Recruiter reached out to share two PM positions, both centered on AI. One was inside FAIR, focused on external moonshot applications. The other was internally focused, building AI tooling for company-wide recommendation systems. I elected to interview for the former, insisting I did not have any desire to interview for a generic position that put me in some bullpen, only to find a team later. Recruiter assured me this was definitely the case for the FAIR job but indicated they would still consider me for the latter anyway. Recruiter did screening. Then I had two interviews with different ppl. One was product sense; the other product execution. Despite the heavily technical, specialized, external-facing nature of the role, my interviews focused on bog-standard PM questions with an emphasis on typical consumer social products. One interviewer was a mid-career PM focused on internal biz ops dashboards. The other had less than 2 years of experience total and declined to say what they actually worked on (presumably, they're in some kind of APM role). In both interviews, I focused my answers on... AI things... while making sure to stick to the basic structured thinking formats people expect in PM interviews. Unfortunately, neither interview knew anything about AI. So I needed to explain a lot of what, for the position I was shooting for, should have been foundational knowledge. In the end I didn't advance to the next round. Rejections happen all the time for PM. Sometimes you just flub the flow and sometimes you nail everything but still don't go through. As much as the industry doesn't want to admit it, it's a harder role to quantify than something like a SDE. Getting rejected didn't bother me so much as the fact that I felt like the interview process was just part of a the same, blunt meat-grinding machine. I get contacted all the time by Meta and always decline bc that's not experience I want in an interview or in a job. The recruiter really pitched that the job and process here would be a little different, but in the end it wasn't.