 Imagine these big challenges presenting in front of you. You came from a CPA background, want to transition into B2C space, and you're also immigrant. On the top of that, you are also underpaid. What if I tell you, you're not alone? A lot of immigrants, lots of women are underpaid, but there's a way for you to jump into an even better company, change your industry, and really do the work you're truly passionate about. Today, I had a pleasure to invite our guest, Amy Yu, and she is support manager at TikTok, doing creator platforms, and she's going to share with you regarding her challenges, her journey, and vulnerabilities, and also how she conquers those challenges so that you can repeat her success as well. Hey guys, this is Dr. Nancy Lee, a director of product and feature in Forbes. I've helped 100 people land their dream PM job offer in fan companies and unicorn startups and continue to get promoted as a product leader. If an interesting partner management course goes to PMXL, her DIO, to learn the most effective way to become a partner manager, you should subscribe to the channel, hit the bell button to be notified every time I turn on your video every Tuesday. Hi, Amy, welcome to our show. So excited to have you join us. Thank you, thank you for having me here, Nancy. Awesome, so actually, I invited for a specific purpose because they actually made so many transitions and also conquered so many big challenges doing very competitive, like recession and comic. Can you do a quick introduction of yourself to the audience? Sure, so hi everyone, my name's Amy. I'm a product manager at TikTok in the San Jose office, which is their US headquarters. A little bit about my background, I transitioned to product management from a CPA background. Prior to becoming a PM, I was a consultant at Deloitte RIS advisory, got my CPA there, and then realized I wanted to work in tech as a PM. So I pivoted and I worked at the B2B SAS Deloitte startup for two years. And then last year around August, I quit my last job because I realized I was interested in the B2C space and in creator economy and the accounting tech space might not be in alignment with my longer term interests. And back then I also realized I wanted to land a PM job in the US because especially in the Bay Area because that is the tech capital of the world where some of the top talent in PM are working at. I wanted to be able to learn from the best. And in the meantime, I was also aware that we're in a recession economy, the job market is like super, super competitive. I was switching industry, switching country as an immigrant, as a non-US resident, and also potentially switching the size of company as well, moving from the startup space to the big tech space. So three barriers on my PM careers and I was actually quite overwhelmed. I was quite stressed out because I knew the PM hiring process was like really, really lengthy and very competitive as well. I really didn't think I could do it. Back in like August last year, it did take some time, but I did it. I made a transition. I'm now working in one of my dream industries in creator economy space. And to my surprise actually, my salary has increased a lot, which I didn't think was even possible even one year ago. It was quite a journey of career transition. I know a lot of women are actually very underpaid and a lot of us are actually not confident or comfortable in asking for more in our compensation or applying for that job that we're doubting ourselves, whether we're qualified for. I guess my intention of joining this discussion is to send out a message for the women out there to believe in yourself, to have faith in yourself. It doesn't matter where you are right now in your career. It doesn't matter how big your dream is. Don't be afraid to go for what you want because it is possible. It's not easy, but it's definitely possible. And I want to use my story to hopefully give some bit of inspiration or hopefully some perspective on how you can also bridge the gap and make the kind of jump or pivots that you want. Awesome. Amy, can you break it down regarding the challenges you're facing? And I love how vulnerable you are regarding you want to film these videos to really stand out to encourage, inspire lots of women out there, especially your salary increase significantly after your landed job, a take-off. So let's start from the top. What are the top three challenges and how did you conquer these challenges? Tell us your challenges first. So the top three challenges are if I look back on when I was applying for PM jobs back in, I would say, October last year, I would say it was definitely extra competitive during the recession economy because there were massive layoffs everywhere. So that itself is very difficult. But for me in particular, the three biggest challenge were one, switching industry. I came from a CPA background and I worked at an accounting tech company for two years. So most of the companies that were interested in hiring me were FinTech companies and other accounting tech companies. And it was very hard for me to land an interview in any industry outside accounting tech or outside FinTech in general. The second challenge was switching location. I was based in Toronto and I wanted to land a PM role in the San Francisco Bay Area, which is probably one of the most competitive job market in the world in tech because everyone wanna be in Bay Area, right? And the third challenge I would say is tackling the PM recruitment process. I'm sure a lot of people who are interested in becoming a PM is aware of how lengthy the PM hiring is, especially