This month we spoke with three recruiters about the trend they're observing with companies more aggressively seeking industry expertise and deeper vertical domain knowledge from their Product Management hires.
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Meet this month's Recruiter Roundtable:
Kim Benedict is CEO & Co-Founder of TalentMinded Inc., one of Canada's fastest-growing, female-founded and led recruiting solutions companies. A talent acquisition leader and entrepreneur, Kim pioneered the subscription-based recruiting model, helping companies take a more flexible, modern approach to hiring.
Andrew Shaw, Head of Executive Search at The Product Recruiter, specializes in helping organizations hire senior product leaders across North America. His work sits at the intersection of product leadership, executive search, and the evolving skills companies need to succeed in an AI-driven world.
Neha Khurram is a Career Transition & Startup Coach with over 12 years of experience helping ambitious professionals navigate the tech ecosystem across North America. Drawing from her experience hiring 1000+ tech candidates and leading the venture community at MaRS, her advisory spans job search strategy, personal branding, leadership development, and entrepreneurship in the age of AI.
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Kim Benedict: None of these priorities is new. What is new is how consistently we are hearing them, how strongly hiring managers are emphasizing them, and how central they have become to the ideal candidate profile.
Across roles, levels and industries, hiring managers are placing far more weight on three dimensions of a candidate's experience: depth and breadth in a particular domain, specific industry knowledge and visible upward career progression.
-
Andrew Shaw: We're seeing this constantly right now, and it's not evenly spread. The pressure is heaviest in regulated or high-stakes verticals: healthcare, fintech/banking, gaming and betting, insurance. It's much lighter in horizontal B2B SaaS, dev tools, and infra, where the underlying problem space doesn't carry compliance or licensing risk.
It also skews senior.
A mid-level PM building a feature roadmap gets more slack than a Director or VP who owns a decision with regulatory or fraud exposure. At that level, "strong PM" is table stakes and domain fluency has become the actual filter.
-
Neha Khurram: There’s been a definite shift towards companies seeking PMs with vertical expertise. The PM role remains a generalist in that they must understand the full product lifecycle and collaborate with other departments such as sales, marketing, and engineering - but having deep domain or industry expertise in the company’s business vertical...sets PMs a part from other candidates.
Kim Benedict: With depth and breadth in a domain, employers want people who understand more than the mechanics of a role. They are looking for knowledge developed by working through a particular type of problem repeatedly: recognizing patterns, anticipating challenges and knowing which questions to ask. Depth shows that you understand the details. Breadth shows that you can connect those details to the wider business.
With specific industry knowledge, industry experience provides another kind of context: how the organization makes money, who buys, what customers expect, how decisions get made and which regulatory or operational realities shape the work. Employers increasingly see that familiarity as a way to shorten ramp-up time and reduce hiring risk.
Andrew Shaw: There's also a market-conditions piece that has nothing to do with AI. Hiring has been down, funding is tighter, and hiring managers have deeper candidate pools to choose from. When you can see fifteen strong applicants instead of four, "already knows our world" becomes a free filter to apply, whether or not it's the right one.
The AI angle is real, but it's not what most people think. AI hasn't made domain expertise more valuable by teaching PMs about healthcare or gaming regulation. It's made the generic parts of the job cheap.
Writing specs, synthesizing user interviews, drafting a roadmap deck, first-pass competitive analysis: a capable PM with an AI tool can now do in an afternoon what used to take a week, and that week used to justify hiring a generalist and letting them ramp. When execution speed stops being the bottleneck, judgment becomes the whole job, and judgment in a regulated or high-complexity vertical takes real time in that vertical to build.
Companies aren't willing to pay for that ramp anymore because AI removed their excuse to.
-
Kim Benedict: Our read is that uncertainty is driving organizations toward what feels proven. Hiring managers do not know exactly which skills their teams will need in the years ahead, how roles will evolve or which ways of working will last. But they do know which problems need to be solved now.
That makes experience feel like a safer bet. Someone who already understands the problem, the industry and the operating environment appears more likely to contribute quickly, recognize what matters and make sound decisions with less direction.
The less certain employers are about what comes next, the more specific they are becoming about the experience they want now.
This does not mean employers are simply looking backward. They are looking for judgment that has already been developed and can be applied to something new. In a market that feels harder to predict, experience is increasingly being used as a proxy for readiness.
-
Neha Khurram: In the age of AI, significant industry expertise with generalist skills stands out.
As you go across different industries, the PM role changes, the product lifecycle is different; the supply of PMs is far greater than before, and AI can draft general plans - but deep expertise and knowledge of the end user, channels, and development of niche products sets candidates a part in a sea of applications.
In Canada especially, the trend of Service Designers that implement Product Management principles to design and develop services is a good example of how vertical expertise (service based client delivery) leverages general PM expertise.
Kim Benedict: For job seekers, the implication is straightforward. It is no longer enough to list the skills you have or expect an employer to connect the dots. You need to make the value of your experience unmistakable.
Make the throughline clear: what you understand deeply, where you learned to apply it and how your career has prepared you for what comes next. Don’t leave the hiring manager to make those connections for you.
