Category: Product management

5 tips for making your product management resume stand out

Someone recently contacted me asking for help reviewing their product management resume. Given there’s a fair number of people looking for new product roles currently, I thought I’d share with you what I shared with them.

Here are my five tips:

Focus on result and impact, with quantities

The most important thing to include in a PM resume is what you and your team delivered and what impact it had.

Spending ink describing what you did in your PM job isn’t as helpful as describing what all that work led to.

When describing impact, use numbers. A quantity is a more powerful way to communicate results and impact than a general statement.

Good: Delivered {feature} with {X engineers} in {Y weeks} that increased {metric} by {amount}.

Not so good: Managed the team backlog and bug list to deliver a feature customers asked for the most.

Be clear and concise

Fewer words are usually better. Take time to edit out unnecessary details that distract.

Exclude roles that are irrelevant to the role you’re applying to. Your summer job at Steak & Shake isn’t relevant.

You don’t have to keep your resume to a page, especially if you’ve had lots of roles or been working for decades. Try to not exceed two.

Include side projects if you’re starting out

If you’re light on work experience, add in side projects you’re proud of. To keep things concise, link out to the project or a page that describes it.

Work before education

Put your work experience first and summarize your education in one or two bullets at the end. Even if you’re still in college, prioritize your prior internships, school projects, and side projects.

Check spelling and grammar

Typos and comma splices can distract from an otherwise impressive resume. Product management requires solid communication and an attention to detail; these mistakes can imply you’re not great at either.

– – –

Those are my tips, but I know there are more. What do you look for in a great product management resume?

Advertisement

What Winston Churchill said about product launches

Did you know Winston Churchill was a closet product manager when it came to big product launches He’s quoted as saying:

Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.

Ok, I lied. 😉 While he was a famous leader, he wasn’t a PM as far as I know. But I did use his quote above in a team all-hands last week. Why? To give people some perspective. 

You see, the team is working on a big product launch that’s just around the corner. And product launches are hard! They take a lot of energy. Finishing features, fixing bugs, making hard cuts, stabilizing, perf testing, marketing, PR… 

And when a launch happens, it can feel exhilarating! 🚀 Finally, the world can use what the team worked so hard on! Tweets, press releases, and news articles galore!

But as Churchill states, that’s just the end of the beginning. After you launch a product you can finally:

  1. Get usage data
  2. Run A/B tests
  3. Get feedback from a much wider audience
  4. Build those fast follows you had to cut for launch
  5. Embark on a longer-term product strategy

And more…

A launch is a great milestone for a team and a product, but it’s just the end of the beginning. After launch, the real work begins. 💪 

Right Questions, Right Product

My vision prescription changed recently, and I was in the market to buy some new glasses. I was intrigued by the potential for buying glasses online, both for convenience and price. But, I had no idea what it meant to purchase glasses online. I had only ever bought glasses in a physical store, trying them on in front of a mirror while receiving semi-helpful guidance from a store employee. And, there are countless online retailers to consider (and yes, even Amazon has some options). Where does one start?

Knowing so little about buying glasses online, I started visiting a bunch of different online eyeglass vendors’ websites. As I browsed their sites, I started cataloging what they highlighted as features. For example, some vendors were keen to advertise their try-on-at-home program, where you are sent frames to try on at home before deciding on a pair to buy. Others touted low prices, while still others advertised their frames’ quality or designer pedigree.

Once I figured out the landscape of features, I set to work. My wife makes fun of me for it, but whenever I research making a new purchase I build a spreadsheet to organize my information. In this case, my spreadsheet had 14 rows and 9 columns. Each row was an online vendor. Each column was a question I was trying to answer. Questions included the following:

  1. What’s the price range for the glasses this vendor offers?
  2. What’s the return policy for this vendor?
  3. Does this vendor offer a try-at-home option?
  4. How stylish are this vendors’ frame options?
  5. Any other perks from this vendor?

Then, I started sorting my spreadsheet, ranking the best answers to the top. I landed on a few of my top vendors based on what I thought the most important questions were. Then, and only then, I started actively shopping for glasses.

The key to figuring out what glasses to buy wasn’t flipping endlessly through pictures of frames until I spotted one I liked and then clicked on a buy button. With that technique, I may have picked a nice looking pair of glasses that fit terribly from a vendor with a bad return policy, and ended up dissatisfied. Instead, I identified what was important to me first and then figured out who could give me what I valued most. And I did so by identifying what questions mattered the most to me.

The Right Questions

Imagine we’re building a new online eyeglasses company. If we just took a bricks-and-mortar shop, cataloged its inventory, and put it online, we’d most likely fail. Why? After all, we’ve taken an existing product (a glasses shop) and added a feature (a buy button online). Incremental improvement is better, right?

