📖PM resume tips if you've never been a PM
resume
If you’re looking for your first PM gig, then I’m sure you’ve experienced this 👇
The irony! How is one supposed to get a PM job without any experience? Well, the good news is that everyone is aware of this paradox and if you’re applying to the right role (a role that appreciates 1-2 years of PM experience), then there is a way to get around this. In this post, we’ll talk about some general tips and a lot more PM specific tips to make your resume super effective and get past the resume screening stage.
As always before we get into the tips, let’s first look at:
What is the resume reader/interviewer looking for?
As with any job you’re applying to, there are some specific points that the person screening your resume is going to be looking at. These are generally
years of experience
education - degree, which college, time period
work experience - role, the companies you worked at, time spent at each company
But more specifically, they are going to be looking for proof of your aptitude for product management. So, how do we go about showing this in the resume? If you’re thinking, “I don’t have anything to show aptitude for PM 😭” , don’t worry - all is not lost yet. (Pssst you may also want to read our take on the Impostor syndrome and what you can do about it). You most likely have examples to show for some of the skillsets needed of a PM. So park that ball of anxiety and self doubt, and read on, dear reader. There’s also a section at the end for those of you who truly believe you have absolutely no examples to include in your resume.
How to show aptitude for product management in your resume?
First, ensure you have a list of points about your work experience/achievements ready. You might want to write this out in a separate document. Now, let’s get into the crux of the matter. If you’ve never officially been a PM, what are you even going to include in your resume?
1. It’s all about the skills - Let’s look at some of the skills a PM needs:
Ability to influence
Product mindset
Leadership
Stakeholder management
Anything else that showcases your aptitude for PM such as customer empathy, writing, etc.
You aren’t a PM officially but I’m sure your work experience demands all these skills to be used in whatever role you are in currently. Not convinced yet? Let’s work with an example.
Example - You’re a developer who is applying for their first official PM job
Let’s look at some examples that you can include from your work ex.
Ability to influence - Your ability to influence comes from several factors such as effective communication, expertise in the domain, confidence, negotiation skills, or networking. It’s really difficult to indicate examples of this ability but you could use this space to list anything that differentiates yourself. What makes you really good at what you do? Ideally, you would list your key achievements here - awards, recognition, promotions, special projects, etc.
Product mindset - This is probably the toughest part. But in most cases, you have the product mindset but just don’t know it yet! Here are some indicators
Did you identify a user need and think about solutions for this need?
Did you think the UX of the feature you were building was not intuitive enough?
Did you refine your code to ensure the user had a good experience? Make the operation faster, stored a user preference to make the user’s life easier, include formatting shortcuts as delight?
All of these indicate that you were able to put yourself in the shoes of the user and empathize with them. Make sure to include these in your resume, it’s what sets you apart from the others applying for the same role with similar experience.
Leadership - If you had people reporting to you, this is easy. You can talk about leading a team of x people and the impact you created as a team. If you didn’t have people reporting to you, you can talk about the projects/initiatives you led as part of work and the impact it made.
Collaboration/Stakeholder management - Talk about the time you’ve worked with multiple teams - did you set up a weekly cadence to identify blockers early? Did you send updates on this project to multiple stakeholders? Alternatively, did you work with the leadership team on a project? List examples from these projects and talk about the impact you created.
Control YOUR narrative - Once you have these points ready, think about how you want to include them in your resume. The typical way to do it is
But this is the lazy approach. With this, you’re basically making the interviewer do all the work. For an interviewer who is strapped for time and can spend an average of 2 minutes on your resume, the above format conveys that you’re a really good developer at best. How about you convey what a great PM you will be instead? Then, it’ll look like this
So you basically take all the points you listed under the different PM skill sets in point 1 and create those buckets in your resume. If you’re feeling a little skeptical at this point, remember that all of these examples are from your work experience and you’re highlighting the skills used instead of just grouping them under the organization you worked for. You aren’t trying to make up a PM role for yourself in your previous organization, you’re simply saying that you have created opportunities for yourself to display your PM skills.
Consistency is key - try to showcase these skills throughout your resume. Make sure you aren’t just looking at your work experience, revisit your side projects, internships, entrepreneurial endeavours and hobbies, and include them in too!
The JD is your friend - If you don’t have examples for all of the skills listed above, take a look at the requirements section in the JD to see which skills might be valued more/are essential for the role.
This makes it really easy - make sure to include product management/product mindset (as experience in PM or a similar role is mentioned), leadership skills and problem solving as sections in your resume under work experience.
