Product Manager Resume Guide by an ex- Facebook PM

The resume templates, examples and tips I wish I had when applying for product manager and APM roles

Jul 25, 2022

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.