Happy New Year 2021! This is an announcement-style article about an upcoming talk and related upcoming articles; this article is not information-heavy. To see the information related to this talk, go to the post-talk details here.
Product School had recently reached out to request me to give a talk to their audience. Glad to have the opportunity, I worked with PS to shortlist topics and decided to give a talk about learning about Product Management and getting a Product Manager role.
I originally published this in my newsletter on Substack. You can subscribe there to get new articles straight to your inbox.
I found the overall process of working together interesting and will write about that as well another time.
Context for the topic and content
There are about 1,770,000,000 results on Google for the phrase “how to get a Product Manager job”, so no doubt there are several resources out there. While struggling to find my first PM job back in 2016, I experimented and build job hunt frameworks that I tested in the real-world. I had the opportunity to share the learnings with 50+ PM aspirants and collate feedback on the intersection of the tips that helped and the tips that were novel. I’m sharing these tips via a talk about the job hunt for finding your first Product Management role.
Expected takeaways from the talk
Main Takeaways:
Treating the PM job search process as a marketing funnel helps provides an organized approach to chaos and reduces the feeling of uncertainty
Optimizing each part of the funnel keeping conversion and return on effort in mind helps focus on the levers you can control
In the application phase, prioritizing your search with a ranked list of companies and champions, optimizing your applications to have a high volume, and obtaining referrals from champions in favored companies.
In the interviewing phase, building a relationship over chats by researching the person, showing your value addition to the company, and practicing to show organized innovation in case questions in interviews.
I built a word cloud based on my slides and speaker notes and this is what I found:
What is the content?
I’ve described the PM job hunt as a process (think of a marketing funnel). I’ve shared a few tips to improve each part of the job hunt. Here are the steps in the process I’ve shared tips for:
List of target companies
People (a.k.a Champions) list
Outreach to potential champions in target companies
Informational interviews
Resume, cover letter
Job post Search
Request referral
Recruiter interviews, behavioral interview Q preparations
Case interview Q preparations
Preparations about the company and on the interviewers
Functional (PM) interview Q preparations
How does the talk fit with my articles?
Each slide I will present is significantly summarized to the “what” for the sake of brevity. I have kept aside the “why” and “how”. The “why” and the “how” on each topic would help anyone searching for another PM job (including PM aspirants) connect the dots between my suggestion and their situation. So, I might expand each section of the presentation into its own article in 2021.
My articles for 2021 would not just be about job hunt… Upcoming articles will have some lifehacks and continue to highlight Product Management learnings such as understanding customer behaviors, identifying KPIs, or developing skills on the job.
How to sign up for the talk?
One can register for the talk on Product School’s Eventbrite here
Post-talk details
You can see see the recording of the talk, slides, speaker notes, etc. here.
Originally published at https://harshalpatil.substack.com on Jan 1, 2021