 I got two product manager jobs even if I had no product management experience. Hi guys, this is Dr. Nancy Lee. I help engineers and international professionals to transition from worker B to a business leader and a product manager. People frequently ask me this question, how do you become a product manager? To be honest, for all the product managers today, we do not have product manager's experience to begin with, but you become a product manager. The question is, what do you need to gain to make the smooth transition to become a product manager? What do you need to do to make people hire you as a product manager? Today, I'm going to answer these questions to tell you how to become a product manager. And step one is to do side project. There's a lot of preparation you need to do. As I mentioned, nobody has real product manager experience before they become a product manager. But how can you show that you have the right potential to become a product manager? That is through the side project. And for example, we can do hackathon. This is the most highly recommended experience I encourage all my students to do. So hackathon usually is like two days over the weekend, the one I attended was 54 hours of continuous hackathon experience that you need to work with a team of people to address the problem and make MVP and launch a product. So those experiences going to push you through the product management experience in a very fast motion so that you're able to learn what it looks like to interview customers to do design, to come up with the idea. And in addition, if you can win any award in those hackathons, it's going to be really great highlight on your resume, such as I won the second place when I attended hackathon like three years ago. And there beside hackathon, you can also help out with the startup. So help them to launch a product to do voice or customer interviews. Basically startup needs lots and lots of help. They do not have resources, but you can step in to help them out with the process of launching or developing a product. That's also something you can mention on your resume. But to be honest, most importantly, you really need to be sincere in building the product with them together instead of just at least something and put something on your resume. As a hiring manager, I was able to tell how exactly he had done this before. I can immediately tell he's faking that. So make sure you really execute this. So besides hackathon and startup, there are 13 different ways you can improve your experience to add value to product management interviews. I created a checklist for you to identify those 13 projects. You can find out the checklist down below as a description of the video. And second is to build the product sense. What it means is that before you start to become product manager, you need to think like a product manager. What it means is if you grab any product such as Apple Watch, what do you like about it? How would you want to critique it? How do you want to improve it? And if you were the customer, would you like to pay for this or not? What kind of customer would like to buy an Apple Watch? So you should start to think about those questions as a product manager designing the Apple Watch. This is going to prepare you for the product management interview. And third is help with a product launch in your current company. I assume you already had a few years experience in your previous life, even if you're a student doing your MBA, you already worked for a few years. So now if you're in your current company, what can you do? For example, if you're not part of the product management team, but you're in the adjacent functions around product management, there's something that you can do. And first of all, when everyone who launched a product as a product manager, product managers like me will work with different departments within the company such as the marketing team or corporate strategy or software development team. And we will work together to launch a product. So if you are part of those marketing or corporate strategy teams, you need to get closer with the product launch. Help me design a go-to-market strategy so that this could be your related experience and you have been part of the entire experience of launching a product. And number four is to understand the product manager's challenges. What it means is that you need to wear the shoes of a product manager ahead of time. As a product manager, we're thinking about different aspects of the product and how to enhance the product and how to make customers willing to buy our product. So if I were you, I would do information interview to understand what the biggest challenges they are trying to solve. And in addition, shadow of product managers and people had asked me before to shadow me to understand what exactly a product manager is doing. So this is going to prepare you to interview so you can answer those product management interviews questions way better. Number five is that if you are not a technical person, for example, you're in finance or marketing, you want to become a product manager, what can you do? It's that you need to study the software architecture. To be very frankly with you, we believe that it's easier to train an engineer to study pricing and business side aspect. Instead of training a business person to study what the API, how to run containers on top of the AWS platforms, how to do integration regarding different SDK. So those things are very hard to train. So therefore, if I were you, you do not have an engineering background, I would go through some kind of book camps or learn a pick up a book to learn the software architecture, how does API SDK works, this will be part of your day to day operations, even if you get a job. So therefore start to learn this ahead of time. Number six is to join a product community. So networking is how you open the doors to get interview. I've also seen that lots of people when they go networking, they approach me, you want them to tell you about themselves, lots of them couldn't make the connection between what they did before to product management, which means you really need to improve your 30 seconds elevator pitch. So I teach you how to do the 30 second elevator pitch in my free public workshop. And I give those workshops probably once per week. So you can subscribe to my newsletter, I'm going to make announcement about my public workshop. So you can come in and learn how exactly to talk about your 30 seconds elevator pitch. It is critical important was because there will be tons of students or other people who doesn't have product management experience trying to get into the space. But who should I help out? It's a person who already has a vision knowing what's their value, how can they improve and how can they join the company as a product management. So how you really package your story in the 30 seconds elevator pitch is very important during this networking process. Number seven is your resume. Believe me, lots of people send me their resume, have me to review their resume or they want to apply for jobs in my own group. The resume doesn't look like a product manager resume. They're missing those keywords such as voice of customers and customer feedback, product launch, MVP, and even technical description of those products. And those are specifically missing in those resumes. So therefore those candidates cannot stand out. For lots of you guys, if you already followed original step one to step six, I told you earlier, you should be able to identify several experiences relevant to product managers. Now when you put on your resume, you need to know how to put it correctly. So if you're interested in learning more about writing product management resumes, you can comment down below. Let me know if this is a great interest to you. Number eight is the interview. Prepare for product management interviews. After you gain all the experience, you need to learn how to tell stories, how to present yourself in those interviews. I already made a video about 10 secrets to ace the product management interviews and you can directly watch a video right here. I'm not going to repeat what I said earlier. And number nine is join a product management bootcamp. So the key behind it is you need somebody to provide behind the scenes information to tailor your specific experience to the product management interview. The interesting part was that not everybody had the same experience. Everybody experienced a little bit differently. So you need to know how to do that. So I recommend everyone to learn what product management is and how to tailor your experience to product management jobs. So attend the product management bootcamp is pretty interesting as well. So you can check out my book and if you're interested, you can check out more information down below. And finally, I create a step by step guide to show you how to become a product manager. You can find out the guide and down below. This is how exactly I transition from an engineer to a product manager and how I start to manage senior product managers in my own team. So hopefully it's going to help you to land your dream job. All right, this is Dr. Nancy if you're interested in product management and learn how to get compensated at the right level, feel free to subscribe to my YouTube channel and newsletter and learn more from that. See you next time.