Product Life: 👀 Recruiting Strategies

Product Manager Resume Guide by an ex- Facebook PM

Will Lawrence — Mon, 25 Jul 2022 14:30:38 GMT

A great product manager resume can change your life. This was my experience — with no referral or real connections at large tech companies, my resume is the thing that got me my first PM job at Facebook (now Meta).

I still get asked a ton of questions about PM resumes, including:

What’s the best product manager resume template?
How do I make an Associate Product Manager (APM) resume?
What product manager skills should I highlight?

Today, I want to answer all of these questions with an in-depth guide on making a great PM resume.

This will be based on my own recruitment experience but also backed by my experience hiring at Facebook/Meta and reviewing 100s of product resumes.

Let’s go!

😢 97% of product manager resumes don’t land interviews.

This is especially true for top-tier companies (Google, Meta) and great startups (Stripe, SpaceX). An open role will receive hundreds of applications and standing out is really challenging.

But investing in standing out is extremely high ROI.

The salary for an entry-level product manager at Google is $167,000 a year and a mid-career product role at Meta earns $345,000.

🔑 Key idea: A strong resume is the single most important thing you can do to be a part of the 3% of applicants who get interviews.

The next most important thing is getting a referral, which I talk about more here. But unless you have a friend at these top companies, a strong resume is a necessary asset to even get a referral.

Here’s what makes a great resume:

📝 Overall Principles of a Great Resume

Specific to the job: Every bullet point should be concrete and speak to your candidacy for the role. Remove filler or vague words (common culprits: “various,” “managing,” “impact”). Every word should speak to your qualifications for the specific role you're applying to.

Bad bullet point: Managed various social media channels for a multinational firm by being proactive, hard-working and excellent at communication.
Better bullet point: Led team of 3 (2 marketers, 1 engineer) to execute a referral program for a SaaS project, leading to $50,000 in new revenue and 120 new customers.

Impact: Ideally, every bullet point should show the outcome you’ve created

Bad bullet point: Led user research on our products
Better bullet point: Synthesized qualitative user research from 23 usability tests into actionable tickets in Visual Studio; worked with engineers to improve the user experience and confirm the build meets the user specifications.

Simple: Please, please, please just choose a simple resume template (I link to an example in the final section). No fancy graphics, colours or multiple columns are necessary. The goal of your resume's style is to be easily readable. You will not get "bonus points” for cool logos or visuals.

🔑 Key idea: Each bullet point should be concise, show impact and be specific to the PM job. Don’t include filler words, vague statements or fancy visuals.

🗺 Sections

My suggestion would be to have five sections: Header, Experience, Education, Projects and Skills.

🎬 Summary [Optional]

Some people like to include a summary section. My advice is only to include this section if you have significant experience in a field very different from product management.

Bad summary section: 10+ years experience managing teams, leading product development and creating business impact.

Why is this bad? Because it's redundant with your experience section.

Better summary section: I'm a Ph.D. physicist who is fascinated with consumer behavior. I'm looking to apply my rigorous academic background to the world of product management.

Why is this better? If your resume is made specific to the job, many of your experiences as a Ph.D. physicist will not be on your resume. This summary also creates a strong, memorable narrative for your experiences.

🎯 Header

Your name, email address and phone number are essential information.

Social profiles (ex. link to Twitter, LinkedIn or Github): include these if you're incredibly proud of the content on them. Most recruiters won't check these but interviewers later in the process might.
Location: Resume best practices say that you should include this.
Style: Make your name legible and slightly larger than your header titles.

🚀 Experience

This is the most critical section of the resume. I spent years refining the art of creating good experience bullet points. Here are some critical suggestions to improve yours:

Each bullet point should tie to one of the responsibilities of a PM. These include leadership, design, working with engineers, project management, data analysis and communication.
Every single point should be relevant. If an experience isn’t relevant, take it off your resume. This may feel painful, but it helps to strengthen your resume.
Fill in the gaps with side projects. You may notice some gaps in your skill sets and experiences. Note these down and aim to fill them in with projects (more on this below).

Let’s go into even more detail. You may have heard of the STAR method for breaking down your experiences during interviews.

STAR is fine for interviews but is bad advice for resumes. Generally, people spend too much time on the situation and tasks whereas the action and result are what matters for a resume.

This is why I recommend RACR, or result, action, context and result. Yes, the result is twice on purpose. This is because there are often two levels of results: the outcome of your action and the impact of this outcome. Here’s an example using a strong PM bullet point.

Use RACR to frame your experience bullet points and show impact better

🔑 Key idea: Use RACR (results, action, context, results) to frame your experience bullet points.

Notice how this bullet point leads with a tangible outcome (the dashboard) and ends with the business outcome. This is what product management is all about -- creating things that improve the metrics of the business. The context of the situation is a supplement to the outcomes as it is not especially relevant for the roles themselves.

If you need more help on your experience bullet points, I added 40+ strong examples from PM resumes I’ve seen to the resource in the final section.

🎓 Education

My main advice: keep it simple. You won't get hired because of your academic background. Education should go under your experience section unless you went to a very recognizable university (ex. Stanford, Oxford).

Use the education section to highlight the points from your degree that are most relevant to the role. Again, remove irrelevant information.

Example Education Section:

The University of Melbourne, Bachelor of Arts (Economics)

Courses Include Python Programming, Cost-Benefit Analysis, Design Thinking
Extracurricular: 2015 Campus hackathon winner, mentor for Girls Who Code

🔑 Key idea: Unless you went to a well-known institution, keep your education section simple and below experiences.

⚓️ Projects

I’m a huge believer in projects. These are things you do outside of your day job or core curriculum to advance your interests. On a resume, they are a great way to fill in your skills gap. My general philosophy: build the experiences you need.

I was an economics undergraduate with work experience in user experience design and analytics. The glaring gap in my product management resume was a lack of technical expertise (ex. working with engineers). I used the projects section to highlight three projects I worked on with engineers at hackathons. Here’s one of those bullet points:

Tumblr HackDay – Led a team of 3 (2 engineers, 1 data scientist) to build a new Tumblr mobile interface for casual users; won 4th place across the entire company (40+ competing teams)

🔑 Key idea: Use projects to fill in skills gaps from your experiences. I go into more detail on how to do that here.

💎 Skills [Optional]

This is a section to list out the tools and skills that you’re proficient in. Use this to highlight soft skills and hard skills. I go into more details on the right skills to highlight here.

Summary

Building a concise, targeted and effective resume is amongst the best investments you can make when you’re ready to make a jump in product management. Use these tips to craft a product manager great resume:

A strong resume is the single most important thing you can do to be a part of the 3% of applicants who get interviews.
Each bullet point should be concise, show impact and be highlight specific skills to the PM job. Don’t include filler words, vague statements or fancy visuals.
Use RACR (results, action, context, results) to frame your experience bullet points in the most effective way possible.
Keep your education section simple. Put it under the experience section unless you attended a very well-known institution.
Use projects to fill in gaps on your resume that aren’t covered by your experiences

If you need more help with your resume…

… I made a Resume Kit! It contains the templates, advanced strategies and resources I wish I had when applying for product manager roles. It includes:

The actual product manager resume template (DOCX, PDF) I used to land my product role at Facebook (and still use to this day)
40+ of the best experience bullet points I’ve seen from 100s of resume reviews
10 advanced strategies to making your resume stand out
A PDF copy of The Associate Product Manager (APM) Playbook
Resume reviews for a limited amount of people

I made this kit because I’ve seen firsthand how a strong resume can change lives.

As we discussed, 97% of candidates don't get interviews — and I hope this resource can significantly improve your odds of being part of the 3%.

Get the Resume Kit

🌟 Seeking your dream role or dream employee? Join the Product Life Talent Collective.

For companies: If you’re hiring, apply to get regular drops of amazing product managers in our community. Over 100 PMs from companies like Coinbase, Meta, Netflix, Zoom, Shopify, Samsara and Workday are actively looking for their next play. Join now and start hiring directly from our community here.

For product managers: Join our Talent Collective to get reach-outs from growing companies. Apply here.

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Until next time,

Will

The Associate Product Manager Playbook

Will Lawrence — Fri, 15 Jul 2022 08:10:35 GMT

Getting your first product management job is hard.

It’s even harder to get one at a top company that invests time and resources into teaching you about the craft of product management.

I was one of ~15 people to join Facebook’s (now Meta’s) Rotational Product Manager program during the summer of 2019. This is one of a handful of Associate Product Manager (APM) programs in the tech industry. Each of them has the potential to change the trajectory of your personal and professional life.

There are a handful of associate product manager programs out there:

Meta’s Rotational Product Manager Program
Google’s Associate Product Manager Program
LinkedIn’s Associate Product Manager Program
Uber’s Associate Product Manager Program
Lyft’s Associate Product Manager Program
Atlassian’s Associate Product Manager Program

In this guide, I want to go very deep on all the experiences, resume tips and interview strategies you’ll need to get an Associate Product Manager role.

For current PMs, I hope this guide can be the perfect response for when someone asks you “How do I become a product manager?”.
Next time you hear this, feel free to forward this guide to them!

Also one important note

This guide is supported by partners. If you sign up for their services, I’ll get a few bucks to keep writing guides like these. I only recommend products that are actually useful.

Table of contents

🗺 Introduction: Understand the Programs
1. 🥇 Top Associate Product Manager Programs
2. 🙋 Frequently Asked Questions
3. 📅 Timeline for APM Programs
🛠 Part 1: Become a Great PM Candidates
1. 📚 Learn the Right Skills
2. 🧱 Build the Right Experiences
3. ⭐️ Highest ROI Resource: LinkedIn Learning
4. 🤝 Get a referral
🏆 Part 2: Cracking the PM Resume
🏁 Part 3: Crush the Interview
🎬 Final Recap

This is a long guide (25 pages!!) and it may be more enjoyable to save + read the PDF version — which includes more artwork, bookmarks and slightly more content.

Get the PDF Copy via Email

Let’s dive in!

🥇 Top Associate Product Manager Programs

APM programs are perfect for new grads or people with less than 5 years of experience in a non-product field. In my cohort at Facebook, about half were new grads and the other half had backgrounds in analytics, consulting, program management or finance.

There are a handful of associate product manager programs out there at companies like Meta, Google, LinkedIn, Uber, Lyft, Atlassian and Spotify.

While all of them vary slightly, there are a few common benefits of APM/RPM programs:

🏄 Opportunity to try multiple teams: APMs/RPMs have the chance to be the PM on multiple teams, giving them the ability to choose areas of interest, learn how things are done in different environments and build a rounder skillset

🏘 A tight-knit cohort: These programs have a small number of other talented peers. Having a small group of people allowed us to get to know everyone individually and have intimate conversations that were not performative. We also bonded because all of us were equally smart, ambitious and had similar career goals. This community thrived because anyone could reach out and you would be excited to speak with and learn from them.

