 Hello, everyone. Welcome to my webinar, Crafting Your Resume for Product Management Role. Before we get started, a few things about me. I'm Ashish. I'm currently a Product Manager at Facebook, and before this, I worked at BROCO into Microsoft Nokia Infosys. I'm really glad to be here today and help the aspiring Product Managers succeed in the journey of getting into Product Management. I also want to thank Product School for giving me this opportunity to be here. Let's get started. First thing is why does it matter? For my experience, and I'm pretty sure you have this experience as well, career switching in general is difficult. Career switching into Product Management is even harder because it traditionally has not been any formal courses or programs that would allow to make this happen. In such cases where you are competing against other Product Managers who are trying to get into the similar role, where you are trying to get, your first impression is through resume. It's basically your digital identity when you are not there, and that's why it matters a lot. One thing I do want to note here is the resumes are pursued by different people differently, and so there's no perfect source of exact format, exact wording or some sort of structure that will be appealing to most of all the people. And then an example I give here is like, it's just very similar to how people pursue other people. You take an example of a mom who always loves her kids, no matter what type of clothes they are wearing or hairstyle, but the same thing may not be appealing to other people and it's similar, right? But what today I'm going to do is share with you some of the recipes, the tips, which will make your resume much more appealing to most of the audience out there, right? And then you can bring your innovation into that and make the resume even better. Cool, let's get started. Again, one more reminder, resume is your digital identity, right? And it's presenting you when you are not there. So don't think of it as just a paper or a PDF or a Word document that you are sending. Imagine it as if you are standing there and talking to that person. And that's why it's very, very important how you create a draft, draft your resume, how do you put content in it, how do you structure it, how do you use white spaces in it. All small details and we are gonna go into three main tips. First, I'll tell you overall what it means and then we are gonna deep dive into each one and look at some of the examples on how to get things done, right? Buckle up. So the first step is state your impact and do it concisely, right? Problem solving is a very important skill for a product manager. Demonstrating that to quantifiable impact is something hiring manager is looking for always in a product manager. And given that we said resume is the digital identity of you, if you are standing there, you need to prove that you can state the impact of your work and you can do that concisely, right? So keep this in mind just at the surface level right now that you wanna state your impact and do it concisely in your resume. How to do that? Looking at a couple of examples, we are gonna come back to it in some time, right? For now, just remember state your impact and do it concisely. The next tip is be relevant. Of course, if you're trying to get into product management right now, you lack the PM experience. And so the hiring manager is looking for either relevant skills or impact demonstration that you may have done in your past roles even if you are not product manager. So you wanna compensate your lack of experience with the relevant skills and impact demonstration, right? Again, just keep in mind this for now that you wanna be relevant. You wanna find examples of your past roles which are more appealing in the next role of the PM that the hiring manager is looking for. How to do that, see all the examples, we are gonna come back to it in some time, right? For now, remember you wanna be relevant. And the third one is again, very important, design. There are lots and lots of designs out there. Some people use colorful with the heading being highlighted for the resume. Some people put images in there, your own picture. Some people try to make it more appealing through aesthetic. Some people keep it very simple using the white space. White spaces, sometimes your friend when people are going to 240 or more resumes in a day, they do wanna find something which is more appealing to reading purposes, right? And so we are gonna see some tips on how to create a good design that's more radiable and appealing, right? Don't worry about it right now, just keep it on top of your mind. We are gonna come back to it. The three tips I shared, let's go back to it. First, state your impact and do it concisely. Second, be relevant in what you are mentioning on your resume. And third, the design, you have to draft it very carefully to make it more appealing to either a recruiter or the heading manager, right? Let's get into each of these in detail and see a couple of examples as we go. So the first one I said is state your impact, do it concisely. Product managers are required by the nature of job to state the impact of everything that their team works on. You as a product manager either need to do this before you even start the project because probably you wanna convince the other teams whom you are dependent on. You wanna convince your own team. You wanna convince stakeholders. Sometimes you wanna convince the leadership that yes, this is the right project that we wanna do. And so in that case, you are basically estimating what impact might be this project doing or what might be the customer problem and how much it is causing trouble. If you already have