Getting to the Product Manager interview stage | Hacker News Reader

Getting to the Product Manager interview stage

glenngillen.com

80 pointsglenngillen45 comments

My cynical take on the "highlighting experience" section is that you should find some vanity metrics associated with your product or company and take credit for them.

Which actually probably does correlate well to success in a PM role.

My tip to get to the interview stage: get a referral. Trying to be 1 in 814 on resume and cover letter alone is brutal odds.

When I was looking for work two years ago, I sent around my software engineer resume but was not getting many responses. So I looked at ten job listings for open positions and analyzed them for many things.

Most of them said they wanted a software engineer, one said they wanted a software developer, one used both terms. Two companies asked for knowledge of data structures and algorithms. Three asked for someone who could write maintainable code.

One thing I noticed - mention of having high impact. Mention of agile, iteration, fast pace. Lots of mentions of team collaboration. Mention of being able to ship features, fix bugs, and learn.

My resume was mostly about what languages I knew and the like, I rewrote it to use words like collaboration, impact, agile and the like (all of which were true, I just didn't use the word collaborate in my resume, or mention I collaborated with product owners, UX etc.) Basically my new rewritten resume was a regurgitation of the job listing commonalities - but an honest one as I had been working scrum, collaborating etc., I just left that out of my resume and instead put technical buzzwords. Once I made the change I began to get more responses.

Most recruiters use a software to screen CVs before an actual human even reads them. If you don't have enough of the buzzwords then unfortunately it doesn't go through.

1) I agree with the overall thrust of listing achievements instead of just generic duties. However I would say that it can be difficult to do in some instances and so shouldn't be taken as dogma. It's even more difficult to do when you work in very large enterprises (where there are multiple layers of management and you own a very small bit but you do it exceedingly well)

2) I disagree with the listing of job title unless it's generic i.e. instead of 'Senior Product Manager', I think hiring managers should instead expect 'Product Manager'. This is important because titles differ wildly across companies. I have seen a large number of companies (especially startups) title a job as 'Director Product Management' or 'Head of Product' but the requirement is looking for someone with 3+ years of experience. In some other companies, a 'Director' must have multiple reports including a manager of others reporting to them while in others a Director is an Individual Contributor. Blend (the FinTech company) has an article on this - [a]

3) Unfortunately, companies (including Recruiters) still filter by Name brand schools (unless you have some exceptional public profile) so putting your brand name school at the top still looks good. If LinkedIn generates your resume, it will put your school at the top.

[a] - https://blend.com/blog/life/job-titles/

re 2: as you note, many titles are next to useless without other information, but if you have had more than one role in a company that can help shape the arc.

On the other hand, every position needs a concise role description precisely because titles are not often comparable across orgs.

Can confirm the importance of a thoughtful cover letter, both from the hiring and job hunting perspective.

I am glad to see more people move away from the 2010s-era-Google-focused approach to hiring where human elements of a job are stripped away and the interview is merely another test to ace.

Some good advice here. The part about highlighting experience resonated with me. A lot of CVs I see just list the generic duties of each role, not what the candidate achieved in them.

Among the things I look for when interviewing PMs:

- did they have an impact in the past roles?

- will they help us be excellent, by finding and embedding good ideas/practices/tactics from elsewhere?

If a PM in 2021 doesn't list achievements on their CV, then they:

- haven't bothered to Google something like 'how to create a great CV', or

- couldn't separate the great answers from the noise, or

- decided their accomplishments weren't worth listing.

Bad sign.

Glad we're asking PMs to chase resume trends from random blogs instead of just interviewing well and being the right fit for the job.

First, showing achievements on a CV isn't a trend.

Second, you can't "just interview well" if your CV doesn't give someone an inkling you might be able to do the job.

Third, "being the right fit for the job" includes being able to learn and being able to communicate. A CV that doesn't list accomplishments signals negatively for both of those.

Well, I've never heard of listing "achievements" on your resume, and all the articles I see on Google related to this are from Winter and Spring 2021, so at least that verbage is a current fad.

I'd consider someone with a pretty trendy CV to be a net negative, it means they endlessly focus on whatever is the latest thing, and not focusing on core principles, but many companies just want to hire people who spend hours optimizing minutiae and ignoring substantial fundamental issues; so this is actually rock solid advice!