🧑‍🏫 Mentorship: Each program has various forms of mentorship. At Facebook, we would have a manager for the entire 18 months, a mentor, small-group mentorship and alumni support.

🥗 Access to company leaders: We had many events where 5-6 PMs would have a candid conversation with industry titans like Sheryl Sandberg, Fidji Sumo and Chris Cox. These conversations were exponentially more enlightening than fireside chats in front of 1000s of people. Conversations got personal, specific and involved the whole group (rather than a Q&A).

🔑 Key idea: Each APM program gives people with no formal product experience the chance to work in an interesting product space, bond with a talented cohort and receive training within the company.

🙋 Frequently Asked Questions

What type of candidates gets into these programs?

All backgrounds are eligible to apply. In practice, though, successful candidates often have experience in strategy, analytics, data, design, engineering, consulting or finance. This is because successful candidates will have the experiences necessary to succeed in the role.

Do I need a technical background (i.e. do I need to code)?

Some programs, most notably Google, do require a technical background. Others, like Meta, LinkedIn and Uber, do not screen for technical backgrounds.

Would you recommend an APM program?

100%. I learned a ton in 18 months (and wrote about my experience in detail here).

Is this program only for recent graduates?

No. It’s for people with little PM experience, including existing professionals or new graduates. In my cohort, roughly 50% of RPMs were experienced hires.

What are some example rotations?

Growth for Uber Eats, Launching Google Payments in Brazil, Creator Monetization for LinkedIn, AR filters for Instagram Stories, Machine Learning for Google Search. Nearly every part of a company is open to APMs/RPMs.

Can I apply if I need a visa sponsorship?

Yes. I know several people who applied while needing a sponsorship to work in the target country.

Is one program better than any other?

Not really. Each company has their own culture and way of building products. But rather than getting caught up on culture too early in the process, I recommend you apply to all the programs that you are interested in.

📅 Timeline and Approach

Applications for these programs open between June - October of any given year. Here’s a summary from APM List:

Meta
Google
LinkedIn
Lyft
Atlassian
Uber
Visa

🔑 Key idea: Don’t wait until applications open to start preparing. Start now -- specifically by learning the right skills, building an effective resume and getting referrals. Preparing early is what sets strong candidates apart.

At a high level, this is how I’d suggest preparing for recruitment:

Make sure you have the right skills for the job: If you don’t build a project or two to demonstrate those skills/
Make a killer resume: Frame your experiences in effective ways, use a simple template and highlight the impact of your experiences
Effectively practice for interviews: learn the interview rubrics, self-study frameworks and practice a ton.

I’ll walk you through how to do each one.

🛠 Part 1: Become a Great Candidate

With the logistics covered, the rest of this guide will be about making your application stand out.

🔑 Key idea: 97% of applicants don’t get an interview. You need to build the right experiences, make a killer resume and network to be a part of the 3%.

Here’s my general advice: your main focus needs to be on getting an interview. Once you land the interview, switch to interview prep.

The exception is if you are confident you’ll get an interview (e.g. you’ve secured a referral and/or you have incredible experience). If this is the case, switch to interview prep early.

🔑 Key idea: Don’t prepare for interviews until you are at least 80% sure that you will get an interview. Focus all your time on getting the right experiences, making the perfect resume and getting referrals until then. Being a great interviewee is useless if you don’t get an interview!

But for the rest of us, getting an interview consists of three things: the right experiences, the right resume and the right referral. The most important of these is the right resume as this is how you’ll be evaluated.

📚 Learn the Right Skills

Like any job, having the right experience means you have the skills to do the job well. APM/RPM programs are no different.

The trick is that people feel that they can’t demonstrate product management skills without having a previous role in the product. This is a lie.

🔑 Key idea: The right experience is in alignment with the PM job requirements. These are a combination of soft and technical skills.

The skills necessary to succeed as a product manager include soft skills and hard skills.

🍦 Soft Skills

Let’s focus first on soft skills. These include

Leadership
Project management
Strategy & Vision
Analytical Thinking

These are the skills that you’ve likely developed from past jobs, school or life experience. While we’ll get into how to frame this on your resume in a future section, it’s important to map out all of your experiences that map to one of these attributes. Do not restrict this mapping to your work experience. Instead, your list may include:

Leadership: Led hockey team, led fundraising campaign at the food bank, led a team of marketers for a marketing campaign
Project management: managed tasks for an engineering project, organized freelance calendar
Strategy & Vision: build a go-to-market plan for Class 454, and established a charter for a volunteer group
Analytical Thinking: did a research project for undergraduate thesis, built financial models

Catalogue all of the experiences that you have related to these soft skills in a document. This will help you see where your strengths may be and where you need to fill in gaps.

For areas with gaps, I’d suggest taking a short course to improve your skills here. A course will give you the experience to put on your resume (in the Skills or Education section).

🔑 Key idea: If you have gaps in your skillset, take a short course. This will give you something to put on your resume to fill that gap.

LinkedIn Learning is offering readers of this guide 1 free month to learn all the product, design and technical skills you’re missing. Claim your free month here.

Here’s one for each section:

High-Stakes Communication - Spend an hour improving one of the most important skills of your career - communicating effectively.
Project Management Simplified - Learn a simplified version of project management to determine how to effectively drive progress amongst several stakeholders.
Product Management: Building a Product Strategy - a great crash course on how strategy is created for products
Data-Driven Project Management: Project Metrics That Matter - learn how to choose the right metrics using analytical thinking

I think of soft skills as the bare minimum that you need to demonstrate to get an interview. But to exceed the minimum, you need to include skills that will differentiate you from others.

🗿 Hard Skills

This is where hard skills come in. In my experience reviewing resumes, having these is what differentiates a strong candidate from a weak one. If you want more advice on building hard skills, I wrote a guide on this exact topic.

Hard skills include

Engineering/Coding Knowledge
Design
Data Analysis

Any candidate can say that they are a strong leader. But it’s harder to claim that you have a hard skill like design, analytics or programming.

In a similar way to how you catalogue soft skills, catalogue your hard skill experience too. To help you out, here are some areas that might fit into these categories:

Engineering: coding, systems design, APIs, scripts, building programs
Design: wireframes, interface design, prototyping, graphic design, user research
Data: SQL, statistical analysis, experimentation, survey design, data collection

🔑 Key idea: Use hard skills to differentiate yourself from other candidates.

This is where it’s important to have experience in either design, engineering or data analysis. Ideally, you’ll have experience in all three. It all depends on your background:

Highlight all the technical skills you have. Again, if you’re not feeling strong on one or more of these, take a quick course and build some projects in this area.

Again, I’d recommend taking these courses with a LinkedIn Learning free month (redeem it here). Here are some suggested tutorials:

Programming Foundations: Real-World Examples - I did this course while I was in university! I learned a ton about computer science and featured this course prominently on my resume.
Figma Essential Training: The Basics - Figma is the premier design tool for UX designers. Understanding the basics while working on a real project is hugely valuable.
Data Storytelling Basics - Rather than coding, learn the basics of storytelling with data. This will be more valuable for interviews and on the job.

If you’re new to Product Life, join 10,000+ other product managers learning tips to grow their careers.
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🧱 Build the Right Experiences

In addition to taking courses, another great way to build the skills you need for a PM role is to get PM experience before you get the job,

I wrote a full piece on this topic, but the summary is to work on side projects. These are small projects that you can ideally do on a weekend that help you try a new tool, practise a new skill or perhaps earn some extra cash.

🔑 Key idea: Use projects to fill in skills gaps from your experiences.

At a glance, the best PM side projects involve building something and taking it to market. Here are some ways to build that experience.

👨‍💻 Data Science Project

Find a data set that’s interesting on Kaggle (a site with awesome, free datasets). Use Excel, SQL or Python to find interesting trends in the data. I did this exact process with a dataset from Spotify to answer a research question, Is faster music happier? As a bonus, I shared this project with a Research Scientist at Spotify and it helped me build a great relationship (while developing my skills).

👩‍🎨 Design Feedback

Find an app you love and identify changes to improve the user experience. This helps you build product sense and gives you something to share with a company you love. Check out Growth.Design or UserOnboard for great examples of doing constructive app critiques.

🔨 Use No-Code tools to build a product

This is likely the best avenue. No-code tools make it easy to build a product. I’d personally check out tutorials on NoCodeMba. In a few hours, you can build a Tinder clone or an upvote site like Product Hunt without coding. Once you’ve built a product, drive traffic, get users and respond to their feedback.

⭐️ Highest ROI Resource: LinkedIn Learning

If you want some help building the right skills or experiences, I’d highly recommend claiming a free month of LinkedIn Learning (usually $26/month). LinkedIn Learning has over 14,000 expert-led courses related to business, design and technology. As a bonus, you get access to all of LinkedIn Premium including talent insights, InMails and more.

I’ve personally taken six courses on LinkedIn learning, including Technology for Product Managers, Programming, Python GUI Development with Tkinter, and Programming Foundations: Real World Examples. Featuring them prominently on my resume helped me get my PM job.

🤝 Get a Referral

All APM/RPM programs are at companies that value referrals. A referral is when a current employee at that company refers you for an open role that the company is hiring for.

A referral will significantly improve your chances of landing an interview. While it’s not 100% necessary (I didn’t have one), you would be foolish not to try to get one.

🔑 Key idea: People are incentivized to refer strong candidates. They determine your fit for the role based on your resume and opening messages.

To expand on this, many employers give their employees a bonus if they refer someone who gets the job. They also want to help people.

But in my experience, most people who ask for referrals do not appear as strong candidates. Common mistakes I see:

They don’t personalize their message to the person they reach out to
They have spelling or grammar mistakes in their message (shocking, I know)
They don’t attach their resume
If they do, their resume is not strong and does not highlight relevant experiences
They do not explain why they are perfect for the role

Now the next steps are to find the right person to refer you and to send them a great message.

The right person is often someone who works at the company. Start with your own network

Do any alumni of your college work at the company? See here for a guide on how to find those people.
Do any alumni of one of your former jobs work there?
Do you have any friends or contacts at the company?

If yes, reach out to them on LinkedIn or over email. If you don’t know anyone at the company, you’ll need to make a contact. In this situation, just search Product Managers at the company you’re looking for on LinkedIn.

