TL;DR

Waterloo graduates have a realistic shot at Notion PM roles, but the path is narrower than for Big Tech. Notion hires fewer than 10 PMs total per year globally, and most come from top US schools or have prior startup experience. Your edge is your co-op network and raw technical depth, but you must show product taste and design instinct that your engineering-focused resume often hides.

Who This Is For

This article is for current Waterloo students or recent grads who have completed at least 2-3 co-op terms in software engineering or product roles, have a GPA above 3.5 (Notion screens for academic signal), and are targeting Notion specifically—not Palantir, Google, or Meta. You are comfortable with ambiguity and have built something small from scratch, even if it failed. You are not a career-switcher or someone who has only done finance or consulting co-ops; Notion PMs come from building backgrounds.

Why does Notion hire so few Waterloo PMs compared to Google or Meta?

Notion’s PM team is under 30 people globally, and the company deliberately stays small. Unlike Google, which hires hundreds of Waterloo PMs through structured campus pipelines, Notion has no formal university recruiting program for Waterloo. They attend no career fairs here, run no on-campus info sessions, and do not post PM intern roles on WaterlooWorks.

The few Waterloo grads who land PM roles at Notion do so through two paths: a prior internship at Notion in engineering (then converting to PM) or a referral from a current Notion employee who is a Waterloo alum. As of 2024, there are fewer than 10 Waterloo alumni at Notion across all roles, and only 3 of those are in product management. Compare that to Meta, where over 200 Waterloo grads work.

Your strategy must be referral-first, not application-first. If you submit a cold application through Notion’s careers page, you are competing against 5,000+ applicants per role, most from Stanford and MIT. Your Waterloo degree alone will not get you past resume screen. You need a current Notion PM to vouch for your product instincts and say, “I worked with this person at a startup co-op, and they shipped a feature that moved retention by 5%.”

How do Waterloo co-ops map to Notion’s PM interview expectations?

Notion evaluates PM candidates on three axes: product intuition, technical judgment, and execution bias. Your co-op experiences need to demonstrate all three, but most Waterloo students only show the technical judgment axis well.

A typical Waterloo resume lists: “Built API endpoint that reduced latency by 40%” or “Implemented CI/CD pipeline that saved 10 engineering hours/week.” That is not PM-relevant. Notion PMs do not care about your API work unless you can connect it to a user problem. You need to reframe every co-op bullet to show product impact.

BAD: “Developed a React component for user onboarding flow.”

GOOD: “Redesigned onboarding flow based on user interviews with 20 beta testers, increasing first-week activation from 12% to 18%.”

If you did not have authority to run user research in your co-op, you must find a project where you did—whether in a startup co-op, a side project, or a student club. Notion PMs are skeptical of PMs who have only worked in large-company intern roles where product decisions are made by senior PMs. They want evidence you can operate autonomously in ambiguity, which is what Notion itself requires.

Your strongest co-op for a Notion PM interview is one at a seed-stage startup where you were the only PM or the only non-engineer. If you did a co-op at a 5-person startup and owned the full product cycle—from spec writing to user testing to shipping—that beats a Google PM internship on your resume. Notion values ownership over brand.

What does the Notion PM interview loop look like for Waterloo candidates?

The interview process is 4-5 rounds, all virtual, and takes 3-4 weeks. There is no phone screen with a recruiter first; you typically start with a 45-minute call with a Notion PM who is a Waterloo alum (if you have a referral). If not, you start with a take-home product exercise.

Round 1 is a product sense interview. You will be asked to design a new feature for Notion, like “How would you design a calendar view for Notion?” The Waterloo trap here is over-engineering. You will want to discuss database schemas, sync protocols, and API design. Notion PMs want to hear user jobs-to-be-done, trade-offs, and how you would test with 10 users before building.

Round 2 is a technical PM interview. This is where Waterloo students shine. You will be asked to reason about system design trade-offs for a Notion-scale product, like “How would you design a real-time collaborative editing system?” But you must also address business constraints: cost, latency tolerance, and user willingness to pay. Do not just describe the technical architecture; explain why you chose it over alternatives and how it impacts the user experience.

Round 3 is a strategy interview. You will be given a vague business problem, like “Notion wants to expand into the enterprise market. How would you prioritize the first three features?” Use the RICE framework (Reach, Impact, Confidence, Effort) and show you can make a decision with incomplete data. Waterloo PMs often struggle here because co-op experience rarely involves strategic prioritization. Prepare by analyzing Notion’s public product roadmap and writing a 1-page memo on what you would do differently.

Round 4 is a behavioral interview with the product lead. Questions like “Tell me about a time you disagreed with an engineer” are common. Your Waterloo co-op stories work well here if you frame them as product disagreements, not technical disagreements. Not “I disagreed about the programming language,” but “I disagreed about whether to build a feature for power users vs. new users.”

The final round is a presentation: you present your take-home exercise to a panel of 3-4 PMs. This is where most Waterloo candidates fail because they present like engineers—data-heavy, slide-dense, and lacking narrative. You need a story arc: “Here is the user problem, here is why existing solutions fail, here is my proposed solution, here is how I would measure success.” Practice with a non-engineer friend who will tell you if they got bored.

How do you get a referral from a Waterloo alum at Notion?

Notion does not have a formal alumni referral program for Waterloo, but the informal network is active. There is a Waterloo-Notion Slack channel with about 30 members, mostly engineers. To get a referral, you must add value before asking.

