A Career Hackers’ Classic, read the full post here.
You must’ve heard of the term “Product Managers”.
They are essential to a company, they are responsible for defining, prioritizing, and driving the development of the product. They work closely with basically everyone. With the marketing team to develop a good product-market fit, with the engineering team to ensure that the product is delivered on time.
But what exactly do Product Managers do? And how you can learn from them to Manage your Job Hunt?
You can learn a lot from PMs (Product Managers), and organize your job hunt for success. This also sets you apart when you’re applying for a PM’s role, as you’re already implementing what you’ll be doing at the job.
But the process of landing a PM job takes work. So take the new approach, consider your application as a product and think of delivering value to your users (the companies you interview with)
Set clear objectives
Having clarity is the best thing you can do for your dream job. Learn about the positions you want to apply for, the work and companies, and talk to people in these positions, to figure out important things about it. Select one to two scenarios, similar to each other that are specific to the position.
Keep track of the companies you love to use as your starting points. A PM knows its target users. Just like that, a PM job seeker knows which companies to target. Once you narrow down your focus, execution gets more efficient.
Have a strategy
Once you set your goal, you need to get an action plan together. Think about what you can do for a specific company or product. Anything that will bring value to them like making a product for them, blogging intensively about the industry intensively to show your knowledge, etc. Get a plan and try to maintain a schedule.
Go for smaller startups than bigger corporations to avoid long recruitment processes. Having a company wait too long for another one to answer is a risk to lose both.
PMs have a bird’s eye view of everything to manage different aspects of a product in parallel to save weeks on a release.
Get people on board
You don’t have to do a job hunt all alone. Confront your ideas to others. Tell your close group of talented friends everything you are doing for their input. Clearly set and communicate your goals so that they can contribute better to your endeavor. They would be happy to help and would feel engaged. Feedback can be really valuable for your improvements.
As a PM, communicating to make sure everyone around the product is moving on in the same direction will make everybody feel engaged and motivated to contribute their best work.
Leverage existing knowledge
The Internet has a ton of free information but try and go for paid professional content for the value and high quality. The ROI will be your PM job. Invest in your knowledge and increase your value.
A PM often identifies external projects to benefit their product either through quality, performance, or speed of execution. They recognize value, incorporate it and shape it according to their product’s needs.
Execute
Practice is the way to make ease with your core skills and learn new ones. Do some interviews and you will notice how better you will become after every interview. Work on your answers to the expected questions.
PMs don’t hesitate to take responsibility. By being able to do things, you could help convince other stakeholders through prototypes, fill in for someone on holidays, or take some weight off someone’s back and let him be more efficient.
Track your success
Make sure to track your steps, success and failure to your goals and strategies. Remember what you were aiming for. Be it likes, page views, or anything.
Failure is an important track to success so try and learn from those failures. Write down after every interview what got the interviewer excited, or what you felt turned him down a bit.
A PM tracks his goals religiously. Ideally, a Product Manager should define the metrics for validating success at the same time as the goals.
By going through all the structure and process, and applying it in your interviews you will already be a much better PM. Your stressful and scary job hunting can be a really exciting, enriching, and fun challenge.
A powerful excerpt from the blog-
“By being able to do things, you could help convince other stakeholders through prototypes, fill in for someone on holidays, or take some weight off someone’s back and let him be more efficient.”
A Career Hackers’ Classic, read the full post here.
Raphaël Korach is a VP Product @GetaroundEU (ex-Drivy) – created www.thepminterview.co.
