You are ready to be a Product Manager but how do you convince the hiring gods
Tips on establishing your product brand online
There is a huge conundrum around breaking into product management. Most companies want to hire a product manager manager with a previous product experience. And you won't get product experience unless you get a product management job. This 🐔 and 🥚 situation makes it tricky to land the elusive product management role. So how do you break out of this cycle exactly?
Product managers need to exhibit the following hard skills early in their career:
Business Aptitude
Technical Knowledge
Product/Design Sense
Now imagine yourself sitting in an interview and trying to convince the interviewer that you will be a good product manager because you possess the above mentioned skills 🤔 You are going to have a hard time! You HAVE TO show and not tell.
In these times of working digitally and remotely, you are only as good as your online identity. Demonstrating your aptitude online to be a successful product manager is about investing time in building you brand, being present online, engaging with product communities, networking, showing your information diet, talking about your projects/work/side-hustles, and most importantly sharing your learnings.
Let’s look at how to tangibly do that with a few examples and build a product brand for yourself.
Business Aptitude 💼
Write posts on LinkedIn analyzing a company, business model, or a strategy. For e.g. Ujwal shares summaries of earnings call of his favorite companies.
Write a business case study analyzing a market or an industry vertical. For e.g. Zoe shares market deep dives and strategy every week on her newsletter.
Create a short video sharing your opinion and thoughts on events like mergers and acquisitions, IPOs, new product/feature launches and its impact in the industry. For e.g. OpenViewVenture Youtube channel shares 1-2 minute videos based on recent industry events.
Technical Knowledge 💻
Build a small side project for yourself and then document your process and learnings. For e.g. Richa, my wife, documents her experiments with Python and Arduino and shares her learnings.
Break down a complex technical topic from book, video, or a blog into byte sized content in the form of summaries or twitter threads. For e.g. Bernie broke down Web3.0 for a 5 y/o in this twitter thread.
Design Sense ✏️
Redesign an existing product for a new problem statement or new set of target customers using design tools like Figma, Balsamiq etc. For e.g. Zesan redesigned the Zomato app to improve the information hierarchy of the app and documented the entire process.
Pick your favorite tech product, conduct a product dissection, and document your learnings. Here is how to do a product dissection. You can do this as a group or even individually.
It’s all about documenting, putting your work out there and doing what you do in public. Invest time in building your brand. This will not only help in hiring early in your career but also reap benefits in the long term as you are slowly and steadily building a repository of content.
Go out there and show your work!
Further Reading 📘
Read - Show your work by Austin Kleon. Ali Abdaal talks about how it changed his thought process on sharing stuff online here.
Read - API for Product Managers. This will help you get better with APIs as a product manager.
Read - How To Get Into Product Management (And Thrive) by Lenny Rachitsky.
Inspiration for the week 💪🏼
Manan Agarwal landed an internship with Razorpay (leading payments gateway solution in India) by writing and sharing his work online. Read his story here.
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Tanay 👋