 Hello, everyone. Welcome to the webinar. I am Anirudha Bharatwaj and I go by Andy. I'm a product manager at DocuSign and I'm here today to do a guest webinar at Product School on tips to generate more product management interviews. Today, we will be going over five most important tips that have helped me and all of my friends over the past several years that reach out to me regularly. They've also tried and tested this and it's proven to improve your chances of getting more interviews. Then I'll also share an additional point specifically for university graduates and I'll be closing by providing more details on how you can connect with me on Twitter, LinkedIn, and my email ID as well. As I mentioned earlier, I work as a product manager at DocuSign. I've been here for the past two and a half years. I'm currently a product manager on the DocuSign mobile app. Before this, I was a product manager on the API team supporting the entire real estate use cases. Given my technical background, I'm an engineer-turned-product manager, so I started off as an API PM and now I'm on the mobile team, and I graduated from Duke University in 2020, and since then I've been working with DocuSign. With my intro out of the way, we can jump right into the tips. The first step that I have for you today is that LinkedIn is pretty crowded. Don't get me wrong, LinkedIn is a great tool, but it's extremely crowded by job seekers, and I see my field full of people who want a job, commenting for better reach, which is not reaching anyone ironically anymore, because everybody is looking for a job. LinkedIn is like an echo chamber where everybody posts that they either got laid off or looking for a job, and it's pretty saturated. On the flip side, platforms like Twitter, my field is full of tips and tricks of how to be a better PM, tweaking your go-to-market strategies, and so on. I love to hang out on Twitter, and I see all of the senior folks, senior level PMs and decision makers, startup founders also hang out and share their thoughts on Twitter. All job seekers, once they get a job, will also migrate to Twitter just like I did, but it'll take time. So you see already the divide here where job seekers are on LinkedIn and the decision makers are on Twitter. So you wanna be where the puck is going and not where the puck is currently right now. So reach out to people on Twitter directly to increase your chances. A lot of the senior PMs share their thoughts, so you can add value by commenting inside full details to their Twitter threads or to their tips that they share. Get on a call, slide into their DMs. That's a way better way to network and to get informational interview from these people who share these tips. Remember, you wanna be where the puck is going and not where the puck is currently. And all the decision makers are on Twitter and different platforms. So some examples that I wanted to share here is Shreyas Toshi is an OG in the product management space and he recently shared a tweet where he crowdsourced a bunch of product management recruiters in the space with their LinkedIn title and their name. And you can already see that it's already crowdsourced and helping a lot of people, but nobody ever knew about this because you're not on Twitter. Similarly, a second example here is Shanpuri. He's a great angel investor and he shares a lot of his portfolio company is looking for who are looking for talented engineers and product managers like yourself. So just being there and being there and adding value to this community will go a very long way. And it doesn't necessarily have to be Twitter, only it could be a plethora of different platforms like Reddit, Product Hunt, Meetup, Lunge Club AI, the possibilities are endless. All I'm trying to drive home is LinkedIn is pretty crowded. Take the principles that you have learned from LinkedIn and try to apply it to different platforms like Twitter, Lunge Club, Reddit and so on. All right, the second tip that I have is to convert your project to a product. Case studies are great. They're a great way to learn what you've already to implement what you've learned in the class, but they're not flying anymore, unfortunately. The competition in the product management space is just immense and everybody is doing a case study. So take your project and convert it into a real product by launching it to real users. Provide value for free, that's the mantra. If you wanna stand out, you have to provide value for free. I'm sure that you have some real world metrics. It doesn't even have to generate revenue. Nobody's asking you to launch your own product or I mean, nobody's asking you to launch your own startup. No, you don't have to go fetch VC funding. All you have to do is convert your site project to a product and get some metrics in, real world metrics in. This could be anything like number of user signups, monthly active users, it could be paying customers, it could just be shared growth. It doesn't matter. Recruiters and hiring managers love this when you can take an idea from a project phase to a product phase because you learn a lot in this entire process, like go-to-market strategy pricing and whatnot. You can also go viral organically and generate more interviews, which I'll share some examples in a little bit. So even if it has 10 people on the platform, that's fine, that is real world users. Go way longer than your LinkedIn post on sharing the PPT slides that you have done previously. So here is an example case in point. Resume a puppy started as a site project where graduate students Anish, Sraman and Simon realized that they needed a system to beat the ATS and in the process of optimizing their own resumes, they created a tool that could also help others leverage this tool and generate resumes that will pass through the ATS system. They had thousands and thousands of new users sign up in the first few weeks itself. It doesn't have to be revenue generating, as I mentioned earlier. It