done the project after the fact, you anyways need to state the impact either for performance review or to encourage team, celebrate your success and how much impact as your resume, your project has made. And so in your resume, you need to be able to state the demonstrate that skill and state the impact of the work from your previous role. And if you haven't done anything that shows impact probably along, you're not able to identify, we are gonna see how to identify the projects as well in your past role in a couple of minutes. So don't worry, everyone in day-to-day life is a product manager. Even if you are making a normal decision, like, hey, I wanna pick up my kids and go to grocery store, which one do I prioritize first? And that's a product management, right? So don't think that in your previous role you haven't had any examples. We are gonna see and come back to that how to pick the examples, right? Two things to note here. If you have a resume and you're trying to put together a few things on it and you have job achievements versus job responsibilities, I would say always you hire importance to the job achievements. It's the demonstration of how you successfully achieved something in your previous role versus responsibilities are kind of generic and they don't give complete idea of how successfully you have gone through those responsibilities, right? So if you have job achievements versus responsibilities, always try to prefer job achievements. And I'm not saying don't totally give up on responsibilities. If responsibilities are also matching with the role, you might wanna include some of those, but if you're maybe making two to three points, first two points should be job achievements. The last point could be the responsibilities, right? We are gonna see some examples in next slide. So don't worry about how to do it. The second point I wanna mention is do not crunch too much information into a small space. I myself have done this in the past, try to keep very small margins and put everything because I think that's important. Try not to do that. As a recruiter or a hiring manager who is going through lots and lots of resume every day, if the resume is too much counted, it just get ignored and people don't feel like reading through it. Imagine yourself having, picking two books, one with some images and some white space and very nicely drafted concise statements in a book, you feel like reading it. But if a book is like all the words from the left top margin to the right bottom, people usually not tend to go and read into those things, right? So keep that in mind, do not crunch too much of information. Again, I'm gonna show some examples in a couple of slides. Let's go and see one of the examples of how to state the job achievements versus responsibilities. On the right-hand side, you'll see this is one of the sample from my older resume when I was trying to get into product management from engineering. And this was my very early draft where I started writing all the things that I felt are important for the product management. And I kind of went with a very broad picture here, I'm responsible for upgrading product technology or rapid development, UI design, product offering, et cetera, et cetera. So first thing you'll notice is like it's too much wordy and it's crunched in one paragraph there. Too much information, which was the second point, do not try to do this. Also, it's not very easily readable and it doesn't tell how much impact did I make? Did I successfully achieved what a team was trying to do? Did I perform my responsibilities clearly? And if I did, what was the result of it? It does not communicate. And this is my digital identity speaking. So if I'm basically standing in there, it's not gonna convey the right information, right? And so I took some time and reiterated it to make this happen, something like this at the bottom. And you will see now the paragraph is gone. There are three bullet points. First two bullet points are very specific in terms of what work was done and what was the impact, right? Delivered the WPF MVVM architecture for most influential tax advising software which increased the speed by 15%. What did I do and what happened because of that? Same thing with the second point. And then the role I was trying to get into had something to do with some of the skills related to C-sharp and SAML development, which was very relevant with the role which the work I was doing in my previous work, right? So I kind of put that as a responsibility point in there, delivered multiple projects. But again, it's worded in a way that it feels like an impact, right? So you can see the clear difference between the top and the bottom where the top one is crunching everything into one thing. It's talking very broadly about responsibilities but it doesn't talk about the achievements at the job. And the iterative attempt which is at the bottom tries to convert that into very, very readable format. It also uses a little bit of white space and makes feel, okay, this is what is important. This person has done X thing and that has resulted into Y thing and either a group or a hiring manager can start thinking if this person comes into my team, how it's gonna impact my team, how this person can make my team successful, right? So try to keep this in mind. State your information in point-wise and prefer the job at humans always try to state the impact, right? The second point was do not crunch too much information. We already saw a little bit of that glimpse in the previous slide. But let's go through one more example, right? And think about I have a thought that I wanna convey. When I started my own business, it has given me a whole new perspective to see the bigger