Tag: 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.

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

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. 💪 

Prioritize your time with the Eisenhower matrix

A framework I keep coming back to for prioritizing my time as a product manager is the Eisenhower matrix for prioritizing one’s work.

The framework is simple. There are two dimensions to the work on your plate: urgency and importance. And there are two values for each dimension: urgent and not, important and not.

As tasks are added to your plate, or as you get asked to do things by others, consider where they fall in the matrix.

Then, you can take action based on what cell they are in.

– Important + urgent tasks need to be done now. Go do them!
– Important + not urgent tasks need to be done, but not right now. Schedule a time to do them!
– Urgent but not important tasks aren’t important to you but are important to someone else. Find the right person who can help, or give out the information that someone can use to address the task on their own.
– Finally, don’t do things that are neither important nor urgent.

I’ve seen people spend a lot of time on tasks that aren’t important or aren’t urgent, to the detriment of their products.

It feels good to turn the crank and get stuff done, but make sure you’re focused on the right things first!

The benefits of spreading positivity

I received a small, visual reminder to spread hope, love, and positivity in 2022 from my local coffee shop this morning, in the form of this decoration on my drink.

Image

Does the above sound like just a cheese-ball cliché sentiment? Maybe. But this behavior has an impact.

First, simply the act of giving thanks can make you happier.

When their week’s assignment was to write and personally deliver a letter of gratitude…participants immediately exhibited a huge increase in happiness scores…greater than that from any other intervention…

https://www.health.harvard.edu/healthbeat/giving-thanks-can-make-you-happier

Next, positive thoughts rewire your brain to see more possibilities in life and can drive skill-building because you become more outgoing and try more things.

Fredrickson refers to this as the “broaden and build” theory because positive emotions broaden your sense of possibilities and open your mind, which in turn allows you to build new skills and resources that can provide value in other areas of your life.

https://jamesclear.com/positive-thinking

And, volunteering is good for the mind and body.

By spending time in service to others, volunteers report feeling a sense of meaning and appreciation, both given and received, which can have a stress-reducing effect.

https://www.mayoclinichealthsystem.org/hometown-health/speaking-of-health/3-health-benefits-of-volunteering

These are some of the reasons I’m committing some of my time in 2022 to give back to the product management community. I will do so by creating and sharing content to help others, especially those early in their careers or trying to get into the discipline.

But regardless of what you do or how you do it, I hope you’re able to spread some positive energy this year. Chances are, it won’t just benefit those around you. It will also benefit you.

And yes, this post is a way for me to spread positivity. I feel better already! 😉

Happy 2022!

What product management taught me about releasing an album

Last Tuesday, I released an album of music. It’s something I’ve worked on part-time for almost a year. Each track is inspired by a natural phenomenon.

I initially thought of this as a creative venture fairly different from my day job. Surely nothing from my day job would carry over, right?

Wrong.

While the end product is music someone listens to and not software someone uses, it turns out product management skills and techniques were very much in play as I went from early idea to published work. Here are a few that I used along the way:

Working backward

Product visions illustrate what changes in the world when the product exists, and what success looks like when the product is released and adopted. Some, like Amazon, write this vision down in the form of a future press release.

While I didn’t write a press release for my album, I did think ahead to what a release it would look like, and anticipated the things I would need to figure out:

  1. I knew I wanted an album that combined electronic with acoustic and electric instruments, so I had to research the best ways to get the sounds that I wanted.
  2. I knew I had a fair bit to compose, so I knew I had to research MIDI controllers and other input mechanisms for my setup.
  3. I wanted it to be released on streaming services, which meant I had to figure out what my options were for self-publishing through a distributor.
  4. I knew I wanted it to be listened to, so I had to come up with a plan for how to get the word out.

Defining a schedule

Work often fills available time, and for my album I had no hard deadline. To avoid working on it indefinitely, I set a personal goal of releasing it before end of 2020. This artificial deadline helped motivate me to spend time working on my music. It also ensured I wasn’t spending too much time tinkering, rethinking, or dwelling on parts of the work that were effectively done.

Making hard cuts

Early on, I had desires to have fifteen or even more tracks to my album. I had dreams of doing field recordings, and maybe even collaborating with other musicians. All of this takes time. That, combined with the reality that the last 10% of a project often takes the most time, made me cut back to something that was more reasonable: a 10-track solo album created in my home studio.

Beta testing

Often customers are asked to use a product in advance of it being released, to help the development team find and fix issues. As I was nearing completion of my album and doing final mixing and mastering, I listened to the music on various speakers including earbuds, car stereos, smartphones, and cheap monophonic Bluetooth speakers. I also shared the music with a few people to listen in advance. This all helped me uncover and fix small issues that I otherwise wouldn’t have uncovered.

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While there are many differences between shipping software and making music, my day job doing the former certainly helped me figure out the latter.

I welcome your thoughts on how your day job may have helped you with a creative side venture. And, if you’re interested, take a listen to my work.