could just be the sheer number of users signups, downloads or monthly active users or even just growth in the process that you can show how you went to go-to-market and you can talk about this in your interviews. And this, I'm pretty sure, landed a lot of recruiters and hiring managers reaching out to them and sliding their DMs, asking about the product and asking for their time to schedule an interview with them. Another example here is Tanmay Duri on the left-hand side is, was one of my friends and my peer. He built a prototype suggesting how LinkedIn could improve one of its features and showcased it to the crowd. Guess what happened next? It went viral. See the second image here where Monica Lewis, who's the senior director of product management, noticed this and she commented her entire team. It went all the way up to the chief of staff of product, to the product officer at LinkedIn. It's pretty huge what you can do with some of these opportunities that we have now. You can go viral overnight and I'm pretty sure Tanmay got a slew of recruiters DMing him about these opportunities. So you can generate interviews not just by outbound opportunities, but also inbound opportunities. You attract talent. You attract recruiters to you and this is one of the great ways to do it. So taking from a project and converting it to a product, it doesn't have to be pizza perfect, doesn't have to adhere to standards of prototyping or UI design. It could be scrappy. It could be on .space.com domain. Nobody cares. Just host it somewhere, let it release it to the public, get some real value from these users and showcase it to your network, showcase it to the recruiters. Excuse me. The third point that I have for you is networking reimagined. What I mean by reactive networking is when you reach out to someone and get on a call asking them for a referral. This is truly a hit or a miss and most people are weary about referring people that they don't know. I've done this too and I'm guilty about it. So the solution to this problem is something called proactive networking. Make a list of the target companies that you want to work for and start reaching out to these people to understand more about their role. Even though there is no job opening right now, show that you're genuinely interested in this company, learn more about their role. The goal here is to build a relationship with these people even when there is no opportunities at all in that space. But in the future, when an opening eventually shows up, hey, you know where to go and you already have a connection that can land you an interview and have a foot in the door already because of the connection that you've already built. So be more proactive in nature and don't be reactive in nature just because a job opening came out. And if you go in the reactive nature, chances are that all of the people in your school or your current school also reach out to the same people on the same platform. And if I am on the receiving end, I just receive 10 people reaching out for the same role. So chances are that I won't reply to any 10 of these people but if you've already had the pre-built connection, it's much easier to progress and much quicker to get a referral and move forward. And the second point I have here is as the word goes networking, in the word itself, there is network, we have to unlock the network effects of networking. For every person I've talked to, I've asked them to recommend two people that they think I should talk to and would even ask them to make an introduction to these folks. This is the easiest way to increase your network and meet interesting people. This starts to multiply in snowball very quickly. If you meet a person today, they refer you to two more people and the number goes to four, eight, 16 and having that personal introduction guarantees an informational interview call with those people and you can reach as many, you can reach exponentially higher number of people than just by reaching out by yourself on LinkedIn or any other platform. Additionally, try to have something in return when you reach out to these people. Share an article that you think they might be interested in or offer to help anyone that they think might benefit from the skills that you already have. Offer something in return, even if they don't ever ask you for a favor, tell them at the end of the call that, hey, you'd be happy to provide any of these additional help in these areas that you're an expert in and just put it out there. It doesn't have to be in a way to help them immediately, but let them know that you appreciate their time and is willing to also return the favor for the time that they've given to you. Remember, the name of the game here is to ask for introductions and not for jobs. Jobs will open up eventually, but the network that you build is very important. All right, the fourth point I have here is to reach out to hiring managers at companies that do not have openings. You might ask, isn't that confusing? Why would I reach out to a company where there is no openings? Hold on, let me explain. This is one of my favorite hacks that I use to do mock interviews and practice with hiring managers that could potentially hire me at some time in the future. I used to get interviews, but I used to fail them and get rejections from all of these and the recruiters would never give me feedback. They got me thinking, what am I doing wrong and how can I improve? Because I had no or very few feedback at my disposal. So I started to reach out to these folks at director level and who are not hiring and would ask them if they could do a mock interview with them, ask them to ask me questions, and then schedule a separate five minute at the end to get the feedback. And they would blatantly give me feedback because they had no obligation to hire me. And this was a game changer. I learned a lot of the things that I was failing and I used to tweak them and interview with the next