Strong opening messages contain four things:

A personal connection: include a message to endear the connection to you. This may be what you have in common or a media feature they did that you enjoyed
A sentence on your strong background: use one sentence to communicate why you’re a good fit for the job.
Ask for a referral: be direct and ask for a referral, not a coffee chat or a call. This is because these PMs are inundated with requests for their time. It’s also infuriating getting onto a coffee chat where it’s very clear that the candidate just wants a referral and doesn’t care about your answers.
Include your resume: this gives them a chance to dig deeper into your background and even refer you without any additional follow-up.

Here’s a template I’d suggest:

Hey Will. I loved your blog post about your journey to Facebook. As another first-generation immigrant, I could really relate!

I’m a computer science student at USC and interned as a PM at Walmart this summer. I’m set on product and have been preparing for interviews all summer. I’d love to interview for Facebook’s RPM program, would you be open to referring me? I’ve attached my resume.

Thanks!

Your Name

🔑 Key idea: Your referral reach out should include a personal connection, a sentence on your background (bonus if it sounds impressive) and your ask for a referral. Don’t beat around the bush and please don’t ask to “pick your brain” or a “virtual coffee chat”.

I would try 1-3 people at each company you’re aiming for. These people are likely receiving many referral requests, so be patient and understanding.

🏆 Part 2: Cracking the PM Resume

Creating the perfect resume is the hardest part of landing an interview. But it’s also the most important.

🔑 Key idea: A strong resume is the single most important thing you can do to be a part of the 3% of applicants who get interviews.

If you’re like me and are applying without a referral, without a coaching service or without connections at the company, the best way to get an interview is to have a killer resume.

I made hundreds of resumes during my job hunt. Now, I have had the benefit of seeing hundreds of PM resumes and interviewing over 50 candidates for PM roles at Facebook/Meta. I want to use this experience to share detailed guidance on building a stellar resume. If you need more help, I’ll share a resource that I wish I had when applying.

📝 Overall Principles of a Great Resume

Bad bullet point: Managed various social media channels for a multinational firm by being proactive, hard-working and excellent at communication.
Better bullet point: Led team of 3 (2 marketers, 1 engineer) to execute a referral program for a SaaS project, leading to $50,000 in new revenue and 120 new customers.

Impact: Ideally, every bullet point should show the outcome you’ve created

Bad bullet point: Led user research on our products
Better bullet point: Synthesized qualitative user research from 23 usability tests into actionable tickets in Visual Studio; worked with engineers to improve the user experience and confirm the build meets the user specifications.

Simple: Please just choose a simple resume template (recommended resource). No fancy graphics, colours or multiple columns are necessary. The goal of your resume's style is to be easily readable. You will not get "bonus points” for cool logos or visuals.

🔑 Key idea: Each bullet point should be concise, show impact and be highlighted specific to the PM job. Don’t include filler words, vague statements or fancy visuals.

🗺 Sections

My suggestion would be to have five sections: Header, Experience, Education, Projects and Skills.

🎬 Summary [Optional]

Some people like to include a summary section. My advice is only to include this section if you have significant experience in a field very different from product management.

Bad summary section: 10+ years experience managing teams, leading product development and creating business impact.

Why is this bad? Because it's redundant with your experience section.

Better summary section: I'm a Ph.D. physicist who is fascinated with consumer behavior. I'm looking to apply my rigorous academic background to the world of product management.

Why is this better? If your resume is made specific to the job, many of your experiences as a Ph.D. physicist will not be on your resume. This summary also creates a strong, memorable narrative for your experiences.

🎯 Header

Your name, email address and phone number are the essential information.

Social profiles (ex. link to Twitter, LinkedIn or Github): include these if you're incredibly proud of the content on them. Most recruiters won't check these but interviewers later in the process might.
Location: Resume best practices say that you should include this.

Style: Make your name legible and slightly larger than your header titles.

🚀 Experience

This is the most critical section of the resume. I spent years refining the art of creating good experience bullet points. Here are some critical suggestions to improve yours:

Each bullet point should tie to one of the responsibilities of a PM. These include leadership, design, working with engineers, project management, data analysis and communication.
Every single point should be relevant. If an experience isn’t relevant, take it off your resume. This may feel painful, but it helps to strengthen your resume.
Fill in the gaps with side projects. You may notice some gaps in your skill sets and experiences. Note these down and aim to fill them in with projects (more on this below).

Let’s go into even more detail. You may have heard of the STAR method for breaking down your experiences during interviews.

STAR is fine for interviews but is bad advice for resumes. Generally, people spend too much time on the situation and tasks whereas the action and result are what matters for a resume.

This is why I recommend RACR, or result, action, context and result. Yes, the result is twice on purpose. This is because there are often two levels of results: the outcome of your action and the impact of this outcome. Here’s an example using a strong PM bullet point.

Built a custom Tableau dashboard (result) by integrating with Salesforce data platform (action); enabled the team to accurately track user engagement metrics (context) and build a roadmap to grow engagement by 20% (result).

🔑 Key idea: Use RACR (results, action, context, results) to frame your experience bullet points.

If you need more help on your experience bullet points, I added 40+ strong examples from PM resumes I’ve seen to the recommended resource.

🎓 Education

Use the education section to highlight the points from your degree that are most relevant to the role. Again, remove irrelevant information.

Example Education Section:

The University of Melbourne, Bachelor of Arts (Economics)

Courses Include Python Programming, Cost-Benefit Analysis, Design Thinking
Extracurricular: 2015 Campus hackathon winner, mentor for Girls Who Code

⚓️ Projects

Tumblr HackDay – Led a team of 3 (2 engineers, 1 data scientist) to build a new Tumblr mobile interface for casual users; won 4th place across the entire company (40+ competing teams)

💎 Skills [Optional]

This is a section to list out the tools and skills that you’re proficient in. Use this to highlight soft skills and hard skills (more details in Part 2).

⭐️ Highest ROI Resource: My Resume Kit

I made a Resume Kit with all of the templates, advanced strategies and resources I wish I had when applying for product roles. It includes:

The actual resume template (DOCX, PDF) I used to land my product role at Facebook (and still use to this day)
40+ of the best experience bullet points I’ve seen from 100s of resume reviews
10 advanced strategies to making your resume stand out
A PDF copy of The Associate Product Manager Playbook
Resume reviews for a limited amount of people

I made this kit because I’ve seen firsthand how a strong resume can change lives.

As we discussed, 97% of candidates don't get interviews — and I hope this resource can significantly improve your odds of being part of the 3%.

Get the Resume Kit

🏁 Part 3: Crush the Interview

After investing in getting the interview, it's time to shift gears to get the offer. This means succeeding in the interviews.

Interviews have rubrics and predictable structures. This is why the best predictor of success in interviews is the number of hours of effective practice.

🔑 Key idea: Your experiences don’t matter once you get to the interview stage; it’s now all about performance. The best way to perform better is through effective practice.

There are three stages of effective practice

Understanding the interviews: read and learn what the interviews look like. This is key for understanding the rubric you’re being evaluated by, what great answers look like and strategies for answering PM questions.
Self-study: easily the most underrated step, studying by yourself will help you solve interview problems with greater ease.
Mock interviews: finally, practice with others to improve your communication, time efficiency and ability to interact with an interviewer.

I practiced for a few hours a day over 3-4 weeks before and during my interview period. This may have been overkill, but I knew that getting an interview meant I was a serious contender for one of the roles. I didn’t want to leave anything to chance.

Rather than give you high-level guidance on each interview, I’ll share my advice and link you to more detailed guides, videos and resources to go deep on specific areas.

Let’s dive into each of these.

💎 Learn the Interviews

Each APM interview process will have different interviews. I haven’t done them all, so I’ll share my experience and link to some great resources from Exponent which is (spoiler alert) the best ROI resource for understanding how interviews work.

📞 Phone Screen (All)

Key question of the interview: Does this person meet the job requirements?

Example Question: Can you walk me through your professional background?

They are looking for two main things they are looking for at the phone screen stage: communication skills and alignment with the job description criteria.

🔑 Key idea: Phone screens are all about strong communication and how aligned you are with the job description.

Communication skills: This is the most critical part of the interviewing process. If you can practice one thing, I’d prioritize your communication. Strong communication means three things:

Structured
Concise
The ability to tell stories

Excellent communication is out of scope for this guide. But if you feel like you could benefit from improving your communication, I’d pick up a free month of LinkedIn Learning and take one of the following courses

Communicating with Confidence (free trial)
Communication for Product Managers (free trial)

A recruiter may assess your communication skills by asking open-ended questions like “Tell me about yourself” or “Tell me about a project you’re proud of.”.

Alignment with job criteria: Just as your resume aims to qualify you for every part of the job description, recruiters may look to confirm that you meet the job requirements on the phone screen. For example, if you lack design experience, anticipate questions like “What’s your favorite product and why?

📊 Execution / Metrics (Facebook, Lyft, Google)

Key question of the interview: How do you prioritize and make decisions involving metrics?

Example question: You’re the PM for Instagram Stories. What’s your North Star metric?

For this interview, I’ll point you to several great resources that can help you best prepare

How to Ace Facebook’s Product Execution Interview (free): two friends of mine wrote a great guide for Execution interviews.
Mock Interview (free): A former colleague did a great mock interview
Mock Interview 2 (free): Another interview looking at Facebook Marketplace
Here is a list of questions you can expect for Execution interviews (free)

🔑 Key idea: Show the criteria about how you are making a decision and making the decision. Indecision kills candidacies.

🎭 Product Sense / Product Design (Facebook, LinkedIn, Lyft, Uber, Google)

Key question of the interview: How do you take an ambiguous problem space and turn it into a creative solution?

Example question: You’re the PM for Facebook Dating. What do you build next?

I always enjoyed conducting this interview -- it’s much more creative and interesting than some of the others! At a high level, I can share that we’re looking for people who can set a strong product mission/vision, define the right audience to build for and prioritize the right solution to build for this audience.

For the best dives into how to do well in this interview, use the resources below.

Facebook Product Sense Interview (free): A helpful and comprehensive guide!
Mock Interview from a Facebook PM (free): A former colleague did a great mock interview
Product Sense Rubric (paywall): The things that interviewers are looking for during product sense interviews.
List of questions (free)

I always enjoyed conducting this interview -- it’s much more creative and interesting than some of the others!

🎖Leadership & Drive / Behavioral

Key question: Does this person have the attitude and soft skills to succeed as a product manager?

Example question: Tell me about a time that you failed. What did you learn from it?

This is largely a behavioral interview. I’d prepare using the following guides.

