Getting to the Product Manager interview stage

https://glenngillen.com/getting-the-pm-interview/

by glenngillen • 5 years ago

80 45 5 years ago

Some good advice here. The part about highlighting experience resonated with me. A lot of CVs I see just list the generic duties of each role, not what the candidate achieved in them.

rahimnathwani5• 5 years ago

Among the things I look for when interviewing PMs:

- did they have an impact in the past roles?

- will they help us be excellent, by finding and embedding good ideas/practices/tactics from elsewhere?

If a PM in 2021 doesn't list achievements on their CV, then they:

- haven't bothered to Google something like 'how to create a great CV', or

- couldn't separate the great answers from the noise, or

- decided their accomplishments weren't worth listing.

Bad sign.

SQueeeeeL3• 5 years ago

Glad we're asking PMs to chase resume trends from random blogs instead of just interviewing well and being the right fit for the job.

kritiko4• 5 years ago

How do you distinguish impact from lack of impact?

And how do you validate the PM was actually responsible for that impact?

aedocw• 5 years ago

This is pretty good guidance on crafting a solid resume for a product manager: https://www.productlessons.xyz/article/product-manager-resum...

MeinBlutIstBlau• 5 years ago

I've never known about this and never once had someone mention it to me. Which is exactly why I'm going to be doing it now.

roboben• 5 years ago

Hey Glenn, are you open from applicants based in Europe? Considering to apply :)

glenngillen5• 5 years ago

Unfortunately not for _my_ open roles, but there’s every chance one of the other teams currently has open roles in Europe: https://www.hashicorp.com/jobs

phillipcarter• 5 years ago

Can confirm the importance of a thoughtful cover letter, both from the hiring and job hunting perspective.

I am glad to see more people move away from the 2010s-era-Google-focused approach to hiring where human elements of a job are stripped away and the interview is merely another test to ace.

bilal4hmed3• 5 years ago

Any solid senior software engineer resume samples? I need to update mine as I start looking for jobs. Not a lot of samples talk about how to format it when youve been at one company for a long time with multiple roles.

piptastic• 5 years ago

probably just something like this:

[total year range] Name of Company

-> indent [year range of last position] position title

   duties, interesting projects

-> indent [year range of 2nd to last] position title

   duties, interesting projects

Maybe include months for the individual roles depending on how short the year ranges are

slymon99• 5 years ago

I'd recommend prioritizing impact over "duties, interesting projects", especially quantatative impact e.g. "built widget that increased x by y%"

I'd also always include months

ska3• 5 years ago

"senior" is such a loose category now in tech I find it almost useless, ranging from "no longer needs constant handholding" to "can run this show".

Assuming you are talking more to the latter part of that spectrum, this is what I would expect to see:

1) A rough timeline (say down to month or quarter resolution) of roles within that company (and others if you have them), with a concise role description focused on what you were responsible for; give me an idea of your day-to-day in that role.

2) Projects and achievements. "Shipped X" "Added Y capability" "Improved Q performance by U %" is much stronger than "Worked on Z subsystem". Be prepared to describe anything in here in great detail if asked. Group achievements are fine but call out what you did (e.g. "Part of X team, delivering 9mm in new revenue by adding [system]. My contribution was [describe]).

3) Strengths and skills. Be honest but blow your own horn a bit. Anything you claim here a good hiring manager will consider testing.

4) Maybe education & certs etc., depends on relevance and position

Hiring managers want to understand the impact you've had before, and what you may bring to their team. If you write yourself up as a fungible IC, that's how you'll be pigeonholed.

Formatting. No more than 2 pages for an engineering position. Making it stand out a bit isn't bad, but much more important to make it clear and easy to read.Personally I don't care too much about format unless it is hard to follow.

Two classic ways to do this are time-based (so all above is interleaved) or functionally (e.g. a short role timeline, but also a project area, etc.). They are both fine if written well, but concentrate on the story it tells.

Honestly people are more used to the first format (timeline) but be careful not to bury your strengths if you do. If you chose the second approach to more easily emphasize them, make it clear by formatting.