at later state startups and bigger tech companies. There might be potentially at least five rounds of interviews. For each round of the interview, there are many different kinds of PM questions that you need to prepare for. It takes a lot of effort and work and I felt like without a proper structure, it is very hard to stand out during the interview process. Not to mention, landing the interview itself is already competitive. So we all know the importance of building a product portfolio and actually I have a checklist of 13 different kind of project people can build on the site to create their own product portfolio to gain experience starting from today. I'm gonna each go to this website right here I'm also going to put it in the description of this video and we also have many different videos regarding free product portfolio tools. You should definitely use, we're also going to put it right here in the description and comment of this video as well. So Amy, I love you started talking about the transition and also very inspired by you in terms of the courage that you know to a past profession. Getting a CPA is very challenging. It's extremely challenging and you just switch your career completely because it just doesn't align with the long-term career goal. And I also understand, actually this is one of the biggest transition. CPA and accounting, you know, like tax return, I think it's very challenging. I feel boring, sorry. It's challenging, boring and challenging at the same time. And now you want to do like tech talk, creators, you know, economy, product. So how exactly did you conquer the challenge makes the transition? I would say one of the things that, the key things that has helped me is using leverage. I will share two stories on how I use leverage in accelerating my PM career. So first time was when I was pivoting to PM. When I decided when I want to become a product manager back in 2020, I had no prior PM experience, right? And I knew that to become a PM, you need PM experience and you need to demonstrate you can think like a PM. And I had a CPA background. So what kind of tech company will value someone like me? A tech company that serves CPA. A tech company does build products for CPA because I understand their users. I was one of their users. I can really emphasize really well what's the user pain point. I have that in-depth insider knowledge of their user's pain points. And user empathy is one of the most important PM competencies. I use that as a leverage to build a case study of some of the accounting software users. And I presented that during the interview with my last employer. And that landed my first PM job. So that was the first leverage that I used, which is my accounting background. Awesome. Second leverage that I used in terms of making the transition from accounting tech to creative economy is leveraging my creator identity. So something I didn't share earlier is I'm a standard comedian by night. That is my side hustle identity. I made funny videos on TikTok. I make funny videos on both Instagram and TikTok. So I am very obsessed with how to crack the TikTok algorithm. And I am very obsessed on understanding what helps creators succeed. Actually, last year, when I was doing a comedy festival in LA, one of the talent agency did a workshop and told all the comedians that they need to build a TikTok presence. They need to have a TikTok account. They need to upload their videos on TikTok because that's how comedians get recognized. TikTok can literally build a comedian's career. So I use that as a leverage by doing a case study of content creators on TikTok. Because I did stand a comedy, right? So I already knew a lot of creators who use TikTok. And they had a lot of challenges with, you know, continually using TikTok to, you know, build their brand, to build their audience. So I interviewed at least, I would say, 10 creators. A lot of them are comedians to understand their pain points. And then I used my PM thinking to synthesize the user pain points and prioritize them to identify a key problems to solve. And then I put together a presentation using PM framework to identify the best solution to solve, potential best solution to solve that problem. And then I- This is awesome. Yeah. So that I would say one of the most helpful thing for me in my PM career transition is using leverage. And that leverage doesn't have to come from your job. That leverage can come from the skills that you build outside of your job. It could come from your passion. It could come from like your nerdy obsession. It could come from your network. Awesome. So how do you learn how to build a portfolio the way you want it? Because lots of people say, oh, let me just build my own portfolio by myself doing some site project. But most people doing that, they are not learning a job from TikTok to paying them a lot of money. What makes yours different? That is a very good question. Actually, I would say the most challenging part of building a product portfolio is really prioritizing what to include in a product portfolio. Like knowing what's important to include in a product portfolio because there's just so much to learn as a PM. There are so many skills. There are so many key core competencies. How do you showcase your skills within constraint? Like within, let's say like a short, in a very concise form to potential hiring manager because they have short attention span. They don't have time to learn the entire life story of your career, right? What I found really helpful was, so I joined product manager accelerator by Dr. Nisley, which is your program. And