How to Ace Your Google Behavioral Interview (free): a guide that has helpful advice for Google and beyond
How I Prepared for Facebook PM Interviews: Leadership & Drive (free): This is a great guide written by a friend
Expert Tips for Answering Common Interview Questions (free trial): a one hour LinkedIn Learning course with high ROI

One general tip that I learned when conducting these interviews:

🔑 Key idea: Behavioral interviews are 50% strong communication. I’d suggest taking a free LinkedIn Learning course, practicing saying your answers during mock interviews and practicing structured communication.

💯 Estimation (Google)

Key question: can this person use logic and math to handle ambiguous situations?

Example question: how many Google Maps users are in New York City?

Here are some great resources for interviews at Google like this:

Google APM Interview Guide (free) a great resource with example questions, interview strategies and Google specific tips
PM Estimation Interview Guide (free): a good breakdown with strategies on doing execution interviews
Google PM Estimation Interview (free): a great mock that covers this question type

⭐️ Highest ROI Resource: Exponent

If you need more help on interviews, I recommend getting a membership to Exponent. For $19/month, you get access to their full product interview resource library. There are also specific resources for several popular APM companies like Google, Meta, Uber and more.

If you’re at the interview stage, investing in the right resources will have a large impact on your likelihood of landing the job.

🧮 Practice Frameworks

Self-studying is the piece that I feel sets me apart. Others over-indexed on reading books and mocks with peers. I would spend hours each day self-studying, specifically by practicing:

Segmentation: breaking down ambiguous problems into actionable pieces
Brainstorms: creatively think of many options given an ambiguous prompt
Prioritization: choose the best option amongst a series of reasonable ones

These areas are agnostic to the interview type or the company, so practicing is high-leverage when interviewing for multiple companies. Below, I’ll walk through the exercises I did and share resources on how to do the same

🎯 Segmentation

Every interview begins with a problem. It could be something like

Why has metric X gone down?
What should we build first in area Y?
How would you set the market for market Z?

Each of these are ambiguous questions with multiple paths forward. This is where it is important to break down problem spaces with a structured approach.

🔑 Key idea: Bucket potential options into a mutually-exclusive-collectively-exhaustive list of options. This will make navigating the ambiguity much simpler.

The best way to do this is to look for buckets of mutually-exclusive-collectively-exhaustive (MECE) options. These buckets should encompass all of the potential options while being separate. Here are two examples.

What has metric X gone down?

Bucket 1: Factors external to the company

Economic changes
Social changes
Geopolitical changes

Bucket 2: Factors internal to the company

Measurement changes
Product changes
Policy changes

These two buckets cover 100% of the possible options for why this change may have occurred.

Structures like these are very common parts of product management interviews. The only way to do them well is to practice (the recommended resource has tons of drills to do this).

🧠 Brainstorms

At many points during the interview, you will need to creatively brainstorm across multiple different areas. Examples include

What are all the metrics we may want to track?
Who could we possibly build for?
What pain points do these user groups have?
What potential solution might we build?

🔑 Key idea: Practice brainstorming for every possible axis ahead of time. When brainstorming during an interview, you’ll remember some of the best ones.

Create brainstorm situations for yourself and push yourself to identify all of the potential

Example: What metric should we care about most?

Engagement
Retention
Monetization
User Sentiment
Social Value Created
Virality
Performance
Reliability
Activation

Brainstorming is crucial. Again, the recommended resource has tons of drills to do this and it’s something that I feel set me apart during interviews. Practice a ton!

✅ Prioritization

This is the third and arguably most challenging framework to master. It’s also the one that is most relevant to the actual PM job.

Prioritizing between two or more reasonable options is challenging. You may need to decide between

User groups: do we focus on teens or adults?
Metrics: do we focus on retention, engagement or monetization?
Solutions: do we build a VR shopping experience or a new standalone Google App?

I wrote a full guide on prioritizing as a product manager. The key here is to define the criteria that you will use to make the decision and then measure your options against that criteria. This will show that your process is objective, logical and auditable.

🔑 Key idea: Prioritize based on explicit is explicitly defining the criteria that you will make your decision on.

⭐️ Highest ROI Resource: RocketBlocks

If you want more help with frameworks, Rocketblocks is an excellent resource to practice key frameworks for product interviews. I used their resources when applying for jobs and enjoyed the active practice. There are tons of drills, technical skill reviews and product sense exercises to choose from at a reasonable price.

They also have a community that you can use for…

🤖 Mock Interviews

With an understanding of the interview structure and practice in breaking down problems, brainstorming and prioritization, you’re ready to do mock interviews.

🔑 Key idea: Use mock interviews to practice timing, communication and simulating the environment. Be careful of taking too much feedback from other interviewees.

Mocks are great for practicing your delivery and simulating the environment. Be cognizant that there’s a little bit of “the blind leading the blind” here -- the person on the other side of your interview may not know exactly what to look for. This is why I recommend self-evaluating yourself based on your own knowledge of the interviews.

Here are some mock interview communities that I’ve heard great things about:

ProductBuds: a great, supportive community of aspiring PMs. They have a channel to coordinate mock interviews that I would definitely recommend.
Rocketblocks: there’s a big community for mock interviews on Rocketblocks -- but they also have coaches and experiences PMs you can interview with too!

🎬 Final Recap

What a whirlwind. If you’ve read the full guide, you’ll now be better equipped to:

Build all the skills you need to get a PM interview
Have a killer resume that will get you noticed
Crush the interviews and land a job offer (or two, or three…)

I wrote this guide to simulate all of the advice I would give to an aspiring product manager over 3-5 hours of coaching. I hope it helps you in your unique journey.

Here is a recap of all the key tips from the guide:

🗺 Introduction

Each APM program gives people with no formal product experience the chance to work in an interesting product space, bond with a talented cohort and receive training within the company.
Don’t wait until applications open to start preparing. Start now — specifically by learning the right skills, building an effective resume and getting referrals. Preparing early is what sets strong candidates apart.

🛠 Part 1: Become a Great Candidate

97% of applicants don’t get an interview. You need to build the right experiences, make a killer resume and network to be a part of the 3%.
Don’t prepare for interviews until you are at least 80% sure that you will get an interview. Focus all your time on getting the right experiences, making the perfect resume and getting referrals until then. Being a great interviewee is useless if you don’t get an interview!
The right experience is in alignment with the PM job requirements. These are a combination of soft and technical skills.
If you have gaps in your skillset, take a short course. This will give you something to put on your resume to fill that gap. LinkedIn Learning is offering readers of this guide 1 free month to learn all the product, design and technical skills you’re missing. Claim your free month here .
Use hard skills to differentiate yourself from other candidates.
Use projects to fill in skills gaps from your experiences.
People are incentivized to refer strong candidates. They determine your fit for the role based on your resume and opening messages.
Your referral reach out should include a personal connection, a sentence on your background (bonus if it sounds impressive) and your ask for a referral. Don’t beat around the bush and please don’t ask to “pick your brain” or a “virtual coffee chat”.

🏆 Part 2: Cracking the PM Resume

A strong resume is the single most important thing you can do to be a part of the 3% of applicants who get interviews.
Each bullet point should be concise, show impact and be highlighted specific to the PM job. Don’t include filler words, vague statements or fancy visuals.
Use RACR (results, action, context, results) to frame your experience bullet points.

🏁 Part 3: Crush the Interviews

Your experiences don’t matter once you get to the interview stage; it’s now all about performance. The best way to perform better is through effective practice.
Phone screens are all about strong communication and how aligned you are with the job description.
Show the criteria about how you are making a decision and making the decision. Indecision kills candidacies.
Behavioral interviews are 50% strong communication. I’d suggest taking a free LinkedIn Learning course, practicing saying your answers during mock interviews and practicing structured communication.
Bucket potential options into a mutually-exclusive-collectively-exhaustive list of options. This will make navigating the ambiguity much simpler.
Practice brainstorming for every possible axis ahead of time. When brainstorming during an interview, you’ll remember some of the best ones.
Prioritize based on explicit is explicitly defining the criteria that you will make your decision on.
Use mock interviews to practice timing, communication and simulating the environment. Be careful of taking too much feedback from other interviewees.

Final thought: we need more diversity in tech

The final tip I want to share: apply.

These programs are transformative -- both for your personal learning and your socioeconomic standing. This was my situation; I went to a university in Canada, didn’t know many people in Silicon Valley, didn’t have a technical background and didn’t have the resources to make big investments into myself.

Joining one of these programs exposed me to smart peers, incredible mentorship, new cities, new countries and new ways of growing my career.

If you feel like you need this, don’t disqualify yourself by not applying. Don’t assume that you don’t belong in this industry because of your background, skin colour, location or native language.

🔑 Key idea: You can’t get the job if you don’t apply. Don’t disqualify yourself because you feel like you don’t belong in this program or tech in general. You belong.

We need more diverse thoughts and people in our industry if we want to continue to change the world for the positive. I sincerely hope that this guide is able to play a small part in many diverse stories about “breaking into tech”/

Please do share this guide with anyone else who may find it valuable or encouraging.

And, with that, good luck on applications!

If you want to stay in touch, follow me on Twitter and/or LinkedIn!

How to Transfer Internally to a Product Manager Role

Will Lawrence — Wed, 01 Sep 2021 14:30:47 GMT

The PM role has never been more popular.

Every year, thousands of people apply for entry-level PM roles, enroll in boot camps and read about jumping into product.

On the other hand, hiring a PM is insanely hard right now. My team has several open headcount and we need people to fill them.

In my view, the best way to address this gap is to help internal candidates transition into the PM function.

These people — who often come from customer success, marketing, strategy, engineering or design — have already passed your company’s hiring bar, are looking for new challenges and bring domain expertise to the area.

This is something my team is trying now and I’m lucky to work with some internal candidates who are making the transition. Below, I’ll share the process I recommend to people looking to make the jump internally.

Managers, consider using this same process to help rockstars in other functions join your team as a PM.

Earning Your Stripes

The best way to become a PM is to be a PM first. A great way to do this is to find a PM that you can meaningfully help with their role.

This will give you experience, help the PM scale their own scope and give you a chance to create impact as a PM.

Here’s the process I’d recommend to kickstart that internal move to product:

Find a PM (ideally in your product area)
Scope a workstream that you can drive
Deliver
Seize Openings

🔎 Find a PM

Transitioning starts with a conversation — either with your manager or a PM that you work with.

If you have a good relationship with your manager, share your interests in developing more product management skills and see if they have any connections to a product team.

While it may be counterintuitive to share with your manager that you are looking for a new role, good managers will want to support your career growth and help you hit new goals. Selfishly, they also would prefer to retain you at the company as opposed to losing you.

Alternatively, if you already work with a product manager, you can reach out directly to them.

