How to Crack a PM role right out of Grad School.

Published in

Product Coalition

6 min readOct 23, 2019

October 23, 2019: It’s my birthday today and as I sit here feeling incredibly grateful for the life I have right now, it compels me to share a few hacks/ resources that helped me get where I am. There are so many great product leaders doing tons of great work that’s available for free (will list them later in the article), it’s amazing how much good content is available out there. So if you’re someone who wants to get into Product Management, there might be some meat for you in the article below :)

1000+ online applications, 400+ cold emails, 150+ cover letters and 75+ interviews — That’s what it took me to crack a PM role after graduating from Carnegie Mellon University.

Product Manager is a relatively tough role to crack right out school primarily because of the following two reasons:

(Almost) Every Hiring manager/ Job description asks for a PM with PM work experience.
If one doesn’t have relevant PM work experience, the Application Tracking System (ATS) has made it nearly impossible for the CV to be shortlisted through online applications. So for the hiring managers that are willing to look at CVs of fresh grads, they don’t get enough CVs to reach their eyes.

This is pretty much how an applicant ends up feeling through this ordeal of landing interviews for PM roles:

So what does one do? Well, the good news is, there’s light at the end of the tunnel.

I am documenting below a really comprehensive list of all the things I did to build a product mindset and to be able to crack a PM job. This is not something one can build overnight, it takes a while to understand the industry jargon and train your mind to think in a way where it dissects products by default.

Product Management Blogs:

The blogs mentioned below are amazing blogs that help you wear a PM hat and enable you to start thinking like a PM.

Jay Stansell’s Product Coalition: A great platform with aggregated articles for all things Product-related.
Product Manager HQ: Same as above, another great platform.
Stratechery: This is one of my most favorite blogs, Ben Thompson’s detailed analysis is to die for. It gives you a lot of food for thought.
Product Craft — They send a really nice curated list of articles, subscribe to their mailing list and enjoy awesome reads in your inbox.
Generally read about PM topics on Medium

PM Talks:

Stephen Cognetta Mock- Interview Series: The mock interview series REALLY helped me so much in structuring my answers in interviews. I can’t thank Stephen Cognetta enough for doing these. His inputs at the end of each video are priceless.
Carlos G de Villaumbrosia’s Product School: Listen to real-life PM Talks to be able to get into their shoes and see what their takeaways are.
Sachin Rekhi’s videos: His talk at Wharton is pure gold, watch that if you’re new to the Product Management realm.

Networking:

Linked-in Cold Emailing: Cold Emailing, if done right, can be surprisingly powerful. Treat your cold email as an A/B Test and keep iterating on the content until you see a good response rate.
PM Slack Channels: Product Manager HQ and Carlos G de Villaumbrosia’s Product School: These slack channels provide an unbelievably direct way to interact with the hiring managers/ hiring team. This cannot get better.
FB Groups: Women in Product, Women in Product — Job Opportunities: There are some very helpful PM communities on FB — they help in networking with like-minded people and also to find out about opportunities directly from the recruiting teams at most times.

Books:

Decode and Conquer by Lewis C. Lin 🦊: An amazing no-nonsense interview preparation book.
Cracking the PM Interview Gayle Laakmann McDowell: Great if you want to get an insight into the world of Product Management and are still a novice.
Answers to 164 Product Management questions by Lewis C. Lin 🦊: Dives deeper into more difficult problems like Pricing etc. Take it up after Decode and Conquer.

Podcasts:

Mind the Product: There are some great podcasts on this channel. Follow along to stay updated on trends in the product world.
How I built this by Guy Raz: This is more entrepreneurial than Product Management but I love this for all the insights it gives into how great products came into being.
Sachin Rekhi: His podcasts are really useful, listen to get a dose of how product leaders think.

Quick Product Management Courses:

Cole Mercer’s PM videos on Lynda.com: He has packed so much amazing content in short 1.5 hour-long courses, they’re just too good to be missed. Do yourself a favor and complete these.

Stay up to date with cool new product ideas:

Product Hunt: This is THE place where all new products are introduced and a lively and thriving community gives upvotes/ downvotes. Follow activity on this portal to see what kind of ideas are doing well.

How can you stand out?

The above resources will definitely help you a great deal in being able to structure your thought process and be more opinionated but it has to be entirely your effort to go that extra mile and really show recruiters that you can do more than just academics. Here’s how:

Do Side Projects: I cannot stress this enough. If you don’t have access to product management courses that allow you to do some real projects, please take up a product idea that you have — start interviewing prospective users, build wireframes, break down tasks, write user stories — actually build something tangible. You need to show the hiring managers that you can think through the entire process of building a product from inception to shipping.
Network and speak to real PMs: The best-unfiltered talk about what a PM does on a day to day basis comes from someone who is actually wearing the hat of a PM. Understand what they do on a daily basis, what do they find difficult in their roles and what skillsets really helped them excel.
Optimize your CV to emphasize on the transferable skills: If you don’t have relevant PM experience, it is really important to showcase what you bring to the table from all the previous leadership positions you’ve held, internships you’ve done or work that you’ve done. Don’t underestimate your learning from previous roles just because they are unrelated.
Build a Digital Presence: (blog/ tweets/ LinkedIn posts): In today’s world when recruiters give your LinkedIn profile/ personal websites more importance than your CV, it is a really powerful way to broadcast your product mindset. Trust me, multiple interviews of mine were based on some blogs that I had written and made for such great conversation starters.

All of these resources mentioned above coupled with some hard work helped me crack a Product Manager role at Palo Alto Networks. I am excited about what the future holds for me. It’s a great place to work — brimming with such great ideas :’)

So, as I said, work hard and there’s always light at the end of the tunnel.

I hope you found this useful, please show some love by throwing in some claps and share it with your network. If you know any other resources that really helped you out, please comment down below and let the readers know. :)