 Hi, Product School. It's great to speak to you today. I'm Agni Paducharia, and I'm a Product Manager at Facebook in Menlo Park, California. Today I'll be talking to you about what a PM resume should look like. So this is a picture of me over here and a little bit more just about my background on the next slide. So I work as a Product Manager at Facebook, proud Johns Hopkins alumni as well. So once I go in Baltimore, I've been an interviewer at Tech Product Companies before and in the moment, and now volunteer as a math instructor at San Quentin State Prison, teaching math to adult male inmates. And I also, as a result of that, help college students, recent grads, and prison inmates, craft compelling resumes. And of course everybody has different goals and needs to be aware of. So just as a little bit of a primer for this presentation, I will be sharing specifically how to build a PM resume, but a lot of this assumes not a zero to one approach, but more of a one to 10 approach in which you already have a resume and maybe you just want to optimize it more for PM job listings and you get that dream PM job of yours. So the interviewer's number one question is whether you can add value to the business. And it's super important to put yourself in the shoes of an interviewer and just understand their psychology and what their goals are in order to maximize your opportunities and your candidacy for this competitive process. Second, thinking of some of the downstream implications of the interviewer psychology, which I talked about. And really, if you think of the interview process and just wonder what is this, the goal of the interview process is to de-risk the chance of hiring a candidate who is a false positive. In other words, a candidate who might be a bad fit for the business. So there's a couple of strategies that interviewers follow when they look into a resume to de-risk this sort of a chance. So the first de-risking strategy is just understanding like if you've solved similar business problems and that is often referred to as an outcome as relevant experience. Second is ramping up quickly on new problems and being able to learn and absorb very quickly and act as a sponge. That is often referred to as a track record. And the third and final de-risking strategy is just defining people with a growth mindset who love to learn new things but also demonstrate very specific spikes at the same time. And that's often referred to as subject matter expertise or SME. So when we're thinking a little bit about our tactical considerations of our resume and just like having this as a framing before going into just more of the psychological standpoint is that your resume should just contain your contact details email and phone. Some people put a link in but I think that's optional. And be one page for each decade of experience. So in my case, I have less than a decade of experience so my resume is one page. And then in terms of just the different sections that you have, you should definitely have an experience and an education section. Other sections like volunteering skills, et cetera are pretty nice to have but they're optional. In my opinion, I actually like bundle my volunteering into the experience section. And then another big key which I'll talk a little bit more about is to convey impact as opposed to just your responsibilities on the job. It's a big mistake that I see. And finally, the main thing is just always be honest. You don't want to just ever bluff anything on your resume that you didn't do because honesty is really key over here and it's not only the right thing to do but also we'll definitely come back to you if you end up doing anything dishonest. So next is just my point about impact versus responsibilities. So generally I'd say mediocre resumes along your list of responsibilities and a really good one is one that is quickly and consistently delivering signals of impact to the reader. So generally readers don't spend too much time on a resume. So in order to highlight signals of impact for this person, there's just two types of impact that are worth highlighting and I can talk through them a little bit more. So for a product manager, positive customer impact and positive business impact are the main keys. But for the first one, positive customer impact, just some examples of how your work impacted the end users such as customer satisfaction, net promoter scores are great to talk about this. Customer attention, acquisition, activation, adoption, et cetera. This is all PM lingo and generally ties back to customer impacts very well. Next is positive business impacts, which is just being able to scale revenue, cost savings and time savings, which funny enough, if you multiply by a dollar amount so person salary for example per hour gets a little weird but you can actually extrapolate cost savings via time savings, et cetera. So generally a resume is going to be a blend of positive customer impacts and positive business impact. Furthermore, a resume just must speak the interviewer's language. Talking the talk is important in order to walk the walk. So a good exercise is just to read through several product manager job descriptions and think of the verbs because the verbs are sort of the meat of the sentence and leverage those to mirror the description in your resume for your past experience. Some examples of things include shipping products X, shipping feature X, publishing a roadmap to find your requirements, both functional and technical, running an AB test, which hopefully yields some very positive results and collaborating across functions like legal, marketing, data engineering, et cetera. And furthermore, like