Either way, reach out and share your intentions with them. Here’s an example:

Hey Jane. I’m Will and I work on payment partnerships for Paypal Cash. I’m looking to transition into a PM role in the next 6-12 months and would like to help a PM with some of their core responsibilities to develop the right skills. Would you be open to chatting and seeing if I can take some workstreams of your plate?

As a PM, I’d be happy to offload some of my workload onto an eager, capable person. This is what makes internal candidates so much better — they are pre-vetted and know how things are done at the company.

🤝 Scope a workstream that you can drive

Once you’ve found the right PM, your next goal is to scope a workstream that you can drive. This should be something that leverages your current skillsets, has measurable success, and is independent enough that you can drive it with minimal involvement from the PM.

Start by meeting with the PM. Arrive with an understanding of the responsibilities of a product manager, eagerness to learn and a narrative on why you’re looking to join a product function. You need to convince this PM that you are reliable and able to take on meaningful parts of her or his scope.

Once you’ve established some credibility, consider what type of workstream you can drive. I’m working with two aspiring PMs and I’ve seen two ways of identifying these workstreams:

Extend your current scope to take on more PM tasks

Regardless of your role, there are connections between your work and the responsibility of a product manager. If you’re in analytics, for example, a natural extension of the research project you’re already doing is to define product requirement documents (PRDs) based off the recommendations you provide the team.

Try to draw a line between your responsibilities and how you can support projects that this PM would care about. Here are some examples for inspiration:

Sales - support B2B go-to-market for a new feature.
Customer Success - translate some customer challenges into product specifications that can be added to the team backlog
Legal/policy - create a one-year roadmap of the legal/privacy changes on the horizon that may affect the product.

Projects like these are great because they allow you to use your current knowledge to learn practical skills. The downside of these is that some of these projects may be “nice-to-haves” for the PM rather than “must-haves”.

If you want to go deeper and create more value for the PM themselves, I’d suggest…

Own meaningful execution

Own meaningful parts of the execution by seeing what you can support.

A product manager is responsible for two outcomes: great strategy and great execution. To scale their impact, PMs often look to delegate execution to other leaders on their teams to make sure they have time to define the proper product strategy.

If you want to offer significant value to the PM you’re working with (and learn a lot along the way), look to drive meaningful parts of the execution. Ideally, you want to seek out projects that are important to the team and deliver real impact.

Find a workstream like this by asking, “What is an important project that you’d like to offload to someone?” Give the PM some time to think through the right project for you to drive.

If and when its been identified, work with the PM to make sure the expectations, success criteria and your requirements are clear.

This is a great time to define what you would like to learn, what support you expect and how much time you can commit over a given time period.

📈 Deliver

Once you’ve successfully scoped a workstream, it’s time to deliver.

Start by ramping up. I’d suggest doing 1-week of shadowing (where you shadow the PM in meetings or sessions that involve your work stream) and 1-week of reverse-shadowing (where the PM shadows you as you drive those same conversations).

After this, aim to drive this workstream solo. Keep a one-on-one with your PM to ask questions and keep in contact asynchronously.

Operating independently can be scary. But this is exactly what a PM is expected to do.

A key tenant of successful product managers is agency — the ability to proactively solve problems independently. Demonstrate this by making progress with minimal supervision and great upward communication.

📬 Seize Openings

At the end of the given workstream, reflect on how much impact you were able to create. Debrief with your PM to see what you did well and what you can improve.

If you’ve successfully delivered an impactful result, it's a good time talk to your PM about joining their team as a PM. If their team isn’t hiring at the moment, ask if there are other teams they would feel comfortable endorsing you for.

In the worst case where there are no openings across the company, you’re now in a much better position to transition into a PM role at another company.

But in this job market, I’m confident that your current employer will want to retain you.

📝 Summary

Use the approach above to gain PM experience and transition into product. In this process, you’ll experience what the job is really like by driving independent progress with real results to show at the end of it.

For managers that are hiring PMs, identify some rockstar candidates in other functions and see if they are looking to transition into product.

Help them structure a win-win relationship with PMs on your team that allows all parties to grow their skills. As a bonus, you might get some excellent PMs onto your team.

🦾 Reads and Resources

👾 Buying Your First Crypto with HAX: a friend of mine has an awesome course + community for investors looking to jump into crypto. The cohort starts next week.

💫 Ads, privacy and confusion by Benedict Evans: an exploration of what we really need from the privacy landscape changes that are underway.

👥 How I built a paid community to 1,000+ members in 10 months by Dru Riley: As we kick off Product Circle next week, I’m studying how communities grow and what makes them successful.

If you’re new to Product Life, subscribe below for concise, actionable and often surprising lessons for product managers.

Subscribe now

Until next time,

Will

A Guide to Facebook/Meta's RPM program by an RPM-alumni - Updated for 2022

Will Lawrence — Wed, 21 Jul 2021 14:15:51 GMT

My first day as a Rotational Product Manager (RPM) at Facebook

Hey, I'm Will. A few years ago, I was keen on applying to Facebook's Rotational Product Manager program. The one problem: I didn’t know anyone at the company and hadn’t done product manager interviews before. I spent hours Googling, practicing and reading books, guides and resources. Fortunately, I was able to get the job.

Recruitment for programs like RPM are very competitive. Given the massive demand for these roles, interview-prep companies are charging $500+ for courses on how to get through the interviews. These courses are problematic because it gives an unfair advantage to people who can afford these premium resources.

Below, I'll share all the advice I wish I had when going through product management recruitment. The goal of doing this is to “level the playing field” and make sure everyone has the knowledge they need to succeed.

I especially hope that this guide is helpful to people from diverse backgrounds — including underrepresented ethnicities, socioeconomic backgrounds and varying educational pedigree.

We desperately need more people like you in the tech industry. Don’t be discouraged because you’re not from school X, have experience at company Y or know skill Z. Please, please, please use this guide and apply to this program.

Alright, let’s jump in.

Table of contents (click to jump to that section):

Note: This guide includes resources that I personally recommend and if you do sign up, I may earn a few bucks from partners. This helps me keep writing resources like these!

Introduction

Facebook's Rotational Product Management (RPM) program is an 18-month program for people with less than one year of product management experience. RPMs have a chance to rotate through three different teams across the company over six-month periods.

As an RPM, you’ll have a lot of support, including:

A manager to support your 18-month journey
Managers on each rotation to help you succeed in the day-to-day
A mentor to help you ramp up
A “circle” of other RPMs to crowdsource knowledge from
A broad alumni network (in and out of Facebook)
Program managers to support the program and your individual growth

I say this to highlight that you do not need to be an expert product manager on Day 1. You’re expected to grow and learn as time goes on.

I started at Facebook as an RPM in the summer of 2019. I wrote about my four-year journey to Facebook and my 18-months as an RPM in more detail if this is helpful.

The Application Process

How do I apply for the RPM Program

We hire RPMs once a year for two start dates in the following calendar year. There are five Facebook offices that support RPMs: Menlo Park, Seattle, New York City, London, and Tel Aviv. Applications open on July 26th on the Facebook Careers page. We encourage you to sign up for alerts there, so you are notified when applications go live.

Your application to the program will require a resume and responses to short answer questions. These questions will be emailed to the applicant automatically by CodeSignal after a resume is submitted through Facebook Careers. Applicants will have 24 hours to submit answers to the short response questions (estimated time to complete: 1 hour).

Application Timeline for 2023 Start Dates

July 18, 2022: Applications open.

Who is the ideal candidate?

RPMs are hired from various backgrounds. We look for people with full-time experience or recent graduates.

We actively seek applicants with no tech experience. RPM is suited for individuals completely new to the product manager (PM) function.

Individuals with more than one year of PM experience, including PM internships, should apply for Product Manager roles listed at Facebook Careers.

[Added July 2022] If you feel like you’re missing any experiences, LinkedIn Learning is offering readers of this guide 1 free month to learn all the product, design and technical skills you might be missing to be a strong candidate. Claim your free month here.

Frequently Asked Questions

There is a complete list of FAQs with the following questions on the RPM website:

Who is the ideal candidate for the RPM program?
How long is the RPM program?
How is Product Management at Facebook different from other companies?
What does a ‘day in the life’ of a Facebook RPM look like?
What kind of mentorship is available to RPMs?
What happens after the program?
How do I apply to the RPM program?
Is RPM a remote-eligible position?
How can I prepare for the interview process?
Is there anything else I should know about applying?

Here are some more FAQs that I’m often asked:

Do I need a technical background (i.e. do I need to code)?
1. No. Many RPMs come from backgrounds in finance, marketing or consulting. That said, exposure to technology and engineering is always a bonus.
Would you recommend the program?
1. 100%. I learned a ton in 18 months (and wrote about my experience in detail here).
Is this program only for recent graduates?

No. It’s for people with little to no PM experience, including existing professionals or new graduates. In my year, roughly 75% of RPMs were experienced hires.

What are some example rotations?
1. Growth of Facebook Watch, Launching WhatsApp Payments in Brazil, AR Commerce features, Oculus VR experiences, Instagram Stories, Building Portal. Nearly every part of Facebook is accessible to RPMs.

Resume Advice

Now with the logistics out of the way, let me start sharing some advice.

Here’s a brutal truth - 97% of applicants don’t get an interview. This data may be old, but it was my experience once I saw the hiring funnel.

If you’re like me and are applying without a referral, without a coaching service or without connections at the company, the best way to get an interview is to have a killer resume.

I made hundreds of resumes during my job hunt. I’ve also read dozens of guides and articles on how to write the best one. I want to share my general philosophy on resumes and then more details on each section. If you need more help, I’ll share some resources that I wish I had when applying.

Overall Principles of a Great Resume

Specific to the job

Every bullet point should be concrete and speak to your candidacy for the role. Remove filler or vague words (common culprits: “various,” “managing,” “impact”). Every word should speak to your qualifications for the specific role you're applying to.

Bad bullet point: Managed various social media channels for a multinational firm by being proactive, hard-working and excellent at communication.

Better bullet point: Led team of 3 (2 marketers, 1 engineer) to execute a referral program for a SaaS project, leading to $50,000 in new revenue and 120 new customers.

Impact

Ideally, every bullet point should show the outcome you’ve created

Bad bullet point: Led user research on our products

Better bullet point: Synthesized qualitative user research from 23 usability tests into actionable tickets in Visual Studio; worked with engineers to improve the user experience and confirm the build meets the user specifications.

Simple

Please just choose a simple resume template. No fancy graphics, colours or multiple columns are necessary. The goal of your resume's style is to be easily readable. You will not get "bonus points” for cool logos or visuals.