Listing achievements/accomplishments/results/whatever, as specifically as possible, has been absolutely standard resume advice for decades. Maybe "achievements" is a trendy term. I don't know as I haven't updated my resume for over 10 years. But the point is that it matters more that you accomplished something specific than that you had this job.

Oh yeah, that's definitely true!

I just get tired of seeing resume formats constantly cycling every year around some vague "trend". People adding headers and sections to their resumes outside of a simple straightforward standard, weird resume advice blogs and on YouTube are probably just desperate for constant content.

'I've never heard of listing "achievements" on your resume, and all the articles I see on Google related to this are from Winter and Spring 2021'

The advice is good now, but it was also good 15+ years ago. The 2004 edition of 'Cover letter magic' contains a heading "Sales and Merchandising: What You Have Accomplished". It says:

"You can most positively position your qualifications by defining the scope of your responsibilities and then highlighting your achievements and successes. That means not just saying what you did, but also how well you did it."

Note the use of the words 'accomplished', 'achievements', 'successes'.

I'm sorry I don't have any older CV books handy.

> Well, I've never heard of listing "achievements" on your resume

This has been standard advice for decades. Not necessarily in a section labelled "Achievements" but nonetheless, very orthodox.

OP's blog post said they went through 814 applicants for a PM role. You need some sort of starting screener.

You need to get an interview first. Once you get to that stage, you’re absolutely right!

How do you distinguish impact from lack of impact?

And how do you validate the PM was actually responsible for that impact?

I don't understand question #1. Maybe you can rephrase?

#2 requires a mix of (i) reference interviews, and (ii) digging into details during candidate interviews. Read these books to learn how:

* Who: https://www.amazon.com/Who-Geoff-Smart/dp/0345504194

* Topgrading: https://www.amazon.com/Topgrading-3rd-Promoting-Turbocharges...

Thanks for responding.

Question 1 is basically how do you define impact? What does a candidate who has not made an impact (or made a negative impact) look like in an interview? The reason I ask is that it strikes me that there are so many intangibles in business outcomes.

I'm also curious about how you conduct and benchmark your reference interviewing - I have given lengthy reference interviews for colleagues taking executive roles, but those references were extremely rose-colored. There's no incentive for me to be candid.

(Not the OP)

One thing I always ask about but find to be especially helpful with less technical roles is to go into the whole process. Start with what they accomplished but keep digging. What other options did you consider? What were the trade offs? How did you decide your approach was best? What lessons did you learn and how did you apply them in the future?

Those questions can all be BSed but at a certain point if you have good answers for them then you at least know what you’re talking about even if it’s all made up.

Then I usually combine with some kind of concrete exercise that relates to the actual job. For product managers I like to give some kind of product strategy (either something we’ve done or something we’d never do to avoid people feeling like they are doing free work) and have them put together a product proposal. The more junior they are the more guidance they get and the more it’s a test of turning a discussion of features into clear requirement. If they’re more senior it’s about turning strategy into a clear product.

The second part has caught a number of people who said the right things but couldn’t execute, or at least not in a way that was compatible with our culture.

This is really insightful. Is the product strategy problem typically a take home? In my experience, “product whiteboard” exercises have always felt like a bit of a party trick when I’ve encountered them. The discovery phase gets so truncated in order to get to cover design/implementation etc. Basically a Fermi problem but “show me your framework.”

Oh yeah, definitely take home. After we’ve made it pretty far so that the candidate doesn’t feel like we’re just asking them to do an exercise as a form of screening.

I also try to frame it as the exercise is instead of two more interviews where people would ask the same questions, and tell them not to spend more than a couple hours, although there’s no time limit.

Trying to be really conscious of all the limitations and asks of “take home work” for an interview. I will say, especially as they get more senior, I tell them to make assumptions and document the assumptions they made. It’s part of the job (making good assumptions and communicating them to everyone) and I think it fits well into the framework of a take home product strategy exercise.

mason55's is spot on: keep digging. If someone really did something, they can easily answer any detailed question about it, including what alternatives they considered/tried.

