How Growth Leaders Can Stand Out in 2025’s Brutal Hiring Market

A step-by-step breakdown of how to prep for interviews using product thinking, growth modeling, and strategy-level insight.

Mar 23, 2025

A super talented growth designer I’ve been coaching is getting laid off at the end of March. Now we’re doing everything we can to help them stand out in interviews.

They’re not a Head of Growth (yet), but they were on a cross-functional growth team with ambition to grow into a leadership role. So we shifted our focus from maximizing impact at their current company to finding the next company where they can thrive.

They just landed an interview with a big player in the PLG space (a popular product you’ve probably used).

In this post, I’ll walk you through exactly how we’re preparing for that interview process, so you can steal the same approach if you’re job-hunting in 2025.

We’ll cover:

How to study a new product like a pro
How to reverse-engineer a company’s growth model
How to walk into an interview as a peer, not just a candidate

If you work in growth and you’re thinking about your next move, this will help you prep with confidence, and stand out in a brutally competitive hiring market.

Explore like a power-user. Investigate like a growth lead.

First, we signed up for the free plan, walked through the onboarding flow, and upgraded to a paid plan.

It’s the fastest way to get inside a company’s growth engine when you’re on the outside. As we moved through the experience, we paid attention to every screen and decision point. We studied the questions asked in the signup process, the choices given during the onboarding flow, and how they bundled features across their three paid plans.

That gave us insight into how their team thinks about activation, monetization, and user segmentation - from what was visible in the UI.

We also debated where the “aha” moment likely was, and took a stab at defining their north star metric (the KPI that connects what users care about with how the business grows).

That simple exercise helped my client shift from “user mode” into “growth leader mode” seeing the product as a business, not just a tool. This kind of hands-on exploration is super helpful for interview prep. It not only shows that you care - it shows that you get how growth, product, and UX connect.

If you're job-hunting for a PLG role, start by becoming a power user. It’s how you earn the right to talk strategy.

Reverse-engineer how they actually grow.

Once we had a guesstimate of their north star metric, we started thinking holistically about how they grow.

We took things one step further by sketching out the main components of their growth model. We looked at their:

Acquisition loops + channels (basically how people find out about them.
Features and playbooks that drive retention (what makes people stick around).
How they convert free users into paying customers (how they make money).

We also discussed their user’s jobs to be done - why people sign-up in the first place. And their go-to market strategy - how they balance 1:1 sales with product-led workflows.

We weren’t trying to be perfect. Just trying to be directionally close.

This gave us a pretty good idea how the business operated. It explained how everything worked together. And it showed my client how their design work fits into the bigger picture.

If you want to stand out in growth interviews, build a mental model of how the business works. It’s the foundation for everything else.

But we didn’t stop there.

Pressure-test your assumptions with whatever real data you can find.

We were able to find a surprising amount of public data using GPT for research: usage stats, pricing details, online reviews, press-releases, and anything else available.

We used it to turn our conceptual model into a simple spreadsheet.

The data obviously wasn’t perfect. But it was close enough to pressure-test the model: What metrics might be lagging? What would you prioritize if you were on this team?

That’s where things got really fun - and really valuable.

Because now my client could come to the interview with real hypotheses about what’s working, what’s not, and where they could add value.

And as someone who’s interviewed hundreds of people in my own career, most candidates don’t do this.

Show them how you think, not just what you’ve done.

After going through the exercise above, we landed on the hypothesis this company was probably focused on improving retention.

So we brainstormed 15-20 ideas to help them improve retention. Everything from onboarding changes, habit loops, to lifecycle content.

We ranked each idea using the ICE score framework (a framework to prioritize based on Impact Confidence, and Effort). We made some educated guesses, leaned on previous case studies, and our own experience. The result was a short list of 5 high-upside ideas.

Now my client had a strategic point of view they could bring to the interview.

Not just, “here’s what I’d do,” but…“Here’s what I think might be going on. Here’s some ideas I’d explore. And here’s the process I followed to get there.”

That level of prep shows critical thinking, it creates much deeper conversations, and it’s closer to the actual work you’ll be doing if you get the job.

Most importantly for now, it’s an opportunity to completely stand out from other interviewers.

Most people won’t do this - and that’s the point.

You could argue this is overkill for a growth designer second round interview.

And if this was 2021, you might be right (although I’d argue you should always do this amount of prep if you actually want the job). But this is 2025. The market’s different. The bar is higher. And the days of recruiters flooding your Linkedin messages are over.

If you want to stand out, you need to go beyond surface-level prep. That’s what this process was all about.

To recap:

Study the product like a power user.
Reverse-engineer the growth model.
Guesstimate areas where there’s leverage.
Generate smart, contextual ideas.
Show them how you think, not just what you’ve done.

This is how you make hiring managers say, “we need this person.”

And if you need help navigating a tough job market, prepping for a big interview, or just feeling stuck in your current role, I can help.

I coach people who work on growth teams and want to level up into confident, strategic leaders. If that sounds like you, reach out here and let’s chat.