[Added May 2022] If you need more help with your resume, I made a kit that includes the resume I used to apply for the RPM program. Here it is.

Sections

My suggestion would be to have five sections: Header, Experience, Education, Projects and Skills.

A Note on the ‘Summary’ section

Some people like to include a summary section. My advice is only to include this section if you have significant experience in a field very different from product management.

Bad summary section: 10+ years experience managing teams, leading product development and creating business impact.

Why is this bad? Because it's redundant with your experience section.

Better summary section: I'm a Ph.D. physicist who is fascinated with consumer behaviour. I'm looking to apply my rigorous academic background to the world of product management.

Why is this better? If your resume is made specific to the job, many of your experiences as a Ph.D. physicist will not be on your resume. This summary also creates a strong, memorable narrative for your experiences.

Header

Your name, email address and phone number are the essential information.

Social profiles (ex. link to Twitter, LinkedIn or Github): include these if you're incredibly proud of the content on them. Most recruiters won't check these but interviewers later in the process might.
Location: Resume best practices say that you should include this.

Style: Make your name legible and slightly larger than your header titles.

Experience

This is the most critical section in the resume. My main suggestion would be to follow this excellent guide from a former Google Recruiter: How to Wow Recruiters With Your Resume.

In addition to that guide, here are some tips that I would add:

Each bullet point should tie to one of the responsibilities of a PM. These include leadership, design, working with engineers, project management, data analysis and communication.
Every single point should be relevant. If an experience isn’t relevant, take it off your resume. This may feel painful, but it helps to strengthen your resume.
Fill in the gaps with side projects. You may notice some gaps in your skillsets and experiences. Note these down and aim to fill them in with projects (more on this below).

Education

Use the education section to highlight the points from your degree that are most relevant to the role. Again, remove irrelevant information.

Example Education Section:

The University of Melbourne, Bachelor of Arts (Economics)

Courses Include: Python Programming, Cost-Benefit Analysis, Design Thinking
Extracurricular: 2015 Campus hackathon winner, mentor for Girls Who Code

Projects

Tumblr HackDay – Led a team of 3 (2 engineers, 1 data scientist) to build a new Tumblr mobile interface for casual users; won 4tth place across the entire company (40+ competing teams)

If you have gaps in your skillset, I’d also recommend taking a short course. This will give you something to put on your resume to fill that gap.

LinkedIn Learning has 14,000+ courses and is offering readers of this guide 1 free month to learn all the product, design and technical skills you’re missing. Claim your free month here.

Skills [Optional]

This is a section to list out the tools and skills that you’re proficient in. Use this to highlight relevant skills (ex. Python, Figma) and not generic ones (ex. Microsoft Word, hard-working).

If you need more help on resumes…

I made a Resume Kit that has the templates, advanced strategies and resources I wish I had when applying for product roles. It includes:

The actual resume template (DOCX, PDF) I used to land my product role at Facebook (and still use to this day)
40+ of the best experience bullet points I’ve seen from 100s of resume reviews
10 advanced strategies to making your resume stand out
A PDF copy of The Associate Product Manager Playbook
Resume reviews for a limited amount of people

I made this kit because I’ve seen firsthand how a strong resume can change lives.

As we discussed, 97% of candidates don't get interviews — and I hope this resource can significantly improve your odds of being part of the 3%.

Get the Resume Kit

Interview Overview

There are three stages of the interview:

Phase 1: Phone Screen
Phase 2: Execution and Product Sense Technical Interviews
Phase 3: "Onsite" Loop (will be VC because of COVID) - Execution, Product Sense and Leadership and Drive

The good thing about the RPM interview process is that there are many resources to succeed. Googling will lead you to example questions, resources and mock interview videos.

But if you’re at the interview stage, you have a serious chance of landing a high-paying job. I bought some resources at this stage and it turned out to be an extremely high return on investment (ROI).

When it comes to paid interview resources, many of them are overpriced. There are two that I’d personally recommend as being very high ROI:

Exponent: the most comprehensive platform, courses and community for PM interview prep. They have a suite of courses, practice exercises and coaching services to help you land the job.

Rocketblocks: I loved using Rocketblocks to build my product sense, analytical skills and segmentation. The exercises are great and were great for digging into gaps in my skillset.

Lean on these resources to practice — because you’ll need a lot of practice for these interviews! Here’s my advice for specific RPM interview stages:

Phone Screen

The goal of the phone screen is to do a non-technical screen of your candidacy. In my mind, they are looking for two main things: communication skills and alignment with the job description criteria.

Communication skills: This is the most critical part of the interviewing process. If you can practice one thing, I’d prioritize your communication. Strong communication means three things:

Structured
Concise
The ability to tell stories

Excellent communication is out of scope for this guide. I’d suggest looking at more resources to develop this skill set. Here is one course that I’ve heard positive things about (with a two-month free trial to Skillshare): Communication Skills: Become More Clear, Concise, & Confident.

A recruiter may assess your communication skills by asking open-ended questions like “Tell me about yourself” or “Tell me about a project you’re proud of.”.

Alignment with job criteria: Just as your resume aims to qualify you for every part of the job description, recruiters may look to confirm that you meet the job requirements in the phone screen. For example, if you lack design experience, anticipate questions like “What’s your favourite product and why?

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Execution Interviews

Key question of the interview: how do you prioritize and make decisions involving metrics?

Example question: You’re the PM for Instagram Stories. What’s your North Star metric?

Some friends of mine who are ex-Facebook PMs wrote a great guide on how to prepare for the Execution interview. Rather than rehash it, I suggest you lean on their advice.

Product Sense Interviews

Key question of the interview: How do you take an ambiguous problem space and turn it into a creative solution?

Example question: You’re the PM for Facebook Dating. What do you build next?

As an interviewer, I can share that we’re looking for people who can set a strong product mission/vision, define the right audience to build for and prioritize the right solution to build for this audience.

Here are two ways to practice for this interview:

Create practice questions by going through the Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp apps. I would literally open the app, find a section of the product and then try a product sense question. For example, I’d open Facebook, see the Marketplace tab and then ask myself, “You’re the PM for Marketplace. What do I build next?”. This will help you learn the apps and practice applying your process in new situations.
Do product sense drills: Practice brainstorming, segmenting users and thinking of a creative solution. If you want situations to practice, this is where I again recommend using a tool like RocketBlocks.

Here’s an example product sense interview.

Leadership and Drive

This interview tests a candidate’s ability to support, build and lead their team. Again, I’ll share a resource from a Facebook PM who has shared the best way to succeed in this interview.

Best Practices and Tips

Perfect the resume first: Don't worry about interviews until you're 100% confident in your resume. If you need more help with your resume, I shared the resume resources I wish I had here.

Get people to review your resume: Ask friends, mentors, professional contacts, recruiters or other product managers to give you critical feedback.

Define your narrative: Concisely explain your background in a narrative format. This will be deployed multiple times during the interview process. Here's how I do mine:

Hey there, I'm Will. I'm a product manager at Facebook working on gaming monetization. Before this, I was a PM on a few other products like WhatsApp Payments, Watch and Memorialization. Before coming to Facebook, I studied Economics at university. I'm a writer and am excited by the creator economy and international money movement.

Not every experience is relevant: I was proud of an experience I had in high school and thought I would always have it on my resume. But mid-way through my university experience, it no longer became relevant to the jobs I was applying to. I made the hard decision to take it off my resume and prioritize some of my internship experience. This made my overall resume much stronger and cleaner.

Not all of your experience will be relevant to being an RPM. You have two choices in this situation: Remove it from your resume or adjust your experience to make it directly tied to the job description (see here on how to do that).

Build your experiences with projects and courses: If you’re missing experiences that are relevant to the job, build those experiences yourself. I’d recommend claiming a free month of LinkedIn Learning and taking some courses to fill your gaps.

Your background gets you to the interview; performance gets you the job: This was my mantra during interview prep. If you pass the phone screen, it’s all about how well you do on the problems in the interview. This was comforting for me during the interview process.

Practice, practice, practice. When I had my interviews scheduled, I was practicing for ~5 hours a day. A great self-study tool that I recommend is Rocketblocks. Regardless of how awesome you are, you can always benefit from more practice!

Apply to multiple programs: While this guide was specific to Facebook’s Rotational PM program, I’d encourage you to also apply to other similar programs at places like Uber, Google and Twitter. It’s common to interview for all of them and join the one that is the best fit (and gives you an offer, of course).

If you need more help, here are two more detailed guides I wrote:

The Associate Product Manager (APM) Playbook: The definitive, 25-page guide on resumes and interviews from an APM alumni
The Product Manager Resume: an In-Depth Guide: All of the templates, tips and examples I wish I knew when applying for product manager and associate product manager roles

The RPM Experience

My three rotations as a Rotational Product Manager: Memorialization, Watch Growth and WhatsApp Payments.

In this section, I want to share my background before entering RPM and some details on my experience in the program. The goal is to show that 1) people from very different backgrounds can enter the program, 2) the program is worth the effort put into the recruiting process!

My background before entering RPM

Studied Economics at a university in Canada (non-target for Facebook recruiting). An average student involved in entrepreneurship extracurriculars.
Internships at Microsoft as a User Experience Designer, Tumblr as a Business Analyst, a startup called Siftery as a Growth Intern and a final one as a business operations intern at an ad-tech company in China.
I went to a few hackathons, worked on a side project with local entrepreneurs and wrote content online.

If you want more details, I deep dive into my background and four-year journey to Facebook.

My RPM Experience

I loved my experience as an RPM. I joined a cohort that was a 50/50 split of recent graduates and experienced hires. My rotations were:

Supporting the Bereaved/Profile Memorialization
Watch Growth
Launching WhatsApp Payments in Brazil

If you want more details, I did a deep dive into my 18 months as an RPM.

Closing Thoughts

Above are all of the tips I would give someone in a coffee chat about the RPM program, applications and interviews. I hope they are helpful.

The final tip I want to share: apply. You can’t get the job (or any jobs for that matter) if you don’t apply. Don’t disqualify yourself because you feel like you don’t belong in this program or tech in general.

Please do share this guide with anyone else who may find it valuable. Especially consider diverse people in your networks who may benefit from this advice.

Good luck with the applications!

Every week, I share lessons, tips and stories for thousands of product managers. Subscribe below if you’re looking to grow your career as a PM:

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Build Product Manager Experience BEFORE you Get The Job

Will Lawrence — Wed, 12 May 2021 14:30:25 GMT

How can I get PM experience without being a PM first?

This is a classic conundrum for people trying to transition into the field. My very short answer: build the experiences you need.