picture when it comes to finding a work-life balance, right? Nothing wrong in the sentence on the surface level but if you see it's like so big sentence, by the time you reach half, you're kind of forgetting why did I even start the sentence and if I'm a hiring manager or a recruiter who's trying to go through this, it's too much for me to read through and I'm probably not gonna go through it and trouble myself, right? Just I'm gonna leave it. So this is an example of if you have certain thought like that do not put that directly in your resume, write it down and then the second step of finding the right concise statement from this is try to find out what are the important points that you are trying to convey to the party who is listening to you or reading your resume, right? And a simple way to do that, maybe you can start bolding some of the words that you think are important, these must get conveyed. And so I thought about this sentence exactly what am I trying to convey, right? I wanted to convey that I started my own business so I was an entrepreneur, right? And so started my own business is kind of important thing. The second thing I'm trying to convey here is I found some new perspective, right? And that perspective was something that's going to be our third thing but I started something because of which this happened and that this is I found a new perspective, right? And the third thing I'm trying to convey is what is this new perspective? I basically was able to find the work-life balance, the bigger picture of work-life balance, right? And so those I thought, okay, these are the important points that I'm trying to convey and let's try to rewrite all this making sure that these board points get conveyed, right? Or even if you wanna strip down further from this that's okay too. So the point can be made that starting my own business has given me a new perspective on work-life balance, right? And if you see the bigger picture is gone and we are gonna see why. But if you see now the thought initially we had was when I started my own business it has given me the whole new perspective, blah, blah. It's just too long sentence. The main thing it's trying to convey is as we saw three things, starting on business it's kind of an entrepreneurship, finding new perspective and what is that perspective? And the resume point which is the last sentence here tries to convey the exact same thing in a very short manner. Starting my own business has given me a new perspective on work-life balance. Look at the difference and see which one feels more readable. And resume is always like kind of a shorter space so you wanna use concise wordings and statements to do that, right? A question might come what happened to the bigger picture? You bolded it, right? The thing is don't lose important information for the flashy word. Bigger picture is kind of a flashy word. It's not conveying relevant information here. Starting a business, good thing. It conveys that the entrepreneurship is there. What happened after that found in your perspective? What was in your perspective, work-life balance, right? But work-life balance is like a bigger picture and all that those are kind of flashy terms. If you wanna use them sometimes it's okay but what happens in some cases is because people are trying to make sentences short sometimes they do enter the flashy words which lend the sentence and they try to then get rid of other information, right? So if you know what information you're trying to convey don't get to the flashy words and try to remove the information that you're trying to convey. Let's see an example here. So on the left hand side, you see the manager really understood his employees, right? Really is kind of a flashy word. And what is happening here is that actually the statement is not conveying the information that it needs to convey. Manager understood his employees but in what respect, right? What's the result of it or what exactly did the manager understand? And somebody has tried to crunch this to a smaller sentence and they prefer to use a flashy word against the information which might be actually conveying important information that people should know about, right? The sentence actually was manager understood his employees in depth valuing them as people as well as employees, right? So that's the thing. Maybe there was some session on manager's trading or there was an offsite where manager brought together with employees and he basically started understanding that these are not just employees these are also people they need some time off they have their families, they need to spend time whatever it might be, right? But that's the valuable information that should get conveyed instead of using flashy words like really. It really is just trying to put emphasis and it sometimes makes a difference when you're talking verbally because you can really emphasize it and say the manager really understood his employees, right? But that doesn't happen when you're trying to write it down on the resume somebody's reading it it's just a word that is not conveying information. Instead, you probably wanna remove that and put something that is conveying information, right? Cool, hopefully these examples are helpful. Let's look at the second one. We saw the second one tip was be relevant, right? Product managers in general are supposed to be great at breaking down the complex problems. How do you prioritize and design solutions, et cetera, right? And in your mind, you probably know yes, I can do this if a challenge comes but how do you let other person who is reading your resume know that? It's through your organized resume, right? Resume is kind of your product that you are trying to make it better and