Lots of people on LinkedIn ask me for tips on how to prepare for Product Management interviews, how to create a good resume, suggestions on what to study, etc.

In this series of articles, based on my own experience, I'll focus on bringing some tips on how to prepare for trying Product Management jobs.

I'll split it into four articles so I can go deeper on each one of them.

1. Resume
2. Events and Networking
3. Studying about Product Management
4. Training for interviews and cases

This article was first written in Portuguese and now I'm translating it to English.

Resume

All begins with the resume, commonly it's the first filter on any selection process.

Your resume must be short and objective and, at the same time, have to stand out from others.

Imagine the stack of resumes that companies like Google and Facebook receive each day. What is special about your resume to make it stand out from the rest?

There are lots of articles out there explaining how to create a good resume. I'll try to focus more on the process of continually improving your CV.

Focus on your achievements, not on your responsibilities

The crucial and only tip on this article about the content of the CV is to highlight your achievements rather than your responsibilities.

Bad example: I was responsible for keeping our product backlog prioritized and organized.

Good example: in my last job, as a product manager, I increased our conversion rate of new users by 10% on the landing page.

Ask for feedback on your CV

I truly believe that you can increase your chances of getting the job if you treat it as a continuous learning process.

Each time that you fail must be treated as an opportunity to learn and be better on the next one.

Following this principle, what I recommend is that you ask for feedback about your resume as much as you can. So you can improve it with each suggestion.

Before sending your CV to recruiters, start with your friends and colleagues!

Ask for their feedback on it, you'll get valuable insights from it.

Another thing that you should do is asking for help from other PMs that you know from LinkedIn for example. They can give you even better suggestions.

Feel free to send me your CV, I'll be happy to review it =D (my LinkedIn)

Have a public CV

This can be hard for some people. But one thing that I did while I was searching for a job as a Product Manager was to create a public CV on Google Docs and share it with many people asking for feedback.

I keep it open to suggestions and you can find my CV here.

After creating this public version, I shared it on many product managers' groups like Mind the Product and Product Coalition slack groups.

I received many suggestions to get to that version that I consider fine.

Learn from each application

Another excellent opportunity to learn and increment your resume is with the selection processes themselves.

I suggest you to try to understand why your resume was denied each time that it happens. Ask yourself questions like:

• Were they looking for someone with more experience?
• Maybe they were looking for a specific profile of PM (e.g. more technical or more focused on Growth).
• Were they looking for someone with experience in another kind of product? (e.g. B2B, B2C or B2B2C)
• Maybe I was missing a specific skill or I didn't make it clear on my resume?

A good tip here is to do a follow up with the recruiter asking for the main reasons why your CV was denied.

In my own experience, it's hard to get an answer from it, but trying doesn't hurt.

With this approach, you can understand why your CV didn't work well and what are the opportunities to improve it.

Highlights:

• Focus on your achievements, not on your responsibilities
• Ask for feedback
• Have a public CV
• Learn from each application

Do you have my other tips to share on this topic? Leave it on the comments.

In the next article, I will share a little bit about the importance of events and networking.

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