Here’s why that idea would likely fail:

  1. Not understanding what customers value: people who are interested in buying glasses online probably don’t value the same things as people interested in buying glasses in a store. For example, people buying online are probably motivated more by convenience and price, while those buying in person are probably motivated more by personal service and the ability to do quick, in-person adjustments and returns.
  2. Asking the wrong questions: if you ask people visiting an eyeglass store what problems they see, they may say “needs better hours” or “needs more employees to serve me without waiting”, as they think about how to incrementally improve the existing experience. The focus should be on what customers want, not on how to improve what already exists.
  3. Not understanding what’s possible: a storefront is a decades-old, fairly refined way of selling glasses. Customers or shop employees probably won’t think of things like a try-at-home program (the glasses are right there, try them on!) or a way to find glasses by entering dimensions of your current glasses and clicking “find similar” (just scan the store for similar frames, or ask a store employee!).

Instead, we should talk to people who are buying glasses, understand what they like and don’t like, show them some ideas about buying glasses online, and watch and listen to their reactions. As we amass more and more information, we can start figuring out the questions to ask (is a super easy return policy important? what’s the most you’d pay? are designer brands important? what do you think of this crazy augmented reality prototype for trying glasses on?).

Once you have your questions, you still have to decide which ones are most important to your target customers. Once you have that, you’re on your way to figuring out how to deliver something to make customers happy.

And yes, go ahead and make that giant spreadsheet to organize your thoughts. I won’t criticize.

How To Land Your First Product Management Job

I’ve talked to dozens of aspiring product managers who ask me how to get into product management. They want to be at the intersection of customer, business, and technology. They want to deliver products people love. They want to grow a business. But, how does one get started?

First, let’s clarify a couple of things:

  1. There’s no one educational path to product management. I know great product managers (PMs) who have technical degrees, history degrees, and no degrees. While it may be common for product managers at software companies to have computer science degrees, a technical degree is not required to be a product manager.
  2. There’s no one career path to product management. Some come from engineering backgrounds, others from business backgrounds, and still others from user research and design. You can exercise and grow the skills needed to be a product manager in many different roles. Becoming a product manager means applying those things full-time.

Here are some approaches to getting your first product management job.

Internships

If you’re early in your career, one of the best ways to get into product management is to complete an internship. Product management is an applied trade; there’s no better way to learn than to own real product decisions at a real company with great mentors to help you grow. Internships also let you vet a company to see if you want to work there long-term.

If you’re at a college or university with career fairs, talk to companies hiring product managers at those fairs and find a role that matches your interests and experience. Also, seek out companies you admire online, and contact them to see if they’re hiring PM interns.

School projects

If you’re in college, sign up for as much project-based work as possible. And, make sure you do the work that answers questions that product managers focus on: Who is the customer? What do they want? What problem does the product solve? What is the look and feel of the product? How will you get feedback on the product? How will you measure success?

Sign up for product work

Are you working at a company with product managers? Find a way to stretch into the work they are doing. Talk to a product manager who you work closely with, and see if you can take a task or project from him. Start small: a little customer research, a design wireframe, or a beta test plan is a good first step. Make it clear that you’re there to both do the work and to learn from it, so you’re given something of appropriate scope.

After you do the work, get feedback from the product manager on what went well and what could have gone better. Then, ask for more! Ideally, you get to the point where you are a product manager in all but name, and it’s an easy sell to the right manager to have you formally join the team.

Get a mentor

Have coffee once a month with a product person in your company or at a company in which you have a connection. Find someone that has not just lots of experience, but the kind of experience you’re interested in (consumer products, business products, developer products, and so on). Learn from her what the job entails from her perspective. Ask her to walk you through how she makes product decisions. Get feedback on skills she thinks you need to grow and be successful as a product manager.

Side projects

Have an idea for something great? Come up with the plan, write it down, and socialize it. If you do this for something your company currently focuses on (or should), then pitch the idea to a decision maker. If not, write it down and socialize it with product managers for feedback.

Also, consider a personal project. This can be especially good for those with a technical background who can not only plan and design their product but also build it.

What about classes and books?

I have nothing against product management training. Free, online courses from Coursera may be good if you are brand new to the role and are looking to understand some of the basics. However, I don’t think coursework alone can land you a product management job. A lot of courses out there focus on the mechanics of product management, which is more akin to project management, and are very light on topics like strategy, design, tradeoffs, and experimentation/beta testing.

If you’re considering a paid course, make sure it’s well rounded. And, ask the following: how many graduates have gone on to land product management roles within a few months of completion? If the provider can’t or won’t answer that, I’d be wary of using their program as the primary way to land a product job.

As for books, I’d honestly spend time scouring sites like Medium for posts from product managers talking about their products, instead of reading books about product management.

Hang in there!

Remember, product management is an applied trade. Regardless of how inexperienced you feel, find a way to start doing the job, and get feedback along the way. Sooner or later, you’ll land the role you want.

Oh, and by the way: I’m hiring.