1. Get specific about what you know. A job title does not explain your expertise. Identify the problems you understand deeply, the environments in which you have operated and the decisions you are equipped to make. Name them clearly rather than expecting someone to infer them from your chronology.
2. Show the progression, not just the promotions. Make it easy to see how your scope, complexity, influence and accountability grew. If an important step was a lateral move, expanded mandate or difficult assignment, explain how it moved you forward rather than relying on the title to tell the story.
3. Turn responsibilities into evidence. Listing what you were responsible for shows that you held the job. It does not show the judgment you developed. Use examples that explain the situation, the decision you made, why you made it and what happened as a result.
4. Build the bridge when changing industries. A career change is still possible, but the connection needs to be credible. Explain which customer dynamics, business models, regulations, technologies or operating challenges carry over. Then show what you are doing to close the remaining knowledge gap.
5. Choose your next move deliberately. Consider more than title and compensation. Ask what a role will help you understand more deeply, what new context it will add and whether it will give you greater scope or harder problems to solve. The strongest career moves add another meaningful layer to the story you will need to tell next.
-
Neha Khurram: Years of experience and/or education in a specific vertical such as finance or healthcare provides an edge, but pivoting industries as a PM can beeasier than other roles, as PMs are often versatile, resourceful and generalist by nature.
As a start, you could look for certificates that provide knowledge and practical application within a new vertical you want to enter; consider pro-bono consulting; or jump into vibe-coding solutions for your target industry. There are a few ways to paint a coherent picture of where you’re headed next as a PM committed to mastering a vertical.
-
Andrew Shaw: The instinct to lock into one industry forever is the wrong takeaway. What this trend actually rewards is naming your domain fluency in specific, evidence-backed terms rather than assuming your title carries it.
If you've spent three years in fintech, don't just say "fintech PM": say what you actually know, KYC/AML workflows, payment rails, chargeback economics, whatever it is specifically. If you're trying to break into a new vertical, build a paper trail before you apply: informational interviews with people already in that space, a side project or case study using public data from that industry, certifications where they exist (insurance, healthcare compliance).
None of that replaces years of experience, but it gives a hiring manager something concrete to point to instead of defaulting to "no vertical experience, pass."
This keeps intensifying in the highest-risk verticals and stays mostly irrelevant everywhere else. The PMs who do best won't be the ones who picked a lane early and never left it. It'll be the ones who get explicit and specific about what their domain experience actually taught them, so it reads as evidence instead of a label.
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This month we spoke with three recruiters about the trend they're observing with companies more aggressively seeking industry expertise and deeper vertical domain knowledge from their Product Management hires.
--
Meet this month's Recruiter Roundtable:
Kim Benedict is CEO & Co-Founder of TalentMinded Inc., one of Canada's fastest-growing, female-founded and led recruiting solutions companies. A talent acquisition leader and entrepreneur, Kim pioneered the subscription-based recruiting model, helping companies take a more flexible, modern approach to hiring.
Andrew Shaw, Head of Executive Search at The Product Recruiter, specializes in helping organizations hire senior product leaders across North America. His work sits at the intersection of product leadership, executive search, and the evolving skills companies need to succeed in an AI-driven world.
Neha Khurram is a Career Transition & Startup Coach with over 12 years of experience helping ambitious professionals navigate the tech ecosystem across North America. Drawing from her experience hiring 1000+ tech candidates and leading the venture community at MaRS, her advisory spans job search strategy, personal branding, leadership development, and entrepreneurship in the age of AI.
--
Kim Benedict: None of these priorities is new. What is new is how consistently we are hearing them, how strongly hiring managers are emphasizing them, and how central they have become to the ideal candidate profile.
Across roles, levels and industries, hiring managers are placing far more weight on three dimensions of a candidate's experience: depth and breadth in a particular domain, specific industry knowledge and visible upward career progression.
-
Andrew Shaw: We're seeing this constantly right now, and it's not evenly spread. The pressure is heaviest in regulated or high-stakes verticals: healthcare, fintech/banking, gaming and betting, insurance. It's much lighter in horizontal B2B SaaS, dev tools, and infra, where the underlying problem space doesn't carry compliance or licensing risk.
It also skews senior.
A mid-level PM building a feature roadmap gets more slack than a Director or VP who owns a decision with regulatory or fraud exposure. At that level, "strong PM" is table stakes and domain fluency has become the actual filter.
-
Neha Khurram: There’s been a definite shift towards companies seeking PMs with vertical expertise. The PM role remains a generalist in that they must understand the full product lifecycle and collaborate with other departments such as sales, marketing, and engineering - but having deep domain or industry expertise in the company’s business vertical...sets PMs a part from other candidates.
Kim Benedict: With depth and breadth in a domain, employers want people who understand more than the mechanics of a role. They are looking for knowledge developed by working through a particular type of problem repeatedly: recognizing patterns, anticipating challenges and knowing which questions to ask. Depth shows that you understand the details. Breadth shows that you can connect those details to the wider business.