I’m a HUGE proponent of this path. When I joined Facebook, it was rare to hire non-Ivy league graduates into PM roles. I feel the thing that set me apart was the number of skills and projects I had developed outside of university and internships. I want to share two ways that I used to build my experiences that helped me become a PM without a prior PM role.

They are:

Find PM scope in your current role
Launch side projects

Below, I’ll share how I did both of these and how you can expand your PM skillset regardless of your current role.

Quick aside: what are the skills you need?

Check out my Technical Guide for PMs to find what technical skills you need to develop. Next, try finding the PM archetype that you’d most likely want to land a role in. From there, take a look at actual job postings in that archetype. Determine the skill gap and build a map to building those skills.

🔍 Finding PM Scope

When I was doing Growth at a 20-person, B2B SaaS startup, I learned that I may want to become a product manager. But my job was mostly sales.

I decided to proactively find our power users, companies that loved our product.I reached out to them via email and interviewed 4 people to understand what they liked, hated and wanted to see in our product.

From here, I translated some of the common pain points they mentioned in the product (“the notifications are terrible”) into a product brief. I shared it with our CEO and together we worked with a designer to find how we can create this project.

This became bullet-point number #1 in my Facebook product manager resume ☺️.

You may be thinking, “Wow, what an open company culture. My company would never let me do that.” But here’s the thing: companies will let you do almost anything as long as you’re still doing well in your core responsibilities.

Here are some ideas to create PM experiences from various roles:

👍 Customer Success

Create a beta user program. This is a common model for testing new ideas with people who will give you honest feedback (here’s an example from Todoist). Find people or companies that would like to participate and offer them rewards (ex. discounts, swag). Once you’ve created the program, regularly run user interviews, ask for their feedback on new products and help the product team prioritize features based on your knowledge.

👩‍⚖️ Legal/Policy

Create a one-year roadmap of the legal/privacy changes on the horizon that may affect the product. Be detailed in potential product mitigates that you think could be helpful. Share this with your product team and leadership. This is a great way to add value!

🧑‍🔬 Data Analyst

Use your data skills to analyze a user journey and make recommendations to the product team. For example, do a funnel analysis for your companies website, analyzing how many people arrive on the site, how many create an account, how many make a purchase etc. From here, identify easy fixes that the team can work on.

📽 Side Projects

If you want to learn skills that aren’t possible in your current job, consider a side project. These are small projects that you can ideally do in a weekend that help you try a new tool, practice a new skill or perhaps earn some extra cash.

Many of the skills that helped me enter the PM role stem from side projects:

UX Design: I became interested in UX Design after redesigning a website to land an internship. That summer, I focussed on more design projects in order to build a portfolio. I attended hackathons, worked on some ideas on the weekends and tried to shift my work scope to include more design. Less than a year later, I was doing an internship in UX design at Microsoft.
Python/SQL: My degree in economics exposed me to statistics so I wanted to try a role in data science. I did some online courses, built a small python application with Tkinter (a lightweight graphical interface library) and did a research project in an area of interest. This helped me get a role as an analyst at Tumblr.
Go-To-Market: I recorded and built an introduction to UX Design course. This taught me go-to-market, a skill that I later found out was essential to being a product manager.

At a glance, the best PM side projects involve building something and taking it to market. Here are some ways to build that experience

🔨 Use No-Code tools to build a product

🧬 Data Science Project

🎨 Design Feedback

A fun way of doing design critiques by growth.design

🛠 Working with technical teams

There are many communities that have sprung up (especially during the pandemic) to help people come together to build. One that I joined was called Side Prjct. Check it out to find a team to work on a project with you.

More Resources for Side Projects

PM Technical Guide: Books, courses and tools to learn more about data science, design and engineering.
Side Hustle Stack: a free resource to find side hustles and the resources you may need to get started
Profitable Business Ideas You Can Build With No-Code: inspiration and resources to start building no-code projects.

Summary

If you’re missing a skill, build it. This will help you grow in your current scope as a product manager or transition into the field. Do this by finding scope in your current role or by building a small side project.

Stretch your scope at work to touch the core responsibilities of a product manager. Make sure to keep crushing it in your current role!
Spend time building with no-code tools and taking projects to market.

🖼 Internet Things I’m Enjoying

🏦 DeFi and the Future of Finance: A research paper that highlights the history of finance and how decentralized finance (DeFi) solves some of the current limitations in our system.

👾 The Great Online Game: An interesting take by NotBoring on how we’re all playing an online game for clout, social value and standing.

💸 Naval Ravikant on How to Build Wealth: Everything the wise Naval Ravikant has shared about building wealth. Really actionable and insightful.

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Until next time,

Will

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A Technical Guide for Product Managers

Will Lawrence — Wed, 03 Feb 2021 22:12:44 GMT

Do I need to be technical to be a product manager?

This is a great question and one of the most common questions I get from aspiring PMs.

I did some research to see what the broader consensus on this topic is. There appear to be two camps of responses:

No, you don't need to be technical: PMs focus more on building the strategy and coordinating the many roles involved in building a product.
No, but it helps. It’s unnecessary to have a technical background, but it sure helps build credibility with the team.

Over the last few years, my answer question has evolved. I’m now firmly in camp number three: yes, you need to be technical to be a product manager.

In this piece, I’ll explain why this is and cover the following:

What it means to be technical (spoiler: it’s not just coding)
How a PM is like a coach
Finding your spikes and fluencies
A full list of resources to help you learn the right skills

The technical trio

First, I want to clear up a misconception on what it means to be "technical”. Generally, people think that technical skills = the ability to code. This originates from the idea that engineers are the ones who build the product (i.e. write the code).

But in reality, a product team has three main builders: engineers, designers and data scientists. Each of these roles requires a unique set of skills to do the job. A product manager is responsible for helping these builders create something worthwhile.

For this reason, I think there are three technical skillsets: design, engineering and data. Each of these involves knowledge of processes (ex. hypothesis testing, unit testing), tools (ex. SQL, Figma) and academic knowledge (ex. degrees in specific fields). All of these are unique technical skillsets, and, as you’ll see, they’re important for a PM to understand!

A PM is a coach

Brandon Chu of Shopify has a great article on the First Principles of Product Management. In it, he likens PMs to another job:

There is no better analogy for how a PM should think of their role than the coach of a team sport like basketball, volleyball, football, etc.

This is spot-on: while the PM does not jump on the court and play, they are responsible for helping the team perform to the best of their ability and win.

Importantly, a coach doesn't need to be able to play each position on the team. But they need to have a nuanced understanding of the position and how it interacts with others. This includes knowing their role in the team, their limitations, their relative strengths, the dynamics between each position and how they fit into different strategies.

This understanding is hard to learn from a book or in school. This is why many professional sports coaches, including 100% of NBA coaches, are ex-players. It doesn't necessarily matter which position they played, but the fact that they've played the game does three things for the team:

🧠 Knowledge:

There’s no substitute for being in the arena. Coaches who have played the game know the nuances (like psychology, motor skills and rhythm) that are impossible to learn from the sidelines.

🤝 Empathy:

In addition to knowledge, putting yourself into the players’ shoes can help you better support and coordinate the team. It builds a shared trust between coach and players.

🙌🏽 Love of the sport:

If you want to be a great coach, you need to love the process, have unique insights into the game and be excited about the possibilities of what the team can do. People who aren’t fascinated by the game should not become coaches.

This brings us to two points about product management:

The best PMs have experience as builders.
If you have no interest in learning about the jobs of builders’, you should not be a PM. Aspiring PMs should be fascinated with how engineers write code, how designers decide user flows and how data scientists build models. If you’re trying to avoid learning how code works, there’s a very high likelihood that this isn’t the job for you.

Spikes and fluencies

Now, if you don't come from a technical background, don't fret 😊. I was in your shoes a few years ago.

I was fascinated with UX Design, but I studied economics and had no previous jobs in the field. But somehow, I was able to land a UX design internship at Microsoft. How? Because I took some online courses and built a portfolio through side projects.

Here’s the 🔑: if you don’t have technical skills, develop them through self-directed learning and side projects.

Going into recruitment for product management roles a few years later, design was my spike — my main technical skillset showed I knew how to build products and work with other builders. I also took courses and built small side projects related to engineering and data to help develop fluency in the other technical areas.

Here's what my technical skills would look like in a radar chart:

My suggestion to non-technical people who want to enter product management is to develop a spike in one area and become fluent in others. This isn’t the only path, but it will help you learn more about the role and make you competitive during recruitment.

Here are visualizations of other backgrounds that I’ve seen be successful in PM recruitment:

Developing your technical skills

Below is a series of books (📗), links (🔗), articles (📝) and courses (🎓) to help you learn the technical skills you need. I’ll update this page as I vet more resources (if you have any suggestions drop them in the comments). 😊

Design 🎨

The importance of design knowledge: Design is how a user interacts with technology. It’s everything the user experiences, feels and touches. Because the product manager is ultimately responsible for a product's success, understanding how a product is designed and its uses are paramount. There are really high returns to understanding basic design patterns, ideas and terminology.

You need to know: The basics of usability, journey mapping, wireframing, user interface and information architecture. Learning design vocabulary (ex. terms likes affordances, dark patterns) is really helpful when communicating with designers.

Some great resources to learn design:

🔗 UX Process Checklist
🔗 User Journey Mapping
🔗 Built for Mars (a series of excellent case studies on design & usability)
📗 Don't Make Me Think by Steve Krug
📗 Design of Everyday Things by Don Norman
📝 Design thinking introduction and process from IDEO
📝How to Work with Designers by Julie Zhou
🎓 Intro to Wireframing by Treehouse
🎓 UX Design Masterclass: Learn by Building 3 Real Projects by me 🙃 (you can use my referral link for 14 days free)
🎓 Intro to Figma or Sketch

Projects that can build fluency

App Critique: Open your favourite app and try to accomplish a task (ex. Instagram -> go to my bestfriend’s profile). Record your journey and narrate your thoughts on getting there. Afterwards, go back and critique the positive and negative parts of the journey.
Design a three-screen app: Before building complicated applications, design a simple app (ex. a timer, a note list). This is a great way to learn the basics of a design tool like Figma or Sketch.
Design a full app: With more confidence and best practices under your belt, try building the full experience for a more complicated app (ex. social network or stock trading platform).

Engineering 🔧

The importance of engineering knowledge: Engineering determines how a product works. Everything from its functionality, limitations, speed, data storage and security from hackers is tied into the engineering process. Understanding how code becomes a product like Facebook or Airbnb is crucial for your success as a product manager.