one of the most useful module for me was when the product portfolio module because it kind of refreshed my knowledge as a PN on some of the PN foundational thinking and PN foundational skills. And two is like, how do you structure your response for your product standards question, which is the product case question? During Dr. Nisley's PM accelerator program, one of the modules is about how to tackle product sense questions, AKA product case questions during PM interview. Dr. Nisley has taught us a framework, which is the modified version of the circle framework to tackle questions like, how would you improve X product? And I did get asked that question during my PM interview at TikTok, which is how would you improve our content platform for creators? Wow. Yeah, I did get asked that question. But you nailed it. I got asked that question, but instead of using the modified circle framework to answer it on the spot, what I did was I showed them my whole case study because I used the framework to build a case study of creators' pain points. Since that's something, you know, I was very passionate about. So I used the modified circle framework to showcase my way of thinking on a slide deck and I walked through, I walked a hiring manager through, you know, step by step. This is how I prioritized the problems to solve. This is how I prioritize the potential solutions. This is how I analyzed the competitor space. This is my recommendation and also this is a go-to market strategy. And I found very structured way of thinking that I learned from the PM accelerator was really, really helpful in organizing my responses because I have a tendency to ramble a lot, like outside of, I would say outside of an interview, I'm someone who talks a lot. And I'm someone who talks a lot. And without a structure, people can easily get lost on, you know, following with me or keeping up with me. So I definitely need to learn how to communicate and how to like present my thoughts in a very structured and easy to follow way. So Amy, I love how you share all the insight how you plan a job at TikTok doing those pivot. You also mentioned the second big challenge, which is as an immigrant non-U.S. citizen, learning a job in the U.S. actually very, very challenging. And to be frank, lots of people also want to move to the U.S. They just feel like, oh no, they need to be the sponsorship and no work experience in U.S. A lot of the failure is impossible. Like someone like you and many of the students have made it happen, even if they're all immigrant, never working in the U.S. Can you share with us how you challenge your own immigration challenges moving to the U.S.? That is a very good question. And it was definitely not easy at all. So my advice for those wanting to, you know, relocate to the U.S. that require revisit sponsorship will be, first of all, I would say try to find out what kind of companies are open or able to sponsor a visa. Because from my experience, a lot of the startups, they kind of prefer not to hire people who require visa sponsorship. And that kind of helped me kind of re-strategize my job search approach, not spending too much effort in applying for those companies. I think one of the ways to identify potential company that can sponsor a visa will be like, one, looking at other immigrant PM who got their visa, what kind of company did they work at and ask for their experiences. And two, as a rule of thumb, I would say like, usually it will be mostly later stage of startup that will have their ability to have their own immigration team to help to support the visa application process. So that it could also be an indicator on, in terms of the ease of lending a U.S. job. But in the same time else, I'm also aware that by speaking to some of the PM friends that some of the big tech company actually took back offers after knowing that the students need visa sponsorship. So I would say this doesn't apply to all companies. I would suggest recommend you doing the research whether there are any companies that have that kind of risk, right? Cause you don't want to putting so much effort only to be told that just because you need a visa you cannot have this job, right? That would be quite discouraging. Actually, I learned that advice from Adam Lee which is also a student's from alumni from the PM accelerator program. He has a very, very helpful blog on Medium that talks about his process of applying for visa. The second thing I would say to increase your chance of lending a job in the U.S. will be going back to my point of using leverage. So when I was applying for TikTok in addition to the leverage of understanding creators the other leverage I used was my bilingual competency because I knew that TikTok has a lot of engineers based in Asia and the ability to speak Mandarin is actually a very big asset as a PM when you cross functionally and cross time zone especially with the Asia team in Singapore and China. So I would say try to identify jobs that require a niche skill where you happen to have especially in a very competitive job market like everyone wants the best job possible it is so hard to set yourself apart because you will be competing with not just other people who want to become a PM but also other PMs who want a better job who already had PM experience in the U.S. And startup founders, their startup founders wanted to become a PM because they were like oh, I want to go back to a structured way of living they have already founded a million dollar startup before and they want to become a PM. That's how competitive the job market is. So you have to be strategic on