Prepare for followups - Your resume is the first piece of information that the interviewer sees about you. Ensure you only include details in your resume that you’re absolutely comfortable answering. A good practice is to never lie or blatantly make up something on your resume as this will generally be found out when you’re trying to get into the details of what you worked on or later in the job itself.
Finally, remember - the culture of the organization and the team you’re applying to determines if you advance to the next round or not. Some organizations may not really care about your education, some may mandate an MBA, some may celebrate the fact that you weren’t officially a PM before.
General resume writing tips
In this section, we’ll look at some general tips to make your resume super effective.
1 page only - If you’re having trouble getting your resume to one page, think of this as practice for when you’re a PM! Prioritize the most important points. Also keep in mind that no one is going to spend more than five minutes reading your resume.
Presentation matters - Don’t go crazy and create a flashy template but at the same time a basic DOS like template doesn’t work either. Pro tip 🔮: Check Canva for resume templates. You’re applying to a PM role, UX is critical!
Note: If you don’t have the freedom to use whatever template you want, then go with the template you have but try to be creative about the presentation. You can group information into relevant sections, bold certain parts, etc. The idea is to make your resume easily readable.
Be crisp, but be impactful - When you’re describing what you did at a previous organization, don’t write the JD for the role. Talk instead about what you did and what you created. People like to use the STAR (Situation, Task, Action, Result) or the RAS (Result, Action, Situation) frameworks for this.
Example - I was a social media marketer at company X
❌Managed the social media presence of the company and create leads for the product
✅Launched the twitter presence(Situation/Task); created and led campaign #HumansofCustomerSupport (Action) and increased TOFU by 25% in 3 months(Result)
✅Increased TOFU by 25% in 3 months (Result) by launching the campaign #HumansofCustomerSupport (Action) as part of establishing company X’s twitter presence
No jargon, no short forms - Ur rsm can’t rd lyk dis.
Summary - Some people choose to include a 1-2 line summary of themselves on the resume. As PMs who have screened many many resumes, we don’t think this is necessary and is wasted real estate that you could instead use to showcase other skills.
Photo - This is your personal preference, if you think adding a photo adds some color to your resume, then do include it.
PDF - Please submit your resumes in PDF only, no doc, docx or any other funky formats.
Cover letter - As long as this is not a mandate, this is another aspect that’s upto you. Some interviewers take cover letters to be a sign of effort and the interest on the candidate’s part, while some others just skip the cover letter entirely if they are strapped for time.
Review ^ infinity - Always review before you send your resume out (even if you’ve done this many times). A spelling mistake/typo shows lack of attention to detail and could really bring down the great impression you could otherwise be making on the interviewer.
Get feedback - A resume is rarely perfect on the first attempt and is meant to go through many many iterations. Find friends/mentors (even better if they are PMs) to take a look at your resume and give you brutally honest feedback.
How to build/show aptitude for PM
Now let’s say you’ve written out your first draft and you feel like you don’t have enough to add to the product management/product mindset section. If this is the case, work on a plan to bolster this section. Here are some suggestions
Look for fun projects at work (effort:low) - It’s easiest to try and get some product experience at your organization itself. Discuss your PM aspirations with your manager and try to work something out. If you’re lucky, you could end up working on a small feature but if not, even shadowing a PM for a few weeks will give you a lot of insight.
Work at a startup (effort:medium) - Working at a startup can be really educational. Startups give you the opportunity to shape your own role which makes it easier to develop product skills.
Side projects (effort:high) - Side projects are underrated but super useful. It’s the most fun way to learn and develop PM skills as there’s absolutely no pressure on you to prove its success. Side projects are all about learning. So many of the coolest products today started as side projects. If you’re looking to do one, talk to your friends about some ideas and try working on one together. Read this post for inspiration. Also remember, most side projects don’t need you to code.
Do an MBA(effort:very high) - An MBA degree from a reputed institution gives your resume a boost and the course itself develops your skills on the business side - economics, marketing, finance, consumer behavior, negotiations, etc. Obviously this is not an option that everyone needs to consider. Think long and hard before you do an MBA as this is a big commitment - financially and otherwise, and does not guarantee you a PM job at the end of it.
Start your own company(effort:very high) - In the event that all else fails, this is a pretty good idea though it might put a lot of pressure on you and could be considerably risky. Find a relevant problem you’re passionate about solving, find a group of people with complementary skill sets who you enjoy working with, and get started. Entrepreneurship is a great teacher no matter the result of your startup journey.
Bonus 🌟
Ok, we know this was a lot, so here’s something to cheer you up 🙌