what you wanna convey here is how relevant you are to the job. What are the achievements from your previous role that are going to be helpful here, right? So there are two tips again here on the screen. One is like show your best achievements that match the job description. And we are gonna see in next slide how to do that, like how to come up with those examples and how to work them. And the second one is make it easy for the hiring manager to find your value. Some people do that through bolding the sentences or part of the sentences. Some people underline things or some people use white space in a very creative manner so that without bolding or underscoring the sentences, the value automatically comes out, right? I prefer the third one because then if people start bolding it, it's just like people feel I have so much important thing and ultimately every sentence starts becoming bold and it's too much distracting instead of helping a manager or recruiter to find the value, right? We are gonna see some examples in this one too in the next slides. So this one is about how to show your best achievement that matches the job offer. This is again, one of the examples from when I was trying to move from engineering to product management sometime back. And I couldn't find very easily here, what's the project that could be relevant and how can I make it look like it was a product management project versus purely an engineering project. And a simple way to do that is to stick a spreadsheet create three columns. The first column is put all the projects that you have worked on, right? And don't worry if it's product management project or not, you're gonna find out how to make that happen. But put all the projects that are there, right? Once you are going through this exercise, you're gonna like get surprised, oh, this project was actually a product management project and I just didn't know how to frame it, right? So put all your projects on column A, on column B, then try to figure out what did that project change? You did some work, maybe as an engineer, maybe as a marketing person, maybe as a sales person, what did it change, right? And then the third column, you're gonna think about how to put that in end result and how to present it in a format that it feels like it was a product management project and it did make a big impact. And this is an example. It was a very simple project I worked as a software engineer. I worked on automation script, basically. The script, what it did was we used to ship the desktop software and then every year the version would be different. And so when the version goes out, sometimes it would crash. You may have seen on Windows OS if you use Windows OS or ever use Windows OS before. And sometimes it gives a message that, hey, the application crashed, send a message to a developer and send the report with it. So some people will click on send information and that's the crash report we used to receive. And when the software would go out within first two weeks, there would be like hundreds of crash reports coming from all over the places. And then somebody had to manually go scan through it and figure out what were the problems, right? And it's not easy when you have 500 crash reports to figure out which one is important, which one to prioritize first and how many of similar crashes are happening. If there's one common reason for five different crashes or five different people reporting it, right? So all these, I basically created a script that would open up a folder, open up all these files, go through it, read through the crash errors and basically at the end generate an analysis and off the data on what exactly happened, what are the crash reasons, how many times this crash has happened because of this particular error and all that automation was basically done to create that analysis, right? How do I present this in my resume? If you look at just the left column, it's somebody might say, hey, it's purely engineering project, it's just a script, right? What's there in product management style in this one? But look at the column C now. It says, I automated data generation and analysis for the crash reports that spared up the prioritization and implementation with 60% time saving. Basically this whole analysis, the manual way of going through it, figuring out how many reasons are there for crashes, which reason is the most prominent? All of this was taking more than five weeks, right? But the automation of the analysis brought it down to five minutes of analysis and then figuring out the implementation effects was just then remaining for the two weeks. Most of the part which was taking time here was analyzing which crashes are more important, what are the reasons? That was solved. And that's what the column C tries to convey and now it much more feels like a product management type of a project or a product manager is talking to a person, right? Automated data generation and analysis for crash report that spared up prioritization and implementation with 60% time saving. You always need to state what impact did your project make, right? So hopefully this kind of approach helps you. Just create three columns, left hand side, put all your projects, middle column on the B, try to put what it changed, what was the impact and then try to come up with a sentence on column C. How do you wanna present it in your resume that it makes feel like product management project and it feels like you are a product manager who is speaking, right? Let's go to the next one. Make it easy for the hiring manager to find a value. Again, this is one of the early versions of my resume but this is what I was trying to do by using the white space and trying to find what was mentioned