Re #2, you have to control the interview, and come armed with questions to draw people out. 'kritiko mentioned their difficulty defining concrete measures for the outcome of their work. Can you tell me about the impact that's had on the team?'

Re: #1, I recommend reading 'Radical Focus' and Move (Patty Azzarello). A PM should be able to define measures of impact, and be able to communicate why they are important. If they can't do that, how could anyone trust them to prioritize features/whatever?

This is pretty good guidance on crafting a solid resume for a product manager: https://www.productlessons.xyz/article/product-manager-resum...

I've never known about this and never once had someone mention it to me. Which is exactly why I'm going to be doing it now.

Any solid senior software engineer resume samples? I need to update mine as I start looking for jobs. Not a lot of samples talk about how to format it when youve been at one company for a long time with multiple roles.

probably just something like this:

[total year range] Name of Company

-> indent [year range of last position] position title

   duties, interesting projects

-> indent [year range of 2nd to last] position title

   duties, interesting projects

Maybe include months for the individual roles depending on how short the year ranges are

I'd recommend prioritizing impact over "duties, interesting projects", especially quantatative impact e.g. "built widget that increased x by y%"

I'd also always include months

Once you get fairly far into your career, covering each title separately adds up to a lot of uninteresting text. My two (now 3) long-term jobs, my titles varied but my fundamental role didn't--though my responsibilities increased. (And often didn't go by my official title anyway.)

I just looked at my (out-dated) resume and, for my first two long-term jobs, I just put the years, one of two specific titles, and a list of major accomplishments.

That said, I've never had to go through an HR screen so my resume probably never mattered much.

"senior" is such a loose category now in tech I find it almost useless, ranging from "no longer needs constant handholding" to "can run this show".

Assuming you are talking more to the latter part of that spectrum, this is what I would expect to see:

1) A rough timeline (say down to month or quarter resolution) of roles within that company (and others if you have them), with a concise role description focused on what you were responsible for; give me an idea of your day-to-day in that role.

2) Projects and achievements. "Shipped X" "Added Y capability" "Improved Q performance by U %" is much stronger than "Worked on Z subsystem". Be prepared to describe anything in here in great detail if asked. Group achievements are fine but call out what you did (e.g. "Part of X team, delivering 9mm in new revenue by adding [system]. My contribution was [describe]).

3) Strengths and skills. Be honest but blow your own horn a bit. Anything you claim here a good hiring manager will consider testing.

4) Maybe education & certs etc., depends on relevance and position

Hiring managers want to understand the impact you've had before, and what you may bring to their team. If you write yourself up as a fungible IC, that's how you'll be pigeonholed.

Formatting. No more than 2 pages for an engineering position. Making it stand out a bit isn't bad, but much more important to make it clear and easy to read.Personally I don't care too much about format unless it is hard to follow.

Two classic ways to do this are time-based (so all above is interleaved) or functionally (e.g. a short role timeline, but also a project area, etc.). They are both fine if written well, but concentrate on the story it tells.

Honestly people are more used to the first format (timeline) but be careful not to bury your strengths if you do. If you chose the second approach to more easily emphasize them, make it clear by formatting.

Finally - remember a resume should not be a mere logbook of your work, more of a highlight reel.

I had the same issue last year. I was at one company for 5 years, pretty much my first real job out of school, and wanted to sell a story of personal growth at the company

I ended up with this: https://henryfjordan.com/resume-2020.pdf

It got me plenty of call backs and a new job within a few months. Looking at it again now, I might remove/shrink the "profile" section and move "skills" down below "experience". The resume is very number heavy, which I think worked well selling me as someone who got stuff done. Under my "Experience" section I put my general responsibilities first and then a list of achievements for my main job that was basically a listing of big projects I worked on. I figured that since I really only had 1 real developer job that I should make sure to communicate what that job was like in addition to my achievements. If I had worked at 3 different places, I think it would have been more of a given that I've run into Agile and Jira and all that, but with 1 job I needed to be more explicit.

I also took a lot of advice from an article that I cannot find now, but it described the 3 audiences to consider when writing your resume: HR/Recruiters, Hiring Managers (your potential boss), and Peers/Interviewers. Each is looking for something different. HR is looking that you match the keyword-bingo and don't have red flags (The profile and skills section are mostly for them). The Hiring Manager cares the most about impact, so sell your achievements to them. Peers are mostly just looking for something to talk about in interviews, so I put a line about a video game I made during a hackathon to serve as a conversation starter in interviews.