Do not cold email a Waterloo alum at Notion saying “I admire your work, can you refer me?” That will be ignored. Instead, find their public work—most Notion PMs write on Substack or tweet about product decisions. Read their posts for 2 weeks.

Then email them with a specific insight: “I read your post on Notion’s AI feature prioritization. I have a suggestion on how you could test the use case for student note-takers based on my experience at Waterloo’s student design team.” If they reply, offer to run a 30-minute user test with Waterloo students. That creates a relationship, not a transaction.

Another path: attend Notion’s public product events like “Notion Office Hours” or “Notion Community Meetups.” Waterloo is 90 minutes from Toronto, where Notion hosts occasional events. Show up, ask thoughtful questions, and mention you are a Waterloo student building a product. PMs remember people who engage with their product deeply.

If you cannot get a referral, apply through Notion’s “PM Apprenticeship” program if you are a recent grad. This program is designed for non-traditional candidates and does not require a referral. However, only 5-10 apprentices are accepted per year globally, and the acceptance rate is below 2%. Your Waterloo degree helps here because it signals technical competence, but you still need to show product taste through a portfolio of side projects or shipped features.

What specific product taste does Notion look for that Waterloo students lack?

Notion PMs consistently say they look for “product taste” in candidates—the ability to distinguish between a good feature and a great feature, and the judgment to say no to the good one. Waterloo students often lack this because their co-op experience is optimized for output, not outcome. You ship features, but you rarely decide which features to ship.

To develop product taste, you must use Notion daily for 3 months before interviewing. Not just as a user, but as a power user. Build a personal wiki, a project tracker, a CRM, a habit tracker—all inside Notion. Document what frustrates you about the product. Then write 3 product improvement proposals (PIPs) that address those frustrations, each with user research from 5 fellow Waterloo students. Bring these PIPs to the interview as evidence of your product thinking.

A specific example: Notion’s mobile app has poor offline support. A Waterloo PM candidate who has built a workaround using local storage in a side project, and can articulate the trade-offs between syncing strategies and user expectations, will stand out. That is product taste in action—identifying a real user pain and thinking through solutions without being told to.

Preparation Checklist

  1. Reframe your resume around product impact, not technical output. Replace 80% of your engineering co-op bullets with user-centric language. Every bullet should answer: “What user behavior changed because of my work?”
  1. Build a Notion-based side project that you can demo in interviews. A public wiki for a Waterloo course, a personal CRM, or a student club dashboard. Make it live and get 50+ users before your interview.
  1. Complete the PM Interview Playbook (a structured interview prep resource) focusing on the product sense and strategy modules. Notion PM interviews are closest to these frameworks—avoid generic “cracking the PM interview” content that is designed for Google’s structured process.
  1. Network with 3 Waterloo alumni at Notion via LinkedIn or Slack. Offer to help them with user research for their current projects. Do not ask for a referral in the first conversation.
  1. Conduct 5 mock interviews with other Waterloo PM candidates who are also targeting Notion. Record yourself and check if you spend more than 30 seconds on technical details in product sense questions. If you do, you are over-engineering.
  1. Write 2 product improvement proposals for Notion and get feedback from a non-technical friend. The proposals should be 1 page each, with a clear hypothesis and a test plan.
  1. Read Notion’s public blog and changelog for the last 6 months. Identify 3 features that were launched and argue why they should not have been shipped yet. This demonstrates strategic thinking.

Mistakes to Avoid

Mistake 1: Leading with your technical depth in product sense interviews.

  • BAD: “I would design the calendar view using a relational database with foreign keys and a caching layer for performance.”
  • GOOD: “I would start by interviewing 10 Notion users who currently use Google Calendar for task management. I want to understand why they do not use Notion’s existing reminders feature. Then I would prototype a simple weekly view and test with 5 users before deciding on the data model.”

Mistake 2: Applying without a referral and expecting your Waterloo brand to carry you.

  • BAD: Submitting a generic application through Notion’s careers page, referencing your “strong technical background from Waterloo.”
  • GOOD: Getting a referral from a Waterloo alum at Notion who can speak to your product instincts, or applying through the PM Apprenticeship with a portfolio of shipped work.

Mistake 3: Using a co-op story that shows execution without product judgment.

  • BAD: “I built a dashboard that tracked user engagement metrics for the team.”
  • GOOD: “I noticed that user retention dropped after the first week. I hypothesized that the onboarding flow was too long. I ran A/B tests with a simplified flow, which increased week-1 retention by 15%. Then I convinced the team to deprioritize a feature that would have delayed this experiment.”

FAQ

Can I get a Notion PM role without prior PM co-op experience?

Yes, but only if you have shipped a product in a startup co-op or side project where you owned the full cycle from user research to launch. Notion values ownership over title. If your only experience is engineering co-ops at large companies, you will not pass the resume screen.

Is the PM Apprenticeship easier to get into than a full-time PM role?

No, it is harder because the cohort is smaller and the acceptance rate is lower. However, it is designed for candidates without traditional PM backgrounds, so your Waterloo engineering degree is an advantage there. You still need a portfolio of product work.

How long does the entire process take from referral to offer?

Typically 4-6 weeks if you are referred. Without a referral, expect 8-12 weeks because you will go through a take-home exercise first. Notion moves faster than Google or Meta for PM roles, but slower than startups.

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