Finally - remember a resume should not be a mere logbook of your work, more of a highlight reel.

henryfjordan• 5 years ago

I had the same issue last year. I was at one company for 5 years, pretty much my first real job out of school, and wanted to sell a story of personal growth at the company

I ended up with this: https://henryfjordan.com/resume-2020.pdf

It got me plenty of call backs and a new job within a few months. Looking at it again now, I might remove/shrink the "profile" section and move "skills" down below "experience". The resume is very number heavy, which I think worked well selling me as someone who got stuff done. Under my "Experience" section I put my general responsibilities first and then a list of achievements for my main job that was basically a listing of big projects I worked on. I figured that since I really only had 1 real developer job that I should make sure to communicate what that job was like in addition to my achievements. If I had worked at 3 different places, I think it would have been more of a given that I've run into Agile and Jira and all that, but with 1 job I needed to be more explicit.

I also took a lot of advice from an article that I cannot find now, but it described the 3 audiences to consider when writing your resume: HR/Recruiters, Hiring Managers (your potential boss), and Peers/Interviewers. Each is looking for something different. HR is looking that you match the keyword-bingo and don't have red flags (The profile and skills section are mostly for them). The Hiring Manager cares the most about impact, so sell your achievements to them. Peers are mostly just looking for something to talk about in interviews, so I put a line about a video game I made during a hackathon to serve as a conversation starter in interviews.

I hope this helps!

bilal4hmed3• 5 years ago

Im pushing 15 :)

IndignantNerd• 5 years ago

From what I’ve seen in hiring, you’ll reach the 75th percentile with consistent formatting and no spelling mistakes. It’s incredible how bad some of the resumes are. You would think it would be a good idea to optimize the one constant across all your job applications, but apparently not. If you’re applying as a senior frontend engineer, but you can’t even layout text in Microsoft word, what should I infer about your ability to build a web page?

That 75th percentile might even be enough to get to an interview, depending on how sparse the company’s pipeline is. But in terms of optimizing content to advance from 75 to 90+ percentile – the best method is something that jumps out at the person reading. That might be an elite degree, or a popular project, or an unusually relevant background for the company.

Basically, you need a clean resume and at least one “thing” that jumps off the page and differentiates you from other candidates.

Sometimes I wonder how the hiring process would change if applicants could see the resumes they’re competing with.

bilal4hmed3• 5 years ago

thank you, this really helps

sdf131• 5 years ago

In my experience, having an up to date LinkedIn profile is more than enough.

I have no presence online, I don't do open-source, I went to an absolute no-name regional school, my work experience is nothing more than "Company, title, date range" and I worked for unknown companies for the majority of my career. I constantly get contacted by recruiters and I got all my jobs through LinkedIn still

I am now in a leadership position at a very competitive public company with a market cap over 100b (to illustrate that this works in general)

Companies are desperate and will interview anyone half-decent. If anything, resume is a red flag. I interview more than 100 people a year and I haven't read a resume in years

kritiko4• 5 years ago

My cynical take on the "highlighting experience" section is that you should find some vanity metrics associated with your product or company and take credit for them.

Which actually probably does correlate well to success in a PM role.

My tip to get to the interview stage: get a referral. Trying to be 1 in 814 on resume and cover letter alone is brutal odds.

baby-yoda2• 5 years ago

cynical take:

here is the opinion of one singular hiring manager. do things this way because this person likes things that way. however out in the wild you have zero insight on the preferences of every n=1 situation. despite this huge asymmetry you should spend a bunch of time trying to impress n=1. and even then, after all of this, you're still one out of roughly 1,000. good luck.

glenngillen5• 5 years ago

Absolutely true. Which is why I call out the end you shouldn’t treat this as some kind of dogma. If you’re not getting to the interview stage you at least need to have a process to reflect on why and iterate on it.

baby-yoda2• 5 years ago

Hi Glenn, thanks for the reply. Didn't mean to direct my comment at you in particular, moreso at the job market in general. we all fall on different parts of the job seeking spectrum with relative opportunities for improvement, just trying to keep the numbers aspect from being downplayed.

