Your 15 years experience isn’t the problem. Where you’re looking is.
Senior PM hiring is surging in places you’re not looking. Here’s where to redirect your search.
I’ve been looking at job postings lately with a specific kind of exhaustion. You know the one where you read a role description and think, “I could do this in my sleep,” only to see they’re asking for 3-5 years of experience. Maybe seven if they’re feeling generous.
The ungenerous truth: I have significantly more than that. And somehow, that feels like a liability.
For weeks, I assumed this was just how things are now. The market loves the young coder archetype. Energy over wisdom. Potential over proof. I’d scroll through listings, increasingly convinced that my experience was pricing me out of opportunities I was perfectly built for.
Then I looked at the actual data. And it told me a completely different story.
The numbers say the opposite of what the job boards suggest.
Senior product manager roles grew 87% in the past year at major firms. Not junior roles - those only grew 16%. Mid-size companies and multinationals saw senior PM openings surge by 243% and 255% respectively.
Meanwhile, startups? Down 33% for senior positions.
So the market is hiring experienced PMs. Just not everywhere. And definitely not where I’d been looking.
I think we’re searching in the wrong buildings.
The startup ecosystem - where a lot of us cut our teeth, where the job boards are most active, where the “PM culture” feels most concentrated - has become less hospitable to experienced professionals. Not because experience doesn’t matter, but because startups are currently optimized for different things.
Speed, scrappiness, people who’ll accept equity over salary, and ambiguity over structure.
But multinationals and mid-size firms? They’re actively hunting for what we have. They want people who’ve seen multiple product lifecycles, who can navigate organizational complexity, who don’t need their hand held through stakeholder management.
The challenge isn’t that our experience is worthless. It’s that we’re still applying to companies optimized for the person we used to be.
The other thing the data revealed is that static expertise is becoming risky.
I’ve been thinking about the PMs I know who’ve stayed in one domain for their entire career. The ones who became “the fintech PM” or “the healthcare PM” or - and this one hits close - ”the content and information product PM.”
Some of those domains are evaporating. AI is quietly making entire categories of information-heavy products obsolete. The skills that made someone valuable in 2020 might not translate to 2025, not because they weren’t good skills, but because the ground shifted.
The PMs thriving right now aren’t the ones with the deepest expertise in a single domain. They’re the ones who’ve hopped - strategically, intentionally—across functions and industries. They’ve built a portfolio of experiences that compound rather than calcify.
This isn’t the old advice about “staying at a company for two years to show loyalty.” This is about recognizing that product management itself is evolving faster than any single domain can keep up with.
Your career progression isn’t about climbing a ladder anymore. It’s about building a web.
What I’m trying.
I wrote recently about how the product management job everyone wants might not exist anymore. Companies are distributing product capabilities across roles rather than concentrating them in a single PM. That post was about recognizing the shift. This one is about what you do in response to it.
I can’t promise any of this will work, but I can tell you where I’m redirecting my energy.
Target the buildings where experience is currency.
Mid-size firms, multinationals, companies with complex org structures. Places where my 15 years is an asset, not an overqualification. This means filtering out 70% of the “exciting” startup listings and focusing on the less glamorous but more receptive opportunities.
Tell the domain-hopping story as a strategic evolution.
I’m not a generalist because I couldn’t commit. I’m adaptable because I saw the patterns repeat across industries. The trick is framing your diverse experience as pattern recognition, not indecision.
You’ve seen how customer discovery looks different in healthcare versus fintech versus B2B SaaS, and that breadth is what lets you move faster in new contexts.
Get specific about distributed capability.
If product work is spreading across roles, what’s your superpower in that ecosystem? Maybe you’re the person who can coach non-PMs through discovery, or the one who translates technical complexity for business stakeholders.
Get clear on your value in a world where “product manager” might not be the title on the door. The more specific you can be about what you bring to a fragmented product org, the easier it becomes to show up as irreplaceable rather than redundant.
The entry-level job search is about proving you can do the work. The experienced job search is about finding the specific environment where your skills solve their particular set of problems.
It’s slower. It requires more precision. It’s frustrating in different ways.
Where this leaves us.
I’m working with a company I like as a contractor, but I haven’t landed that dream product role yet. I’m writing this from inside the uncertainty, not from the other side with a neat bow on it.
The market data doesn’t lie. Experienced PMs are being hired. The disconnect between what I’m seeing and what’s actually happening tells me I’m looking in the wrong places, not that I’m the wrong person.
Maybe you’re feeling that same disconnect. That creeping sense that your experience is working against you, that you’ve somehow aged out of relevance in a field that’s supposed to value judgment and strategic thinking.
The data suggests otherwise. The challenge is finding the companies that know what they need, and recognizing that those companies might not be the ones dominating your LinkedIn feed.
If you’re a few years (or more than a few years) into this career, hunting for what’s next, think about where you’re actually looking. Are you targeting the places that value what you’ve built, or still chasing the companies optimized for who you used to be?
It turns out there is a market for experience. It’s just not where we thought it was.
Until next week,
Mike @ Product Party
Want to connect? Send me a message on LinkedIn, Bluesky, Threads, or Instagram.
PS I’d love to hear from those of you navigating this right now. Are you seeing the same patterns? Have you successfully pivoted your search toward companies that value depth over hustle? Hit Leave a comment - I read every response, and your insights might shape the next piece.
References
Product Management Hiring Trends 2025
State of the Product Job Market
Product Management Jobs Report - August 2025
How to Make a Mid-Career Transition to Product Management
Product Management Trends in 2025
Good analysis, Mike!