With specific industry knowledge, industry experience provides another kind of context: how the organization makes money, who buys, what customers expect, how decisions get made and which regulatory or operational realities shape the work. Employers increasingly see that familiarity as a way to shorten ramp-up time and reduce hiring risk.
Andrew Shaw: There's also a market-conditions piece that has nothing to do with AI. Hiring has been down, funding is tighter, and hiring managers have deeper candidate pools to choose from. When you can see fifteen strong applicants instead of four, "already knows our world" becomes a free filter to apply, whether or not it's the right one.
The AI angle is real, but it's not what most people think. AI hasn't made domain expertise more valuable by teaching PMs about healthcare or gaming regulation. It's made the generic parts of the job cheap.
Writing specs, synthesizing user interviews, drafting a roadmap deck, first-pass competitive analysis: a capable PM with an AI tool can now do in an afternoon what used to take a week, and that week used to justify hiring a generalist and letting them ramp. When execution speed stops being the bottleneck, judgment becomes the whole job, and judgment in a regulated or high-complexity vertical takes real time in that vertical to build.
Companies aren't willing to pay for that ramp anymore because AI removed their excuse to.
-
Kim Benedict: Our read is that uncertainty is driving organizations toward what feels proven. Hiring managers do not know exactly which skills their teams will need in the years ahead, how roles will evolve or which ways of working will last. But they do know which problems need to be solved now.
That makes experience feel like a safer bet. Someone who already understands the problem, the industry and the operating environment appears more likely to contribute quickly, recognize what matters and make sound decisions with less direction.
The less certain employers are about what comes next, the more specific they are becoming about the experience they want now.
This does not mean employers are simply looking backward. They are looking for judgment that has already been developed and can be applied to something new. In a market that feels harder to predict, experience is increasingly being used as a proxy for readiness.
-
Neha Khurram: In the age of AI, significant industry expertise with generalist skills stands out.
As you go across different industries, the PM role changes, the product lifecycle is different; the supply of PMs is far greater than before, and AI can draft general plans - but deep expertise and knowledge of the end user, channels, and development of niche products sets candidates a part in a sea of applications.
In Canada especially, the trend of Service Designers that implement Product Management principles to design and develop services is a good example of how vertical expertise (service based client delivery) leverages general PM expertise.
Kim Benedict: For job seekers, the implication is straightforward. It is no longer enough to list the skills you have or expect an employer to connect the dots. You need to make the value of your experience unmistakable.
Make the throughline clear: what you understand deeply, where you learned to apply it and how your career has prepared you for what comes next. Don’t leave the hiring manager to make those connections for you.
1. Get specific about what you know. A job title does not explain your expertise. Identify the problems you understand deeply, the environments in which you have operated and the decisions you are equipped to make. Name them clearly rather than expecting someone to infer them from your chronology.
2. Show the progression, not just the promotions. Make it easy to see how your scope, complexity, influence and accountability grew. If an important step was a lateral move, expanded mandate or difficult assignment, explain how it moved you forward rather than relying on the title to tell the story.
3. Turn responsibilities into evidence. Listing what you were responsible for shows that you held the job. It does not show the judgment you developed. Use examples that explain the situation, the decision you made, why you made it and what happened as a result.
4. Build the bridge when changing industries. A career change is still possible, but the connection needs to be credible. Explain which customer dynamics, business models, regulations, technologies or operating challenges carry over. Then show what you are doing to close the remaining knowledge gap.
5. Choose your next move deliberately. Consider more than title and compensation. Ask what a role will help you understand more deeply, what new context it will add and whether it will give you greater scope or harder problems to solve. The strongest career moves add another meaningful layer to the story you will need to tell next.
-
Neha Khurram: Years of experience and/or education in a specific vertical such as finance or healthcare provides an edge, but pivoting industries as a PM can beeasier than other roles, as PMs are often versatile, resourceful and generalist by nature.
As a start, you could look for certificates that provide knowledge and practical application within a new vertical you want to enter; consider pro-bono consulting; or jump into vibe-coding solutions for your target industry. There are a few ways to paint a coherent picture of where you’re headed next as a PM committed to mastering a vertical.
-
Andrew Shaw: The instinct to lock into one industry forever is the wrong takeaway. What this trend actually rewards is naming your domain fluency in specific, evidence-backed terms rather than assuming your title carries it.
If you've spent three years in fintech, don't just say "fintech PM": say what you actually know, KYC/AML workflows, payment rails, chargeback economics, whatever it is specifically. If you're trying to break into a new vertical, build a paper trail before you apply: informational interviews with people already in that space, a side project or case study using public data from that industry, certifications where they exist (insurance, healthcare compliance).
None of that replaces years of experience, but it gives a hiring manager something concrete to point to instead of defaulting to "no vertical experience, pass."
This keeps intensifying in the highest-risk verticals and stays mostly irrelevant everywhere else. The PMs who do best won't be the ones who picked a lane early and never left it. It'll be the ones who get explicit and specific about what their domain experience actually taught them, so it reads as evidence instead of a label.
Toronto Product Management Association (TPMA) is a community focused on development, growth and networking of Product professionals in the Greater Toronto Area.