NearAP• 5 years ago

1) I agree with the overall thrust of listing achievements instead of just generic duties. However I would say that it can be difficult to do in some instances and so shouldn't be taken as dogma. It's even more difficult to do when you work in very large enterprises (where there are multiple layers of management and you own a very small bit but you do it exceedingly well)

2) I disagree with the listing of job title unless it's generic i.e. instead of 'Senior Product Manager', I think hiring managers should instead expect 'Product Manager'. This is important because titles differ wildly across companies. I have seen a large number of companies (especially startups) title a job as 'Director Product Management' or 'Head of Product' but the requirement is looking for someone with 3+ years of experience. In some other companies, a 'Director' must have multiple reports including a manager of others reporting to them while in others a Director is an Individual Contributor. Blend (the FinTech company) has an article on this - [a]

3) Unfortunately, companies (including Recruiters) still filter by Name brand schools (unless you have some exceptional public profile) so putting your brand name school at the top still looks good. If LinkedIn generates your resume, it will put your school at the top.

[a] - https://blend.com/blog/life/job-titles/

ska3• 5 years ago

re 2: as you note, many titles are next to useless without other information, but if you have had more than one role in a company that can help shape the arc.

On the other hand, every position needs a concise role description precisely because titles are not often comparable across orgs.

logifail• 5 years ago

Instead, consider something like this [snip] Scoped down intial launch requirements

...and after all that, don't forget to use your spell checker _and_ then get someone with good language skills to proof-read your application.

Mc91• 5 years ago

When I was looking for work two years ago, I sent around my software engineer resume but was not getting many responses. So I looked at ten job listings for open positions and analyzed them for many things.

Most of them said they wanted a software engineer, one said they wanted a software developer, one used both terms. Two companies asked for knowledge of data structures and algorithms. Three asked for someone who could write maintainable code.

One thing I noticed - mention of having high impact. Mention of agile, iteration, fast pace. Lots of mentions of team collaboration. Mention of being able to ship features, fix bugs, and learn.

My resume was mostly about what languages I knew and the like, I rewrote it to use words like collaboration, impact, agile and the like (all of which were true, I just didn't use the word collaborate in my resume, or mention I collaborated with product owners, UX etc.) Basically my new rewritten resume was a regurgitation of the job listing commonalities - but an honest one as I had been working scrum, collaborating etc., I just left that out of my resume and instead put technical buzzwords. Once I made the change I began to get more responses.

didntknowya• 5 years ago

Most recruiters use a software to screen CVs before an actual human even reads them. If you don't have enough of the buzzwords then unfortunately it doesn't go through.

ArkanExplorer• 5 years ago

Hi Glenn, how are you finding hiring for product-type roles right now, at this stage of the pandemic recovery?

I'm interested in moving to the USA from Australia with the special E3 visa* available to Aussie professionals,

but I suspect that the job market needs to be kinda hot already, for me to get a look in (given the initial inconvenience and uncertainty of hiring a non-American).

*Similar process to hiring a Canadian

glenngillen5• 5 years ago

We don’t hire to relocate people so I don’t have direct and current experience to speak to there. I’d be curious to know how much it’s happening given the shift to more remote working over the past year.

I’d agree in principle though that it requires a hot and supply constrained market. The process and costs for the employer are no joke and so it really makes the most sense when you’ve got few other options.

My experience with the E3 specifically (I relocated on one a decade ago) is just the lack of knowledge about it. Employers are familiar with H1B but very few were familiar with an E3. I ended up having to time and time again say something like “I’m eligible for a visa that’s very similar to an H1B, but with a higher likelihood of unused allocation. So it should be easier”. Even post offer the legal and relocation team I was matched up with needed a lot of coaching and correction to handle an E3 despite being a specialist immigration firm. I’ve heard stories from others that were a lot less painful, mainly because they got to choose their own immigration lawyers who had specific E3 experience. I was joining a big company by that point and so had to go through the firm and process they were already on retainer with. YMMV.

Getting to the Product Manager interview stage

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