I hope this helps!

Im pushing 15 :)

From what I’ve seen in hiring, you’ll reach the 75th percentile with consistent formatting and no spelling mistakes. It’s incredible how bad some of the resumes are. You would think it would be a good idea to optimize the one constant across all your job applications, but apparently not. If you’re applying as a senior frontend engineer, but you can’t even layout text in Microsoft word, what should I infer about your ability to build a web page?

That 75th percentile might even be enough to get to an interview, depending on how sparse the company’s pipeline is. But in terms of optimizing content to advance from 75 to 90+ percentile – the best method is something that jumps out at the person reading. That might be an elite degree, or a popular project, or an unusually relevant background for the company.

Basically, you need a clean resume and at least one “thing” that jumps off the page and differentiates you from other candidates.

Sometimes I wonder how the hiring process would change if applicants could see the resumes they’re competing with.

thank you, this really helps

In my experience, having an up to date LinkedIn profile is more than enough.

I have no presence online, I don't do open-source, I went to an absolute no-name regional school, my work experience is nothing more than "Company, title, date range" and I worked for unknown companies for the majority of my career. I constantly get contacted by recruiters and I got all my jobs through LinkedIn still

I am now in a leadership position at a very competitive public company with a market cap over 100b (to illustrate that this works in general)

Companies are desperate and will interview anyone half-decent. If anything, resume is a red flag. I interview more than 100 people a year and I haven't read a resume in years

cynical take:

here is the opinion of one singular hiring manager. do things this way because this person likes things that way. however out in the wild you have zero insight on the preferences of every n=1 situation. despite this huge asymmetry you should spend a bunch of time trying to impress n=1. and even then, after all of this, you're still one out of roughly 1,000. good luck.

Absolutely true. Which is why I call out the end you shouldn’t treat this as some kind of dogma. If you’re not getting to the interview stage you at least need to have a process to reflect on why and iterate on it.

Hi Glenn, thanks for the reply. Didn't mean to direct my comment at you in particular, moreso at the job market in general. we all fall on different parts of the job seeking spectrum with relative opportunities for improvement, just trying to keep the numbers aspect from being downplayed.

Either way, me or the job market, you’re right! :)

Which I hope bodes very well for your own hiring process whichever side of the table you’re on in the future. Best wishes and best of luck.

> Instead, consider something like this [snip] Scoped down intial launch requirements

...and after all that, don't forget to use your spell checker _and_ then get someone with good language skills to proof-read your application.

Hey Glenn, are you open from applicants based in Europe? Considering to apply :)

Unfortunately not for _my_ open roles, but there’s every chance one of the other teams currently has open roles in Europe: https://www.hashicorp.com/jobs

Hi Glenn, how are you finding hiring for product-type roles right now, at this stage of the pandemic recovery?

I'm interested in moving to the USA from Australia with the special E3 visa* available to Aussie professionals,

but I suspect that the job market needs to be kinda hot already, for me to get a look in (given the initial inconvenience and uncertainty of hiring a non-American).

*Similar process to hiring a Canadian

We don’t hire to relocate people so I don’t have direct and current experience to speak to there. I’d be curious to know how much it’s happening given the shift to more remote working over the past year.

I’d agree in principle though that it requires a hot and supply constrained market. The process and costs for the employer are no joke and so it really makes the most sense when you’ve got few other options.

My experience with the E3 specifically (I relocated on one a decade ago) is just the lack of knowledge about it. Employers are familiar with H1B but very few were familiar with an E3. I ended up having to time and time again say something like “I’m eligible for a visa that’s very similar to an H1B, but with a higher likelihood of unused allocation. So it should be easier”. Even post offer the legal and relocation team I was matched up with needed a lot of coaching and correction to handle an E3 despite being a specialist immigration firm. I’ve heard stories from others that were a lot less painful, mainly because they got to choose their own immigration lawyers who had specific E3 experience. I was joining a big company by that point and so had to go through the firm and process they were already on retainer with. YMMV.

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