internal candidate. It’s crazy to think they put me through the entire process without the decency to give me any feedback or even reply to my email. The following week, I received the generic automated rejection email. What’s more frustrating is that Adobe’s own career site says candidates will receive feedback. Instead, I was ghosted. Very disappointing, especially since this was my dream company. At least give people feedback as advertised.