Six to eight members. One strategist. Sundays for commitments. Wednesdays for check-ins. Fridays for celebrations. A small, private room of people running the same play as you — matched by vertical, seniority, and timezone.
Job search is one of the loneliest projects a professional ever runs. Your friends can't help. Your family gets tired of hearing about it. Your former colleagues are three levels of "how's it going" and then a subject change. A cohort is the room where none of that applies — where the person across from you is on the same week you are, and everyone in it is fighting for you to win.
Cohorts run on a deliberate, quiet cadence. Enough structure that you always know what's next; enough breathing room that the cohort compounds your search instead of stealing from it.
15 minutes · written
Every member drops a short note into the cohort thread — the two or three moves they're committing to this week. A recruiter outreach batch. A referral ask. A portfolio update. A hiring-manager reply they've been avoiding. It stays specific: a verb, a number, and a day.
45–60 minutes · video
The whole cohort plus the strategist, on camera. Six to eight quick reads on how the week's actually going. What worked. What's stuck. One place each person wants a second pair of eyes — a subject line, a phone-screen answer, a job-title decision. Nobody dominates; nobody hides.
10 minutes · written
A single thread for the wins. A callback. A phone screen booked. A referral that came through. A recruiter who finally replied. Small wins count; wins that "aren't really wins yet" count. Nobody grades. Everyone else replies with a real sentence, not a thumbs-up.
None of these members are real people. All of them are recognizable. This is what a mid-career product cohort tends to look like — a mix of trajectories, one shared vertical, one strategist holding the room.
Twelve years in-house talent at two consumer-fintech companies and one enterprise SaaS. Hosts the room, sets the cadence, keeps the check-ins on time, and quietly connects members after each call.
Eight years product, last three at a Series C fintech. Laid off in a March restructure. Wants a Series B or C role, ideally payments, ideally with a founder she believes in.
Ten years product across two exits. Currently employed but "quietly done." Looking for a first VP role in a company under 200 people. Says less than everyone else and lands the best edits.
Six years product at a Big Tech firm; wants out. First time interviewing in five years and openly rusty. The cohort's most enthusiastic recruiter-outreach experimenter.
Fourteen years, two companies. Post-parental-leave return. Rebuilding her narrative around a two-year gap she refuses to hide. Writes the clearest commitment notes in the room.
Career changer from ops leadership into product. Nine months into the transition. Has the loudest wins because he's the one climbing from the steepest starting point.
Twelve years, currently a senior consultant returning to industry. On visa, so timeline is sharp. Runs the tightest process and shares her tracker template in the first week.
Seven years across two Series B startups. Wants a strategic PM role at a company that doesn't already have five of them. The cohort's designated devil's-advocate on job descriptions.
The strategist runs your search. The cohort makes it survivable — and, more often than we expected, a lot faster.
Most peer programs turn into performance theater. Ours are designed against that from the room shape up. Here's what you won't find inside a Marqee cohort — and why.
A good cohort is one where every member could realistically use every other member's advice. That comes from matching on four inputs, and refusing to compromise on any of them.
Product, engineering, design, marketing, sales, finance, ops, data. And then one layer deeper — payments PMs together, developer-tools PMs together. Advice needs to be usable.
Not where you live — where you're searching. A New York member searching remote-US pairs with other remote-US searchers. A member searching London-only stays with London-only. Employer intel has to overlap.
Bands of roughly ±3 years of judgment. A first-time IC and a two-time VP don't belong in the same room. Same problem shapes, same interview loops, same negotiation terrain.
A ±3-hour window from the cohort's Wednesday call. Non-negotiable. A cohort where two members can never make check-in is a cohort we won't ship.
We do not match on personality, "vibe," or hobbies. Cohorts are working rooms — the shared context is stakes, not chemistry. Chemistry, in our experience, shows up on its own by week three.
40–60%
Hypothesized month-two retention lift · cohort vs. solo membersMembers in a cohort stay in their Marqee engagement 40–60% longer through month two, and refer roughly three times as many friends, than members on the same plan without one. These are working targets pending the first full cohort of Founding Members — the confirmed numbers will replace this [placeholder] once we've closed month two.
Most members who quit a search — or quit their partner in one — don't quit because it isn't working. They quit because it stopped feeling survivable. Cohorts change that math in a specific, measurable way.
We run cohorts in five distinct shapes because the shared context has to be exact. A new grad and a VP hunting for their next board seat cannot be in the same room, no matter how warm the vibe is.
Zero to two years of experience. First real job hunt. Cohort is matched by vertical intent (engineering vs. product vs. finance) more than current major, because the market rewards direction, not diploma.
VP and above. Confidential searches, board-level references, executive-search-firm dynamics, private-market compensation. Small rooms — often five members — because the pool is thin and the stakes are sharp.
Members pivoting into a new function or industry. Matched by target destination, not origin, so an ex-consultant and an ex-teacher aiming at product land in the same room. Longer runway, sharper narrative work.
Visa-sponsored and cross-border searches. Matched on visa class and target geography as tightly as on vertical. The room understands sponsorship timelines the way other rooms understand equity refresh cycles.
Opt-in room for members from underrepresented backgrounds in their field, hosted by a strategist from the same. The frame is career acceleration, not identity workshopping — the shared context is stakes, honestly named.
You can be in exactly one cohort at a time. Members occasionally switch formats mid-engagement — new grad to career changer after a pivot, for instance. No penalty; strategist decides.
A single question on your intake form. Yes puts you in the next matching round. No changes nothing about the rest of your Marqee engagement.
Every member gets a strategist. Cohorts are the peer layer on top. See plans →
Six to eight members plus one strategist. Big enough for real variety in feedback and connections, small enough that every person is known by name and no one goes a week without being seen. Executive cohorts sometimes run at five, by design.
Optional. Every Marqee member gets a strategist and full done-for-you support. Cohorts are an opt-in layer for members who want peers in the same trench. You can join at intake, later in your search, or not at all — and your service does not change either way.
Four inputs: vertical (what you do), geography (where you're searching), seniority tier (how many years of judgment you carry), and timezone (so live calls actually work). Members outside those bands do not enter your cohort — matches are made on similarity of stakes, not personality quizzes.
About 90 to 120 minutes across the week. A short Sunday commitment note, a live Wednesday check-in of 45 to 60 minutes, and a Friday celebration thread. Everything else is asynchronous — cohorts are meant to compound your search, not add a second job on top of it.
No. Cohorts have no leaderboards, no public performance scores, and no comparison rituals. The whole point is a room where you can be honest about a hard week without it being counted against you. Progress is shared, but not ranked.
Tell your strategist. We rematch without drama. Cohorts are a tool for your search, not a commitment you have to defend — if it isn't helping, we move you into a different room or step you out entirely. Members who leave a cohort keep the same strategist, same plan, same everything else.