How to break into product early in your career
Story of Tavasya who broke into product management within 1 year of completing his undergrad at the age of 24!
Hello everyone 👋
Welcome to a ✨ special edition ✨ of my newsletter where I interview a friend of mine, Tavasya to learn about how he broke into product management within 1 year of completing his undergrad education in the US. My goal was to understand his pragmatic approach towards cracking this elusive role and help you all with tips to break into product management early in your career.
So let’s jump right in!
Could you introduce yourself to our readers?
Sure thing! I’m Tavasya, a 24-year-old from Mumbai, India. I went to college at Northwestern University, where I studied Economics, Computer Science, and Marketing. I worked at a digital consulting firm in their product and marketing teams in the summers of my sophomore and junior years, and worked there for about a year after graduation. I recently started a new role with Emburse, a fintech company based in the US, Canada, and Spain as an Associate Product Manager. Emburse is a B2B SaaS company that exists to make CFOs’ and finance teams’ lives easier.
How and when did you decide that you wanted to get into product management?
I started concretely thinking about my career path in the summer before my senior year of college. I decided on product management for a few reasons:
I really enjoyed “all-rounder”, leadership-type roles.
I wanted an opportunity to impact company strategy early in my career.
The technology industry, to me, represented the chance to work on interesting challenges and grow quickly, with the lifestyle and work-life balance that I wanted.
Product management was “sexy” - this is not a good reason though! 😝
Fortuitously, the company that I interned with twice was founded by 3 ex-Product Managers and so I decided that learning from them in my first full-time position could be a great experience.
Looking back, what kind of coursework and projects during undergrad helped you get ready for a product role?
How did you showcase that work to the hiring teams?
A number of my experiences proved beneficial to hiring teams, including:
Cross-discipline background: Studying Economics, Computer Science, Marketing in college was a great way to talk about how PM was a great fit for me.
Campus leadership roles: Bias for action and taking initiative are two things hiring managers look for. Being a leader for different communities and organizations on my campus showcased those traits.
Side projects: Hiring managers enjoyed hearing about real world problems that I worked on solving. My favorite one to talk about was a data visualization website I created for fantasy soccer users. My biggest learning has been that a project doesn’t have to be Y Combinator ready, it just has to be launched, delivering value to its users, and demonstrate your skills and excitement.
Talking about books and podcasts from tech, business, and product and sharing relevant learnings from them worked really well during the interviews. For example, I really enjoyed reading books like Inspired, Lean UX, Lean Startup, The Everything Store and podcasts like How I Built This.
Some specific classes that certainly helped me in interviews and my role(s):
Human Computer Interaction: Learned useful skills such as wire framing, user research, the importance of good UX/UI.
Experimental Economics: Learned important statistical concepts such as A/B testing, statistical significance, power calculations.
CS classes: Taught me to think like an engineer.
How did you pick a company?
This was hard for me 😅 I was fortunate to land a few offers in my couple months of interviewing. I was tempted to take the first because I was insecure I wouldn’t be able to land anything better. My honest advice is that reflect on what you want before you decide to accept an offer. Some things that were important to me were:
Product culture
Team
Opportunity for growth
Domain/company mission/problem space
Type (B2B or B2C)
Location
What did your application process look like?
I found an effective strategy to be:
Setting a goal for the number of cold applications that I would make in a day, for example, I applied to 5 places each day. I used LinkedIn jobs almost everyday and had set an email alert for that. I also found positions on builtin for the cities I was interested in. APMlist.com is a great resource, but only features top tier programs in the valley which tend to be the most competitive.
For jobs that I really wanted, I reached out to a product managers and recruiters there on LinkedIn. This helped me land an interview 1 or 2 times. If I already knew someone at a company, I always reached out for a referral or an introduction which worked well for me.
I only wrote cover letters for jobs when it was mandatory, and when I really wanted the job. I found that more often than not, when a cover letter was mandatory and I wrote one, I would get an interview though this may be a coincidence 😉
A/B test and tweak a bit! If you find that you haven’t got an interview in ~50 applications, I’d look into getting feedback and tweaking the resume.
In hindsight, what do you think worked in your resume? What was the secret sauce?
Circular as it may seem, the more ‘product’ things you have on your resume, the more likely it is you’ll get an interview. Here’s what worked for me:
A product-adjacent job and job title (unfortunately these matter 😞)
Impact/metric driven bullet points, and a story to support each of them.
Side projects in an independent section.
Mentioning leadership positions.
Mentioning skills in analytics (Google Analytics), design (Sketch/Axure), and development (Python, SQL, Node.js, Javascript etc)
What did your interview preparation look like?
This is a great question! My overall preparation process looked like the following:
Skimming Cracking the PM Interview and understanding the types of questions asked.
Watching mock interview videos on Exponent (free videos on YouTube).
I love thepminterview.com! It let me practice questions on my own, spoken out loud.
Practice with friends (including the creator of this newsletter!) with and without product backgrounds.
Before each interview loop, I used Glassdoor and teamblind.com to see what others’ interviews were like and not doing so is criminal!
What were the top 3 tips that helped you crack the interviews itself?
After some interviewing, I was able to get into an effective routine. Some things that worked well are:
I created an Excel sheet with my answers to traditional interview questions for example: my favorite product, why product management, tell me about a time you influenced someone etc.
I created a brief document for each interview. The document had the following:
Company overview.
Research on 1-2 competitors.
Answers to important questions like tell me about yourself, why do you want to join us etc.
Specific questions for the interviewers based on their background. For example asking marketers about challenges in SEO, department heads about strategic moves etc.
Most importantly, practicing a lot! After some practice, you’ll be more relaxed in interviews and will be able to show what you can offer.
What was the most challenging thing in the entire hiring process? How did you overcome it?
The most annoying thing for me was top-of-funnel i.e. getting that first interview. I tackled this by:
Getting feedback on my resume from ‘product people’ early on.
Applying to roles I wanted less first, to test the waters and figure out what worked and what didn’t work for me.
Increasing my volume of applications!
As someone who is trying to break into product fresh out of school, what would be your top 3 recommendations for them?
Kill the imposter syndrome: Don’t self-reject and apply to that dream job!
Get advice from people you want to be like, but trust your gut too: I found that approaching too many people for advice was counterproductive as they really can’t tell you what you want :)
Reflect on your goals: Do you want to be a director in big tech? Save the world? Be rich? Think about the long-term. Product management may or may not be the way forward, and that’s okay!
🛑 Disclaimer
All of the above are things I learned, but may not work for you. We may have different communication styles and goals.
I hope you enjoyed reading this and were able to find some inspiration to land your next dream role 🤩
Questions? Just reply to this email and ask! Would you like to read similar stories in the future as well?
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P.S. - All the roles below are for students based out of the US for the summer of 2022.
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Sincerely,
Tanay 👋