building your brand on like setting yourself apart. Yeah, and I do like you talk about regarding the niche so let's also define the niche for the audience the niche doesn't mean that it's smaller company for example, Amy Joint Tech Talk which is really big company the niche could be the type of skills you have could be the type of product you build in the past or any kind of transfer skills that the combination of three different skills you have and you're the only person or maybe one of the few hands of people now hundreds of people have those combinations three different skills and that could be you. So thank you for sharing with us this is very insightful. How exactly you pass those interviews? Now you know how to find the right company and use product portfolio so how exactly pass those PM interviews because you said it earlier like millions of people or thousands of people they are all product manager or including layoff product manager for Google, Meta, Amazon is very competitive so how did you exactly actually pass those interviews? So that is a very good question for me I use two things one is I kind of do it differently from everyone else tell me more which is I took the initiative to build a case study to present to the interviewer which I could imagine probably not everyone would do that because usually how you tackle like the product sense question product execution question, product strategy question is you draw a whiteboard and you start writing things on the spot, right? And I took a step ahead which was I built a case study because I already thought through I saw I was think through what might be asked during the interview I think through if I were working already as a PM like how I will tackle this kind of problems using the PM framework so that when I was asked those question in during the interview I already have something ready to talk about and better I could show to the Harry manager that I had the initiative and the passion to already interview customers and to understand their needs I did my research I was really dedicated and passionate about the space and I did have a lot of insights and understanding of the problem space so that's something I did differently from a lot of other people the second one was definitely try to identify what was my weaknesses for usually for PM interview question there's behavior question there's product sense there's product execution product strategy and a technical question, right? So I'm curious, what's your weakness? My weakness? One is being concise first of all for a kind of interview question being concise like how do I prioritize my responses in a way that is concise and can't say more was less say more was less, right? And the second I would say knowing how to structure my response to the product sense, product execution product metrics, product strategy question in a PM accelerator program it helped me reduce that overwhelm and it made it seem more manageable because the structure of the PM accelerator program is like there's weekly live cases training where Dr. Nancy taught teach the different modules in kind of like a rotational manner so you can drop into the live training based on your weakness and there's also weekly office hour where you can ask very targeted questions of where you're struggling with, right? And I remember when I was in PM accelerator program I kind of prioritize and structure my study a little bit by prioritizing the areas that I was the weakest which is like I made sure I study all the PM interview modules on questions that I knew I didn't have a lot of confidence on just to learn the way of thinking and then I would participate in the live case training to learn how to for example do customer segmentation and also like to catch if there's any gap in my way of thinking and also for any area that I felt a little bit more uncomfortable with like I could observe how other people do it and also observe how Dr. Nancy Lee give feedback to the students on how they can potentially improve their response which I all found really, really helpful and then during the office hour if I had any areas of weaknesses that I felt really uncomfortable with or that I felt like not confident in myself I could always ask for help Dr. Nancy and the mentors which I found really, really helpful I love that you share so much regarding how exactly you prepare for interviews so now let me ask you over all questions so what's the most important shift that pushes the next level? So during the PM Accelerator program Dr. Nancy taught us a mindset called Bring the Bridge which in Chinese saying is like Tuo Fu Chen Zhou which is like you just cut off my backup like I cut off my backup by quitting like just not turning back like just not going back and just took that leap of faith I was hesitating a little bit on whether or not I would join PM Accelerator because I was already living on my savings and I need to be careful with where I spend my money and it was not a cheap program and what I found so helpful was the PM Accelerator program was really prioritization it's so important because sometimes people tend to procrastinate and get paralyzed when they have too many options when they have too much information and when there's too much out there and they don't know how to differentiate the signal versus the noise what I found so helpful was joining the PM Accelerator program was to help me filter out the noise like it helped me just like filter out what is not important and I just do not even waste my time do not even waste any effort on things that would not result and instead channel my energy