This LinkedLetter edition brings a mix of product updates, platform disruptions, and industry shifts across LinkedIn. From new changes to the Premium experience, to a global outage affecting major services, to a full redesign of LinkedIn’s early-career product roles, here are the key developments you need to know.
LinkedIn Premium Expands With New Perks, Including YouTube Premium and Spotify
LinkedIn Premium is adding three months of complimentary access to YouTube Premium and Spotify, giving members new ways to learn, recharge, and stay ahead in a fast-changing world of work. The update comes as Premium continues to grow in impact: nearly 40% of subscribers use AI-powered profile tools, and features like Top Applicant increase hiring chances by almost 4x.
Source: Linkedin
Premium remains a powerful tool for both professionals and small businesses. Members benefit from advanced job insights, enhanced visibility, LinkedIn Learning, and exclusive Premium Conversations with leaders like Brené Brown, Melinda Gates, and Malcolm Gladwell. Premium Company Pages also continue to scale, helping small businesses generate more leads, attract followers 6.7x faster, and drive 7.5x more engagement.
LinkedIn is also launching Premium Duo, a discounted two-person plan that lets members share Premium Career or Business with a family member, friend, or colleague.
LinkedIn Replaces Its APM Program With a Full-Stack Builder Model
LinkedIn is ending its Associate Product Manager (APM) program and launching a new Associate Product Builder track, which will train new hires to code, design, and manage products end-to-end. Chief Product Officer Tomer Cohen revealed the shift on Lenny’s Podcast, explaining: “We’re going to teach them how to code, design, and PM at LinkedIn.”
Source: LinkedIn
Cohen noted that the company is reorganizing around small, full-stack builder pods, where employees can “flex across” roles and bring products from idea to launch without traditional functional silos. The goal is greater agility and stronger product ownership. He added that the focus is now on developing vision, empathy, creativity, communication, and high-quality decision-making, while “everything else” is being automated. The move comes amid a broader industry debate about the future of product management. Some companies — including Microsoft, Airbnb, and Snap — are reducing reliance on PMs, while others argue PMs are becoming increasingly essential as AI compresses product development timelines. As Andrew Ng points out, when teams can build a prototype in a day, waiting a week for product decisions becomes the real bottleneck.
Cloudflare Outage Disrupts LinkedIn, Vinted, and Other Major Platforms
A new Cloudflare outage on 5 December briefly took down several major services, including LinkedIn, Vinted, the Epic Games Store, Perplexity, and Zoom. Cloudflare confirmed dashboard and API failures around 9 a.m. before reporting gradual recovery shortly after. This is the second global outage in two months, following a similar incident in mid-November that affected Spotify, X, ChatGPT, and Belgium’s SNCB.
Source: Freepik
While some users continued reporting issues on DownDetector, platforms like YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Google, Amazon, PlayStation Network, and ChatGPT remained unaffected.
Cloudflare supports around 20% of the global web, meaning disruptions of this scale can instantly impact one in five websites worldwide.
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