Framework 01 · Movement I — Hiring & matching
Matching is broken
The best senior PMs and the teams that need them keep failing to find each other. That is not bad luck. It is the design of the funnel.
A senior PM with a decade of real wins sends out forty applications and hears back on three. Same month, two doors down, a head of product swears there is no good senior talent on the market. Both of them are telling the truth.
The market sorts on the things that fit in a six-second scan: keyword overlap, company logos, title progression. None of those is the thing that actually predicts a great senior PM, which is judgment under ambiguity. The real signal lives in narrative and in the calls you made when the answer was not obvious, and that signal does not survive a keyword filter.
So the funnel does exactly what it was built to do, and it filters out the wrong people. Strong PMs get screened on shallow proxies. Teams interview for the legible version of the job and miss the candidate who would have been great. Everyone optimizes for the filter, and the filter is measuring the wrong thing.
It gets worse the more senior the role. The higher you go, the more of the value is judgment and the less of it is anything you can put on a resume line. The matching system is least accurate exactly where the stakes are highest.
The best senior PMs are the easiest ones to filter out. Their value does not fit in a keyword.
What to do with it
If you are the PM: stop optimizing for the filter and build the narrative that makes your judgment legible to a human. If you are the team: interview for judgment, not for pattern-match, and you will hire the person everyone else screened out.
From idea to practice
This one runs as a team workshop, and it is part of the coaching.