in the job description and how to make it come very appealing in this format. So if you see on the top very first sentence I wrote was a well-rounded industry experience from understanding requirements, design, blah, blah, right? It's a little bit lengthy sentence. I didn't like it, I ultimately changed it but the very first sentence was very relevant to the job description. This is what the manager was looking for. He was looking for somebody who was a junior type of a product manager who has worked on field in gathering customer requirements and work with the designers, prototype it and basically launch the product. And that's my very first sentence in the summary. The second thing the job description mentioned was the product manager we are trying to hire needs to be an excellent communicator. And on the right side of the skills which is usually where people put their attention I have this mentioned in my skills I'm an excellent communicator. And the third thing I try to convey here is like not the exact title of my role but I try to convey what other things apart from software engineering was I doing. I was also an innovation catalyst add into it. I was also taking on some of the product management projects and acting as a product manager on those projects. And I tried to convey that information making a recruiter and a hiring manager very interested in my role. And as a result when they saw this resume basically I got called and they said your resume is like very impressive. We haven't seen this type of resume ever. It's like a combination of so many different skills. This is basically you can see a science looking at what the other party is looking at and then crafting your resume according to that. And that's what I tried to convey here. And make it easy for people who are looking to hire make it easy for them to see the value you are bringing to the table and how that value matches with what they are looking for. All right, let's go into the last part, the design. This is I found on one of the website and it felt really good to what happens in a real life and real life could be even more complex but approximately let's say in a day for a role there are 240 applications that are coming. Only 120-ish kind of data screen call or even less I wouldn't even say it's 120. And then few of them go through some of the early assignments. Few of them get interviews. Maybe a few of them get the second interview and one person at the end gets an offer. So you can see in a day that 240 applications came in out of those only one person is getting an offer, right? And out of these 240 maybe you can say 100 people are already product managers. 140 people might be somebody who is outside not product manager but interested and this depends of course on the role. If it's a very junior entry level role there might be more people who are not in product management trying to get and trying to apply here. If it's more like a technical product management role again there are going to be lot more software engineering resumes, project managers who are trying to switch into PM. If it's more like a senior PM role most of the resumes are going to be the seasoned product managers versus people who are trying to get into this role. But keep in mind that there are like lots and lots of resumes and application coming and only few of them are getting interviews, few of them are getting screened, few of them are getting to the second round and only one person is getting an offer. And so if those all things are happening designing your resume becomes a lot more important, right? If the design we saw earlier is too much crunch with the information if it's from the left top corner to the right bottom it becomes less readable, there's no white space it doesn't feel like readable. And then you are probably going to be that the bottom space where you don't even get screening calls, right? You just apply and then left out. So here are some seven things that I would say keep in mind when you design your resume. First thing is make your resume as long as it needs to be, right? Many people ask me, hey, I have heard it should be a one pager, which is a good thing because it's like all the points you have seen so far make it concise and try to keep your information only relevant to the job that you're applying for. And so ideally one page would be good. But if you have information that's flowing out don't try to again crunch it in one page and make it again, like not have white space at all completely fell from left to right. It's okay to go to the page too. And I have always had a two pager resume for all the roles that I have applied. It's not that bad. It's definitely better than an attempt to crunch everything in one page and which is completely filled and not readable, right? So I'm not saying make it more linear put all the information again try to find which is relevant to you. But if you feel that it's making too much cruncher in one page, it's okay to go to the page too, right? Make it as long as it needs to be. I would say at all costs try to avoid going beyond two pages then it feels like again be getting to that first point people are now ready through three or four pages of resume. So one to two pages is ideal. One page is preferable by most but it's okay to go to page two. Second thing choose the right font. Your font is again gonna make people either feel your resume readable versus not. In my resume I have used Cambria font. It's not necessarily used the same thing but try to use a good font that makes you feel like formal. Don't use something like Comic Sans. That's mostly maybe for designers who are trying to show that how funky designs they can make. But for a product manager try to use a little