dezkr
Product Management Resume
· 7 min read ·
You have decided to embark on your product management journey. To get that elusive interview call you’ll have to do four things:
Each step requires a lot of commitment and effort.
The goal of this blog is to help you with building an eye popping resume that would make help you differentiate from the rest.
Why do you need to build a great resume?
Before we commit to spending time on making the perfect resume lets understand why its important. You know you are awesome. Isn’t that enough? Lol..Unfortunately it isn’t 🤣 🤣
Skills to highlight in a great product manager resume
Customer Centricity
Keeping the customer first and balancing it with the needs of the business.
Leadership
Taking charge and inspiring the team to come together and achieve a common goal.
Collaborative
Making the team stronger by building great working relationship with everyone.
Analytical
Looking for the right data to back up your gut. We’ve discussed on how to become more data driven in our blog A Guide to becoming a data driven product team.
We will discuss each of these skills in details in a separate blogpost.
Structure of a great resume
It should have clarity of thought, continuity in its flow, be succinct and result oriented.
Personal Details
State the following details:
Professional Experience
Add only relevant professional experience. Focus only on companies you worked for in the past 10 years. Most hiring managers don’t care beyond that. Use the cover letter to:
Format
Left Aligned
Company Name, Job Title, Location
Example:
Google, Product Manager, Mountain View
State the length of employment in each company
Format
Right Aligned
Month/Year
Example:
July 2019-Present
July 2019-Mar 2021
Use the abbreviation for month.
Education Background
Length
Limit the length of the resume to one page. It is human tendency to expand on our laurels. Resume is a place to highlight them, not describe them in detail. It might be especially challenging to stick to the one page limit if you have decades of experience. In that case focus on more current and relevant experience. Use the cover letter to provide more information that you think will be add value to your profile
Formatting
The Power of PAR
Problem | Action | Result
The good news is that there is an amazing format which helps you frame your experience in a way that can be understood by everyone. It forces you to tell your story in a concise manner that the reviewer can understand.
Problem: An issue you found at work
Action: What did you about it?
Result: The result of your action
You can find a list of action verbs to use in your resume here
Quantifying Product Manager Experience
It adds a lot of weight to your profile if you use product metrics to quantify the “R” result in your resume. Some examples are Churn, Revenue, Traffic, Customer Acquisition Cost(CAC), Operational Cost, Time on Site, Bounce Rate, Customer Satisfaction Rating. We will be going over each of these in detail in a separate blog post
Let’s look at 5 examples of how to write resume bullet point using PAR format
Example 1
✅ Led website redesign project; increased monthly traffic by 7%
❌ Worked with a large team to update the website for 6 months that increased revenue for the company
Example 2
✅ Built Mobile App MVP, received 57K download in the first month
❌ Made the mobile app for the product that all customers liked
Example 3
✅ Led product discovery and development of new product; resulted in 17% increase in revenue
❌ Worked on building a new product for the company for a year that the customers loved
Example 4
✅ Analysed data to identify customer pain-point, improved customer satisfaction score by 27%
❌ Found out that customers were cancelling their subscription because of missing features in the product
**Example 5 **
✅ Collaborated with stakeholder to build customer centric roadmap; resulted in 23% increase in revenue
❌ Created the product roadmap for the company by talking to all the teams
Should I create a new resume for every role I apply?
Yes! Please don’t be lazy. Put in the time and effort in your application. I have seen candidates make the mistake over and over again. They make one resume and then submit it for every role they want to explore. The problem here is that every company is looking for something specific and unique. You have limited space in your resume. You should highlight skills and experience that closely matches with the job description.
Resume based questioning
You can created the perfect resume with bullet points that look great. It fits in perfectly with what the role needs. But when the interviewers start diving deep into the details of the project you start to falter. The devil is in the details and its easy for us to forget. So make sure that you write down detailed notes about each bullet point that is in your resume. Because with time you might forget the details of something you implemented six months ago.
What if I don’t have prior experience?
It becomes a classic case of the chicken and egg problem. You can’t get product management experience without getting the job and a lot of people won’t give you the job without having the experience. All hope is not lost. A lot of great companies focus on skill based hiring. So make sure that you focus on:
Product Manager Resume Template
I thought about this long and hard. Should upload my own resume or a template and add it to this blog? I decided against it since it might tempt you to copy paste and use it as is. That would defeat the very purpose of writing this blog. I want you to use the tools we have discussed and create your own unique resume.
If you want somoene to review and provide feedback then send it over to us at [email protected]. We will be more than happy to help you take a strong step forward in your product management journey.