and my time towards things that are actually more effective it was a really helpful cohort and community of people like minor people who a lot of them are in similar career phase as me and going through similar process and some of them have been a little bit ahead that could share such valuable insights normally if I wanted to get mentorship or peer mentorship or peer support I had to seek those out on my own for example I need to reach out to people individually and say women in product I had to network I could still make connection but then it's a very hit or miss and it would definitely take longer time so I would say like a lot of people who are on the fence about like whether or not they want to join a bookend or a structure program like PM Accelerator my advice is like I see paying for a PM Accelerator program as an investment in my career not an expense after joining this program I was able to land a job offer that was a significant salary raise that in any industry doesn't align with my long-term passion and also be able to hugely, I would say hugely accelerate my career at a pace that I couldn't imagine even a year ago in that sense I feel like I am investing in career capital rather than just an expense because I'm building my asset I'm building my career capital that can yield, benefit, you know that will yield income that will yield so much value in the future let's say you decide to pay for a course to train up a PM skill like you want to evaluate a potential return on investment based on like the long-term benefit because I wanted to join a program where not only tackle interview questions but also like, you know strategize how I look for a job that's the best fit for me and also learn foundational PM skill like even improve my PM skill that will benefit me in my future job you want to make sure that you build your core competency and I feel like if you learn on your own you can still do it but you will be probably walking as opposed to sprinting or running if you have a lot of time let's say you have several you give yourself two years or several years you can definitely do it at your own pace but if you say you're aiming for you're aiming for let's say efficiency you're aiming for you're trying to shorten the amount of time on this transition then I would recommend investing in like a more structured program where you can get structure mentorship and a faster feedback loop from your peers as well so that way you grow faster So Annie, so tell us what advice do you have for someone who wants to start the PM career? So my advice for someone who wants to start their PM career will be one is build foundational PM knowledge and PM way of thinking because product manager needs to think in a different way and consultants and marketers you're working in cross-functional teams with both business and technical stakeholders and your customers you'll be working with a lot of different persona you will need to learn how to prioritize what to build, when to build why is it important to build you need to be able to make a lot of decisions based on limited resource limited data and I would say it's very important for product manager to learn for example, design thinking to learn the PM foundational skills on how you can identify the right problem and prioritize the right problem to solve and also work with your cross-functional stakeholders to identify the best solution to solve that problem that aligns with your company's objective in terms of building the PM skillset and knowledge there are several ways I would say like one of the most efficient way is joining a program like PM accelerator joining a bootcamp because it's like very systematic training on the PM foundational knowledge the second advice I would give is try to build hands-on experience if you didn't come from the PM background because for most of the PM job they look for relevant PM experiences and if you didn't come from the PM background it's really important to build a product portfolio where you can demonstrate to a hiring manager that even though you didn't work as a PM before you have actually had hands-on experience as a PM either through working on side projects or volunteering for nonprofits or participating in a hackathon where you got to ship an MVP you want to make sure that you don't just have the theories that you learned from say books or courses you also have applied them in real life and you have learned something from those hands-on experiences as well so those will be my two pieces of advice This is amazing and thank you so much for sharing with us, Amy actually you share so much details I think people can just follow your same path to transition and also land a high-paying job in B-PAC companies in the US as well thank you so much for following thank you so much for sharing with us and of course I will also check out your comedian center comedian jokes for sure and we're also going to put it in the description of this video as well and we're also going to put your following through our YouTube channel awesome if you like any free tips we've provided today feel free to like this video and for regarding portfolio people ask these questions whether we use it, what tools we use feel free to go to the link in the description on this website you can download the 30 different projects you can build and identify those top five free tools and you can immediately get started and it's time to take massive action towards your career dream as well thank you very much for joining us today make sure to like, share and subscribe to the channel we'll see you in the next video bye guys