Transitioning to Product Management: Resume Writing Tips for Novices

It can be challenging for novice product managers to create a "selling" resume tailored to the profession. Having worked in product management for more than seven years, and having undergone and conducted many interviews, I would like to share some tips to help you present your experience effectively and find your dream job.

It only takes a few seconds to form an opinion about a person during the first meeting. The same goes for resumes – recruiters need 7-10 seconds to decide whether to take a closer look or skip it.

To avoid having your resume ignored, make it short and concise, and use the framework below. These tips are universal and will apply to any novice product, regardless of their specialization.

Step 1: Preparation

Describe your experience and formulate your goal

If you already have a ready-made resume – great, but set it aside for now. I do not recommend filling out a template or using resume preparation services.

Start from scratch: open the simplest text editor, preferably one where you cannot format text, or take a regular paper notepad:

• Recall and list all your achievements at work, in business, or even in school. It's not easy to do this right away. Working on my own resume, to make it easier and not miss anything, I reviewed old notes, and letters, and talked to colleagues I had worked with before. This way, I analyzed my entire career, month by month, writing down what I did and what results I achieved.

  
  

• Describe your career path. You will end up with a text of approximately 2-3 paragraphs, based on which you will compose your resume. Do not try to immediately "fit" the text to the specifics of product management; write it as it is.

  
  

  • Indicate how many years you have worked in IT (or another field), and recall the achievements you are proud of and like to talk about. Praise yourself, especially if you are not used to doing so.

  • List the major companies you worked for and the highest positions you held. Write how many people you managed, both in projects and direct subordination, how many projects you launched, how much money you brought to the company or clients, and what other significant results were achieved thanks to you.

  • If you have experience founding your own business and practically no experience working in companies – that's great. You can surely solve complex tasks in the shortest possible time, focusing on results.

    
    

• Clearly formulate your goal. The long version, for example, might be: "By such-and-such a date, I want to become a product manager at Company X/startup, learn from a strong team, earn Y money, and most importantly, influence the product and create real value for users in [name of subject area]." It's important to keep this goal in mind while working on your resume and to orient yourself toward it.

  
  

• If you find it difficult to evaluate your experience or formulate your goal, I recommend reading articles on what a product manager should be able to do and how to assess your own skills.

Step 2: Polishing the Text

A resume is a product that meets the needs of the hiring party. Therefore, to solve the task, you should study the market and carefully analyze what employers are looking for.

I will not dwell on this part in detail, but I will say that it is important to do it after you have completed step 1 and written what you really like and what achievements you have had so that you have more chances not to deceive yourself and choose the right career path.

Focus on the important or "Wow!", "Aha!" moments

When applying for a job, your main task is to impress and "hook" recruiters and hiring managers. Basically, you need to get a "Wow!" and "Aha!" reaction from them:

• "Wow!" - the person reading the resume is impressed by the result of your work and now asks himself the question: "How did you manage to do this?"
• "Aha!" - he receives an answer to his question. Usually, this happens during the interview, so be prepared to tell in detail about the work done. I will try to write about how to do it better in a separate article.

Focus on the results and their impact on the business, but be honest - deception will definitely be exposed during the interview process. Write briefly, trying to convey the essence as fully as possible.

Remember the goal: if you worked as an IT project manager or analyst, you are likely to want to describe this experience in the most detail. This is certainly a big plus, but not quite what the employer expects from a product manager. If you write that you increased the click-through rate of an advertising banner from 2% to 5%, be prepared to explain what you did specifically and how your work affected the result.

Work experience

Traditionally, this part of the resume is presented in the form of lists of tasks and achievements. Here, attention should be paid to the wording, as the same experience can be presented differently. I will give an example of how to do it better.

Example

So, let's say we see the following in the candidate's resume:

"Implemented a dashboard to display the status of platform services."

This wording is suitable for a project manager's resume but is not informative enough for a product manager. What results were achieved? What data can be used to support the value of this development? Let's add specific figures:

"Implemented a dashboard to track the status of SaaS platform services (more than 50 development teams), reducing incident notification time to one second."

Better, but still not clear who and how it helped. During the interview, it became clear that we're not talking about the monitoring of the productive circuit used by end-users, but about an internal project of the development and testing team. In this case, here's the kind of description I would expect to see from the hiring manager:

Reduced downtime for over 50 development teams by N times to one second ("Wow!") by implementing a system for monitoring and alerting about service failures.

This wording can also be significantly improved, but it includes an indication of real measurable results and value for the business. In addition, it clearly indicates that the result was achieved through a new product, not by changing development processes.

By relying on this structure, you can present your experience and achievements in the most favorable light.

About section

The "About Me" section is your pitch, the task of which is to "sell" yourself to the employer. Here, I advise you to avoid general words and vague formulations, for example, this:

Familiar with the structure of information systems, databases, and integrations. Use SQL and Python for data analysis. Know the basics of project management and agile software development methodologies Kanban and Scrum.

Here's how I summed up my experience in the "About Me" section:

Technology product executive with hands-on expertise with 17+ years of a career that includes developing products for 63+ million monthly active users, CPO at 300+ employee company. An innovator responsible for the product growth on new market niches for smart home speakers in 3M+ households using ML & RL, and built a leading parking management system serving 500,000+ payments daily.

Step 3: Creating a resume

Now that the main work is done, it's time to move on to creating a resume. I'll share specific recommendations that, in my opinion, are important to follow.

Main points:

• The resume should be one to two pages in A4 format, even if you have 20 years of experience;
• I do not recommend using the template from the resume-building websites, as they offer an inefficient structure and spacing. Such a resume ends up being too voluminous, and the key blocks may not be arranged in the best order;
• Instead, design the resume yourself. Use a font size of 10.5-12, and leave small indents and spaces between lines to make the text comfortable to read;
• You can experiment with the structure of the resume, but I recommend using this order as a base:
  • Name, surname, and contact information;
  • Brief description of your experience ("About Me");
  • A detailed description of work experience and achievements (from most recent to earliest);
  • Education, courses, and certificates;
  • Skills.

What should be included in the resume:

• The specific position. In this case, it is "Product Manager";
• Contact information: phone, email, link to LinkedIn profile;
• City of residence;
• Year, the month of start and end of employment in each company, your role (it is not necessary to rely on the employment record, write based on facts);
• Education. You can indicate the average grade of your diploma if it is higher than 4 on a five-point scale;
• Certificates and courses in product management or IT. If you have recently completed them, it will show your interest in the profession and your desire to develop;
• Key skills for the profession, both technical and managerial, such as product management, team management, Python, SQL, A/B testing, etc.

Not necessary:

• Listing all the companies you've worked for, especially if there are many. Consider combining some of them into one section;
• Specifying your age. Age or date of birth itself is not important, and you can estimate roughly how old the candidate is based on their education and work experience;
• Adding a photo - takes up a lot of space;
• Listing languages you know if the job does not require foreign language skills;
• Marking readiness for business trips. If the job you're applying for involves business trips, the employer will assume that you're ready for them by default;
• Listing your patronymic.

Useful advice

I recommend practicing your attention to detail and studying the resumes of product managers on LinkedIn. You may want to adopt some ideas from there, but it's important not to copy other people's resumes too closely or imitate them too much, as every experience and situation is unique.

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