You need to know: The basics of systems design, data types, algorithms architecture, version control and the differences in popular programming languages. The actual coding is unnecessary, but learning to code will help understand some of the other ideas!

Recommendations on things to learn:

🎓 CS50 by Harvard (the best introduction out there, for free)
🎓 CS50: Web Programming with Python and JavaScript by Harvard (this course was the single best thing I did to learn more about engineering. I would highly recommend!)
🎓 Technology for Product Managers by LinkedIn Learning
🎓 Programming Foundations: Real-World Examples by LinkedIn Learning
🔗 Teach Yourself Computer Science
🔗 CS Dojo (a great YouTube channel to learn and work on CS problems)
📗 Computer Systems: A Programmer's Perspective by Randal E. Bryant
📗 Designing Data-Intensive Applications by Martin Kleppmann
📝 How to work with engineers by Julie Zhou
📗 Mythical Man Month by Fredrick Brooks Jr. (gifted to me by a former engineering coworker, this book is a must-read).
🔗 Khan Academy: Programming (an excellent starting point for writing code)

Projects that can build fluency:

Create a personal website and edit the code: This is where I started. Try using a tool like WordPress or Webflow to build a personal website. Take time to edit parts to your liking (for example, edit the header fonts or add in a button). There are many templates to start from and limitless potential to play around with code.
Solve Problems: Practice your coding skills on Leetcode, a site full of problems that are actually used in software engineering interviews.
Build a simple application: Try building an application using your language of choice. For me, I learned Python and followed this tutorial to build a Pomodoro Clock for my desktop!

Data 🔬

The importance of data knowledge: Data informs what the product should improve. This is crucial for a PM to understand to make strategies, identify opportunities and empathize with users at scale.

What you need to know: Basic statistics, A/B testing, SQL and a little Python/R. Spend the most time reviewing how to make decisions using data, as this is where you’ll likely interact with it the most.

Recommendations on things to learn:

📗 Intro to Statistics by OpenIntro
📗 Mastering Metrics by Joshua D. Angrist and Jörn-Steffan Pischke (a book I loved from an econometrics class I took in university)
🎓 Khan Academy: SQL (this is where I got started, and it’s more than enough for what I need today)
🎓 Intro to Python by W3 Schools
📝 Making Good Decisions as a Product Manager by Brandon Chu
📝 Empirically Sound AB Testing: A Guide for Non-Statisticians by me
🔗 Distill (intuitive explanations of Machine Learning concepts)
🔗 Kaggle (an environment with great data sets to play with)

Projects that can build fluency

Answer a fun question with data: For me, that was “Is faster music happier?” I created a research question, got data on Kaggle and used Python to build some charts. It’s a great way to practice!
Analyze your favourite website: SimilarWeb can give you free traffic data on any site. Pull up your favourite and find an unusual trend about the site (ex. 40% of Pinterest’s traffic comes from search)!
A/B test a website: If you have a personal website, use a tool like Optimizely to run your own A/B test. Try changing a button, header or colour to see if that changes the engagement on your site.

Recap

Technical skills are more than just coding. It’s about fluency in design, data and engineering.
You may not need to code, design wireframes or analyze data yourself, but it’s helpful to know the process, empathize with the builders and build curiosity for each domain.
Aim for a spike in one skillset and fluency in the others. This will help you be more effective in the role and make you more competitive when applying for a PM job.
If you have no interest in learning about one of these skills, reconsider if PM is the role you really want.
Use resources to build your knowledge and then work on real projects to build your experiences.

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Until next time,

Will

McKinsey, Goldman & Microsoft

Will Lawrence — Tue, 23 Jan 2018 17:10:00 GMT

Hey there! I'm Will Lawrence, product manager at Facebook. Product Life is my weekly newsletter where I write about product strategy, career advice and frameworks I'm using to navigate life. If this sounds like a good time, sign up so you don't miss any articles.

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This article was originally published on LinkedIn.

In was the spring of my sophomore year and I just received another rejection email from a job that I really wanted - this time it was from Deloitte:

After careful consideration of your application, we regret to inform you that you have not been selected for this position.

What was left of my confidence from that recruitment season had all but vanished and I realized how hard recruitment was.

Its been two years since that moment and I'm happy to say that I learned a thing or two about the recruitment process. I've been fortunate to have worked at Microsoft and Tumblr, two awesome tech companies with high standards of recruitment, and even interviewed with some really cool firms in other industries, like McKinsey & Company, Boston Consulting Group, and Goldman Sachs.

This was only possible because of a drastic change in my attitude and approach towards recruitment. Below I'd like to share the tangible steps I take in my new approach. More specifically, I'd like to focus on the part that stumped me and many other applicants the most: actually getting the interview.

At a high level, these are the steps that worked for me:

Set the Right Foundation
Make a Connection
Ask Intelligent Questions
Decide If You're A Good Fit
Ask for Help

This article is pretty packed, so I've left a TL;DR at the bottom if you want just the takeaways.

Step 1: Set the Right Foundation

The right foundation, to me, consists of the right attitude, expectations, timeline, and research.

Be Sincere

Reach out to people because you're curious, not because you want a job. This is easily the most important element of this process and I can't stress this enough. Don't use people in the recruitment process, but learn from their experiences to inform your future decision making. Really be genuine in your intentions and seek to learn, not get a job.

Manage Your Expectations

"Success" in the recruitment process should never be "Get A Job", it should be "Find Somewhere Where I'm a Good Fit". Frame the question in terms of learnings rather than job offers.

Start Early

Give yourself at least 2 months before the application deadline to learn about the company, role, and recruitment process. Remember that relationships are not transactional and take time to develop organically.

Understand the Industry and Company

You're probably tempted to skip over this section because its so obvious and is in every networking guide ever. If you do skip this section, you're likely part of the 90% of applicants who misses the most important of making a good first impression by doing homework beforehand.

Do your research on the latest trends, company news, and strategies of the companies you're interested in.

Step 2. Make a connection

You may think you want to work at specific companies or in certain industries, but in reality, those are just hypotheses. "Stress test" your career path by meeting people in companies you're interested in working at and ask them questions to determine if your hypotheses are true.

My number one suggestion for finding these people is the LinkedIn Alumni Finder tool. I wrote a post on how to access it and use it to find people at nearly any company, location, or role (depending on the size of your school's alumni).

When you find someone in your desired role, send them a connection request that answers:

How you're connected (if you used the Alumni tool, this is your school)
Who you are
Why you're reaching out.

One template you can work off is this:

Hi ___,

I noticed you studied at ____, which is where I'm currently studying ______! I wanted to reach out because I'm interested in learning about the _____ team at ______, specifically around ________, and I'd like to ask you some questions if you have a few minutes.

Thanks,

Notice how my "Call-To-Action" is asking questions. This is not a lie! I'm first and foremost curious to learn whether my idea of the company and team matches the reality of the situation. I think a key distinguisher amongst students are people who approach networking with the attitude is "Is this company a good fit for me?" rather than "How can I get a job at this company?"

Step 3: Ask Intelligent Questions

Once you've made a connection or two, think about the questions that this person would have unique ideas about. If the connection is a Data Scientist on the News Feed team at Facebook, for example, these might include:

How do you think the new changes to Facebook's News Feed Algorithm will affect your teams KPIs?
I've read that the News Feed is hitting a load capacity. I imagine this affects the bottom line, but I'm really interested to see if that affects the size of the team. Are people moving to other teams now or is the team still growing?
Whats the Data Science stack at Facebook? I'm proficient in Java, Python, and SQL but want to know if I should practice my Scala.
I noticed from your LinkedIn that you started in a Marketing role. How was the transition to such a quantitative and senior role?

Less-Optimal Questions

Whats it like to work at Facebook?
Do you hire for interns?
Have you met Mark Zuckerberg?

The difference between the two sets of questions are a respect for the person's time. Understand that most people are busy and are taking time out of their day to help you. Use this to ask real, well-researched questions that make your connection think, "Wow, this person has done their homework and is asking great questions." This is where doing your research is very important!

Ideally, this conversation would take place over a quick 30-minute phone call, but using LinkedIn or Email also works. I personally prefer phone calls because they allow you to build a more authentic professional relationship.

Additionally, I'd also encourage you to do multiple "rounds" of questions (over a month or two) if the relationship is developing well. This is a great way to build rapport with your connection and learn more about your chosen industry/company.

Step 4: Decide if You're a Good Fit

This is probably the hardest step in the process. After hearing the opinions of your new connection (who is hopefully now a new friend), ask yourself two questions:

Is this company/team somewhere I'd like to work?
Am I a good candidate for a role at this company/team?

Be critical on both of these questions. It's easy to be swayed by a big brand name, but stay true to yourself. I personally found this advice to be really hard to follow.

Following two rounds of interviews with Goldman Sachs, I had been selected for the final round Superday in New York. The problem, however, was that this interview was for a very different team (Securities Sales & Trading) whereas my interest was a different team (Engineering). The following was probably one of the hardest emails I've ever had to send:

Why would I turn down this awesome opportunity? Its because I wasn't excited by the team - it's not where my interests or skills lie and I'd be doing myself a disservice by pursuing it. I had to be honest with myself and my capabilities.

It might be hard, but be selective. This will make life much easier and free up your time to focus on opportunities where you are a good fit.

Step 5: Ask for Help

If you've done your homework, asked intelligent questions, and decided that you're a good candidate for a role at the company, reach back out to your connection and ask for help. This can be in the form of:

Getting feedback on your resume
An introduction to an appropriate recruiter
A referral for the recruitment process

Naturally, a referral holds the most weight here for the recruitment process- candidates with a referral are 3x more likely to get an interview. Only ask for a referral if:

You think you're a good fit for the role
You think you'd be beneficial to the company
You've developed a good relationship with your connection

Please don't jump straight to this step. Many students "jump the gun" on this one. Take the necessary time to build rapport with multiple calls around interesting questions and collect information on the company/role.

After asking (and hopefully receiving) help, you'll be in a much better position to submit your application online for the job. The resume check, introduction to the recruiter, or referral will go a long way in the recruitment process!

Conclusion

This is the best advice I can offer to anyone who is having troubles getting interviews. The key to this entire process is to be curiosity driven, not job-driven. If you liked this article or have any questions, I encourage you to connect with me and stay in touch.

Summary

Stop networking with people just to get a job. Reach out because you actually want to learn from them.
Reach out to people who meet your professional interests and give the LinkedIn Alumni Finder a try.
Ask intelligent, well-researched, and non-trivial questions (I give some examples of these above).
Be honest with yourself and decide if you're a good fit for the role before asking for help
Don't be discouraged. If you continue to reach out and learn, you'll find a good fit.

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