bit of formal font which puts the right margins within two lines and within two characters and make it feel like very readable content. Third thing it said the right margins. It could be a minimum mid-level large ones. I wouldn't say put a large ones because that's like wasting too much of white space. Ideal would be like a middle margins that doesn't spend a lot of real estate but also gives you a little bit white spacing to make your resume feel appealing. Try all different settings you wanna try before you send out a resume or finalize it and put it in a PDF. Try to change the margins and see which one makes your resume feel more readable. Couple of very small things divide resume into different sections. You wanna probably have the summary. You wanna have your skills then you wanna have your experience. Those kind of three sections for sure go there. If you have some other sections, think about if they're adding any value when you are sending your resume. If they do feel free to put them there. Very important point use very clear headlines. For the example we saw earlier I mentioned try to mention what other roles I do apart from software engineering. I do innovation catalyst. I also do some projects in product management. And so even if my formal title is software engineer I have been doing some work in all other fields. So be clear in your headlines make those goals and make it easy for people to capture that value. Not necessarily you need to put your formal title always in there. You need to put something that's helpful for the person who is looking at it to see how you're relevant to the role. The next thing is make smart use of a white space. It's your friend like I said if it's too much crunch in one space no matter how important the information is people are not going to read it. So use it wisely, the white space and put some margins between different sentences or different sections. So it feels like, okay I've ended one section take one sec pause. Now I'm going to the second section. Things like that, right? And the last thing is don't overuse bullet points. It's a good way of communicating your value but sometimes people just use too many of them and then it just becomes a distraction. So be cautious about that. It's not a biggie but you may want to keep that in your mind, right? And some parting thoughts by the end. I would say update your LinkedIn profile because that's kind of another digital resume nowadays, right? You probably want to have some data back points on your LinkedIn profiles as well. It's a little bit uncomfortable because you don't know what information you can expose. So you can always try to skip the actual data impact but try to say it has been improved. Some product improved the time. It saved a lot of cost, et cetera. But try to put it in an impact format if you don't want to include the exact numbers because you're not sure if you are supposed to disclose those numbers publicly. The other two important points at the bottom is increase your network. It's very important people, recruiters who are trying to hire for PM roles. You need to be in their surface. You need to be someone who would come to top of their mind if they're trying to hire. And so try to connect with them on LinkedIn or anywhere outside of the LinkedIn in any network possible. And the last point is try to find someone who can refer you or if you are trying to switch within your company, try to find someone who can sponsor you and say, yes, this guy has been proving themselves. This person has been proving himself herself as a product manager. And I think he or she would be great if you're becoming a product manager. So try to find someone like that. One last thought, which is not here on the slide, I'm gonna say this. Don't be afraid to create different versions of your resume. We saw earlier that try to find examples which are closer to the role that you're applying for. And so that means if you're applying for 10 different roles, you cannot send one single resume to all 10 different jobs. You probably need to find good examples. And this is where our spreadsheet study is going to help. Once you have all the projects, it would be very easy for you to pick which project is important to that specific role. And then you can create different versions of your resume that matches with that role and send it out. Don't be scared to create these versions. At one time, I'm gonna tell you 13 different versions of my resume when I was trying to get into product management. So don't be scared. Create versions, make sure that it looks good. It has concise wording. It conveys the important points that are relevant to that job. It conveys all the important projects that you wanna say these are relevant to this job. And this is what my achievement is, right? And at the end, if you need to find any of the links to my webinar either previous or this one, I'm gonna add this one as well when the recording is available. It's under my profile. So if you see my profile on LinkedIn, there's a section, volunteer experience under which we have product school, a feature speaker at product school. And under that, you will find all the links to the webinars. And if you have any questions, you are expecting some answers or you wanna find some helpful material on how to get into product management. Some product managers will come together and build this group on a LinkedIn called Navigating Career to Product Management. Feel free to join it. If you have questions, ask it. Me or other product managers can help answer it. And there is also some material which probably is going to help you in preparing for the interviews. So keep a note of these two things. And at the end, I'm just gonna say good luck.