person. I did this repeatedly and I became very good at interviewing over time. And this is also the easiest way to simulate how much you can, how much you can know when you're actually interviewing with a random person. So you put yourself in the driver's seat. And there's also an anecdote that happened to me was I was interviewing with one of the decision makers at the company X, but he was not hiring. He was so impressed by my profile and the way I interviewed with him that he put me in touch with another hiring manager. He sent me a note insisting that the other hiring manager who was hiring actually talked to me and that opened up another interview. I didn't get the offer, that's a different story, but you can already see here that if people really like you and the way that you interview and the way that you're proactive, they will reach out to their peer directors at different companies or even their own company where they're hiring. A word from them could just be a game changer and it will guarantee an interview for you moving forward. All right, this is the final point that I have for today which is to call email hiring managers directly. And a secret tip is this is how I got my current job at DocuSign as well. So you can skip the recruiter and directly email the hiring manager which majority of the people are not doing. They just apply on the LinkedIn portal and hope that they get an interview but this process will not go all very long way because that's what every single other person on LinkedIn is also doing. So use a combination of tools like LinkedIn, Hunter.io and Twitter to succeed in this particular area. So call email hiring managers with a short paragraph explaining how you can add value to their team and why they should give you a chance to interview for this role. I used to include why as a major component and how I can add value to their team. Getting an eyeball, getting eyeballs from a hiring manager is way more important than an ATS system automatically rejecting your application because your keywords didn't match in the preset job description. So here is an example that I have done in the past. So for example here, if you're looking for a job at Uber they would generally mention which team this role is on. So in this case, it was a senior PM at shared rights. So what you have to do is search this keyword shared rights in the Uber's homepage. It shows that there are 83 employees that have shared rights as the keyword and I automatically see that this person right here actually has worked or is working on the shared rights space and is also a product manager, great. So I just copy paste their name and use this tool called Hunter.io. So you copy paste their name and type which company they work for and it shows you this might be their email ID with a confidence score as well. In this case, 66% certain that this is this person's email ID. So I would directly reach out to them through this email ID in their slide in their inbox explain why I would be a great fit for this role. And this is how I landed my current job as well. So cold emailing goes way, way longer way than you can ever imagine. So this is probably the most underrated thing that you can start leveraging today. The only thing that I caution your people is to make sure that don't overdo this, do not over follow. Sometimes people don't reply back following once or maximum twice is enough, but don't overdo it because people sliding into their official work email is not a great way, it may trigger some people. So don't overdo it. All right, I have this final tip for university graduates, which is a bonus tip to reach out to an alumni network. It's the lowest hanging fruit that you have. And it could reap benefits in an exponential manner. It could be from your bachelor's alumni, your master's alumni, or the previous companies that you work for, anything works. Just find a common ground to connect and say why you're connecting with them and give them a short intro of how, what you're looking forward to learning from them during that introduction. The second tip I have is to network a lot during the internship, and I did this a ton. Talk to anyone and everyone you can, try some product, to engineering, to sales, to customer support, it doesn't matter. Just increase the surface area of the number of people that you know at this company. And no one will turn an intern down if you just slide into their Slack or DM and say, hey, can I just grab a 15 minute on your calendar and talk about ABC? I'm pretty sure everybody would accommodate that, especially when you're an intern. The last tip I have is to start as early as possible. There's no point in waiting till a few months before you graduate. Test the waters from right now. If you land a job and if the company's asking you to start immediately, but you won't graduate until the end of the year, that's fine. You can always turn the offer down, but don't forget to start now. It'll put you in the loop or habitual loop of interviewing and warm you up for the time to come. So if you're graduating in December, now is the time to start interviewing and start now. That's the tip that I have. Don't wait until September or October to start applying for these jobs. So that's it folks. That's all the tips that I got for today. And here are some of the ways that you can connect with me. Twitter is where I'm most active and that's the preferred platform as I mentioned earlier. That's my Twitter handle. Feel free to reach out to me, follow me or even DM me if you have any questions. LinkedIn is another form to reach out to me. I also have my email ID. You can drop me an email. I also write a newsletter, that's the link. Feel free to sign up. Me and a friend write newsletters every single Tuesday. So we share some tips and nuggets like this with the community. Thank you so much for being a great audience. And if you have any questions, feel free to reach out and have a good day all. Thanks.