In my role as hiring manager for Product Management at Pivotal Labs NYC, I’ve been at the receiving end of hundreds of resumes.
Mikael Cho’s post about resume red flags resonates with me.
I too am eagerly looking for the next candidate who will join our team. I too get excited each time a new application pops up in my inbox — and I too am frustrated by how many of these applications end up going in the “no” pile.
It’s easy to spot a great application. However, a typical application takes me around 15 minutes to review as I try to decipher the resume and hunt down the candidate’s LinkedIn, Twitter, personal blog and portfolio, trying to work out whether they do indeed have what we’re looking for but just aren’t presenting it well in their application.
This — the time I invest in each application — is an exception. In most cases, you have seconds to make an impression in the hiring manager’s inbox.
Think of it this way:
You are the product and your resume is the elevator pitch.
An elevator pitch is a short and succinct summary of what you have to offer — just like a resume.
Thus, in addition to Mikael’s advice on the basics of what NOT to do, I would like to offer up the following guidance on how to craft a strong Product Manager application.
1. Demonstrate how you match my company’s flavor of Product Manager.
Or: Tailor your elevator pitch for your intended market.
Product Manager roles vary quite a bit across product organizations based on what products the PM is expected to work on, what product teams look like and what the culture in which product teams operate is like. (PM roles can even vary substantially within the same organization.)
At Pivotal Labs, the lean and agile values and principles we practice shape our PM role:
- Our teams are small, cross-functional and co-located which means that PMs collaborate directly and continuously with engineers and designers.
- We de-risk product ideas through user research and usability testing so that when we to commit our ideas to code we are confident that they are the right solutions solving for the right problems.
- We define development work from the user’s perspective by writing and prioritizing user stories in a backlog. We measure progress in user value delivered.
- We estimate upcoming development work weekly, and we continuously update the backlog (daily) to reflect our current priorities.
- We release early and often and use working software — not decks or prototypes or demos — as our ultimate measure of success.
Pivotal Labs is a consultancy. For our Product Managers, this means that we don’t own the products we work on and that we typically work on a couple to a handful of products each year. Our mission is to transform the way the world builds software. We do this by working side by side with our client teams, in our offices, helping them define and launch successful digital products — and by doing so, helping them build successful product teams who can go back to their own organization and continue to effectively deliver customer value through software. Thus, our Product Managers, in addition to being capable product people, must also be skilled coaches and advisors, consensus builders and communicators, and have the ability to build strong and effective relationships with the client PMs they partner with.
A candidate who can’t demonstrate in their application that they have enough experience in these areas — defining, de-risking and shipping successful software products, consulting, working in small, cross-functional, autonomous and iterative teams — simply won’t be successful in the role and will go into my “no” pile.
The cultural stuff, albeit fuzzy, is equally important.
Pivotal Labs’ values are “Be kind, Do what’s right, Do what works, Keep it simple”. While I look primarily for the right level and mix of skills and experiences in an application, I also look for early signs of cultural fit (and no, this has nothing to do with how good you are at playing ping pong).
We believe that empathy is a tremendously important trait (“Be kind”) and only hire highly empathetic individuals. Empathy makes us better team mates and consultants, helps us design great products, and enables us to productively work through challenging situations. A candidate who cannot demonstrate empathy or how they’ve been successful in situations where empathy was needed won’t be happy or do well on our team. For instance, peppering your application with acronyms that the person at the receiving end may or may not be familiar with is not very empathetic.
2. Tell me what you’ve accomplished, not what you’ve been responsible for.
Or: Instead of listing all its features, explain what value your product offers.
A strong Product Manager delivers concrete and valuable results. She knows exactly what problem(s) her product solves for, for whom and how, can explain in simple terms what success looks like, how to quantify it and how to measure it. When she applies for a new product role, her resume reflects this approach.
Responsibility does not correlate with demonstrable success. I don’t care, per se, that you’ve held a VP title or that you’ve overseen important teams or functions. I don’t care about the roadmaps, backlogs, requirements lists, prototypes or other deliverables and outputs you’ve created. I don’t care that you’re a CSC, CAPM, PSM, CSPO or any other three or four letter combination. These things tell me that you may know how to talk the talk, but they don’t reveal much about your ability to walk the walk. The truly important stuff is at the end of the title, the artifacts or the certificate, namely the outcomes they helped you realize. Tell me about the value you delivered to users, to your company, to your team — this is what really matters.
Have you shipped software? Did you play a vital role in defining and executing on the product? Did users find it valuable? Could you prove it? Would your team love to work with you again? Great — let’s talk!
3. Be deliberate about what you say and how you say it
Or: Make your pitch easy to understand.
The hiring manager is looking to understand one essential thing about you from your application: Might you be a good fit for us?
A great hiring manager also tries to understand a second equally important thing: Might we be a good fit for you?
What you say and how you say determines how easily the hiring manager can answer these questions.
I can easily glean a number of important PM skills and traits from a candidate’s resume and cover letter. For instance:
- Storytelling. Can the candidate effectively tell me why my company is the right place for her, and the PM role is the right next step in her career? It’s disappointing how many applicants don’t actually tell me why they are interested in joining Pivotal Labs. More surprising yet is how many manage to string together a bunch of words that don’t say convey anything of substance (or, occasionally, coherence). Don’t be this gobbly goop person.
- Prioritization. Does the candidate know what is important to share and what is not? So many candidates tell me ALL THE THINGS (I once received an 8-page resume in my inbox). If you can’t differentiate the crud from what matters, you lack focus. If you lack focus, you don’t understand what it is you’re trying to achieve. If you don’t understand what you’re trying to achieve, you’re going to cause a lot of waste and perhaps never get to anything valuable in the end.
- Consulting. Does the candidate understand what I am looking for? Has she done her research? Can she help me quickly understand all the interesting things she’s done without having all of her context and background? Has she built empathy for the person or team at the receiving end of her application, and can she convey that empathy? A strong consulting PM can create clarity amidst complexity and guide a client towards making informed decisions by presenting the right information.
To summarize, position yourself for the job the way a Product Manager would position her product to her customers.
- Understand your audience: Demonstrate how you match my company’s flavor of Product Manager.
- Demonstrate your value: Tell me what you’ve accomplished, not what you’ve been responsible for.
- Communicate well: Be deliberate about what you say and how you say it.
Good luck! (And when you’ve written that awesome resume, consider sharing it with us — we’re looking for experienced Product Managers to join our growing team.)
3 Steps to Landing any Product Manager Interview was originally published in Built to Adapt on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
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