once you describe your impact and you just have the two types of impact that I mentioned surfaced on your resume very clearly, measuring impact is really a golden on the resume because it helps the interviewer answer the very key question of why was this actually important for the business? And here's some just fictional pre-post examples just to elucidate what I mean by quantifying your impact on a resume. So pre is, and this one already contains a number so it's a good start. So saying conducted 10 customer interviews but then the interviewer is gonna ask the question like why was this important for the business that you conduct your customer interviews? And the answer here was that you lifted annual revenue by 20% by conducting 10 interviews for the app's target persona which is specifically American mothers age 35 to 50. So not only is this more descriptive and features more numbers of course but at the same time this just talks about what is the business impact of what you did and the business impact is that you lifted annual revenue by 20%. Another fictional example is talking about how you increase sales. But I think over here it's a very good opportunity to just talk about how you increase sales 40% quarter over quarter by shipping a customer chat feature within your web application. Next is redesigning the core app experience and it's great that you did this but generally business impact is also super important. So you'd wanna talk about how you drove a 35% increase in D30 retention by redesigning the core app experience which is generally a huge win. Another interesting thing about quantifying the impact is you just have to understand that sometimes companies have different guardrails via NDAs or non-disclosure agreements. So generally using percentages is very helpful here in general in my case I can't use how many millions or hundreds of thousands of dollar I lifted sales or revenue by. So generally using percentages is a very good practice and interviewers definitely understand that in a resume as well. I think you have distribution channels. You've written this awesome resume using some tips from yours truly Agni but to get the interviewers eyes on your resume you really ought to tap into an effective distribution channel. So here's what I've leaned about distribution channels and just getting your resume in front of the right people. So the best one here is a referral like having a friend at the company or having somebody who went to college you went to college with at the company is just a very good way to get your foot in the door. Applying through an in-house recruiter is also just a very good way to do it. So if an in-house recruiter reaches out to you on LinkedIn and it's your dream company definitely respond and build that relationship. Another way to do it is applying through head hunter or third party recruiter. So these are typically recruitment consultancy firms that will reach out to you. I've had kind of mixed experiences with these recruitment consultancy firms won't go into too many details but I'd say in-house has led personally to me for better experiences. And finally, the worst is applying online. I know that many companies of course read every resume that comes through their system but I just still like am applying online to just like throwing your resume into a bit of a black hole. It's not very clear about where it's gonna be distributed and go afterwards. So I prefer not to do it personally although I've heard of many success stories by applying online. So two things to keep in mind during your referral which is gonna be your most powerful distribution channel is how well does this person know you? Are they a former colleague versus somebody you just reach out to on LinkedIn? And then also it's how hard is this person willing to go bad for you? So there's often a lot of backshattling involved in the recruiting process. And if I go and refer in my friend Thomas for example, who's actually a former colleague of mine people will ask like, what did you work on together? Like how is he as a product manager, et cetera. And it's just very important for you to be able to really have somebody who will go to bat for you and say good things about you when interviews you're asking or the recruiter is asking very specific questions. Personally for me, I found that getting referrals from former colleagues or fellow Johns Hopkins alumni have been just the most powerful levers for getting my resume in front of the right people. And that's been how I've gotten all my jobs effectively. And finally, I'd like to share this last picture with you. And of course you can read it and you've probably heard this one before but I think really in general if you're like on the hunt for new jobs externally and maybe this is the reason that you're brushing up your resume and you're impetus to just come to this talk and listen to me speak for a little bit it's important to be really resilient during the process and not take things personally. I think it's as much of a psychological game as it is actually a game of just interviewing and putting your best foot forward. Interviewing can be very exhausting but make sure that you're watching out for your own wellbeing and that you're very sort of determined and persistent in your process but of course respect your own limits as it pertains to applying to new jobs with that awesome resume of yours. And with that, I come to the end of my presentation. So thanks for listening and feel free to reach out to me and connect on LinkedIn. I'm happy to serve as a sounding board and a mentor for you as well through your process and wish you the very best. Goodbye.