How I got a Product Management job in 88 hours.

A lot of people give tips and suggestions on how to succeed in getting a PM (Product Management) job, or any other job for that matter, but very few actually write about how they did it.

With so much openness in our industry and companies sharing everything from their salary structure to a complete set of patents, I would like to tell you about the exact steps that helped me get a new Product Management job just a few months ago.

Let’s get a few things out of the way to set some context so that you may better understand how this experience can apply to your job search.

Location and background: I live in San Francisco, a place that saw 57 percent growth in technology jobs from 2010 to 2013, with startups cropping up literally every day. I have also worked in consumer PM roles for over 5 years now, as well as having run my own startup for a little while. With that said, I’m pretty confident that if your situation is different, it’ll simply take a different amount of time until you get your new gig, but this framework should still hold up and yield pretty solid results.

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I know that you likely clicked through to see how one gets a PM job in 88 hours, three and a half days. I honestly didn’t set out for a clickbait title, but I did want to catch some folks who are hoping for a quick fix and just get some job asap.

Sorry to disappoint but those 88 hours in the title were pure interview time, comprised of calls and meetings stretching over 3 weeks. For those of you in a rush, here’s an infographic that covers the my job search funnel, but I really hope you stick around to read how all of this got set up…

Let’s break it down into deeper stats:

Talked to: 22 companies
More than 1 call: 17 companies
Met with: 10 companies

Roles considered: 2x Co-founder, 2x CPO, 1x VP, 3x Director, 3x Senior, 6x PM.

Total hours interviewing breakdown:
Face to face meetings — 49 hours
Screening calls — 12 hours
Recruiter calls — 7 hours
Homework — 20 hours (4 assignments)

Companies I passed on: 10
Companies passed on me: 6

Finding a job is a full time job.

There are a couple different strategies as to how to kick off your job search. Some folks passively look for opportunities as they develop a nagging feeling that they are no longer satisfied at their current role. Some wait for emails from recruiters and only entertain inbound leads.

I suggest a more extreme approach. If you have decided to move on, commit and consider quitting your job.

It sounds scary and uncomfortable and you will come up with dozens of excuses why you couldn’t do that right now, a common one being — I need my paycheck. It’s definitely something you should prepare for but as a scrappy PM you can save up, go lighter on expenses and figure out ways to make it work.

Don’t fool yourself thinking that staying at the current job, which you already don’t like, will allow you to find that perfect opportunity given enough time. There are enough awesome teams to join today, get off your ass and meet them.

Finding a job is a full time job. You should be easily taking blocks of 4 hour meetings, homework and calls any time of day. You’ve also already checked out, don’t do your current team a disservice of being half way out the door. Sneaking around for interviews or long walks to take the phone screen sucks, I’ve done it before and will definitely not be doing that again.

Even if you are getting poached while at your current position, it’s worth considering interviewing at a variety of companies since you’ve pretty much decided to move on. Having time to interview and go to a lot of meetings will allow you to find better opportunities. So like I said, think about quitting your job as you decide to move on.

Check your boxes.

Now that you’ve decided to fully commit and find a job — decide on what you don’t want to do.

I initially found it difficult to think of a specific industry to pursue and instead decided to focus on figuring out which fields I’m not interested in. Those ended up being Finance, Gaming and Advertising. I found that companies in those categories rarely match the goals of their users and taking those out of my search allowed me to set certain criteria and cut down on the noise.

That said, beyond deciding what you really don’t want to do, make sure you don’t miss out on a job without taking a meeting first. I’ve talked to plenty of companies that sounded pretty boring on the outside but ended up showing me just how exciting their product really was.

So rather than picking an industry, figure out what you don’t want to do and decide on what values are important to you. Take a notepad, draw 3–5 checkboxes and write out hard requirements for your next job.

For example for me they were:

Provide real value — I want to build products which deliver real value and where it’s less about having people click a button or generate a page view. This filter allowed me to weed out a lot of companies lacking in a solid business plan or having a weak mission statement.

Mobile Focused — Every PM who has been traditionally a Web PM should be doing more to get into mobile. This could start with owning mobile web portion of the product or better yet working on the team responsible for mobile applications. This was another hard requirement, tons of companies didn’t survive this criteria.

Team and Organization — This goes beyond the standard “good team and culture”. I wanted to make sure that a) company is being led by entrepreneurs with strong domain expertise and b) organizationally I’d get to own a full product line, basically getting as close to starting a company but doing so inside of a stable organization.

I feel like that last point is sometimes overlooked during the job search, however it’s crucial to get an early understanding if you are coming in with the ability of being autonomous and owning something fairly fresh, or if you are there to optimize an existing product. Challenges and skill sets for each can be different and you need to decide which one you’re up for.

Recruiters are your friends.

All right, so now that you’ve decided what you want, let’s go at it.

I love recruiters! They get too much grief in the tech sector especially from engineers and managers. I know that sometimes they will waste your time and misunderstand your needs. They will offer you jobs that are clearly not a match and at times even misrepresent you. All of this is worth going through.

Recruiters have a lot to gain from finding you a job. They get paid to find your next gig and they will act as an extension helping you filter through all those open roles out there. Use this and don’t pay too much attention to misfires.

As I said, I love connecting with recruiters so when the time came I blasted out a template “I’m available” message to something like 70–80 recruiters in my LinkedIn connections. I have also upgraded to LinkedIn Pro account and did advanced searches for recruiters in San Francisco (people search where Function is “Staffing” or “Recruiting”) and connected with a bunch more, also telling them that I’m on the market.

Quite a few of them responded quickly and we started phone screens as well as set up some conversations with companies they were representing. The train started moving.

Be the Product.

As you start reaching out to folks letting them know you’re available, it really helps to be able to give them enough detail about who you are and what you want. You’re a Product Manager and you know that getting a user to understand your product as quickly as possible is crucial. Well, in this case you are the product, so why not create a “landing page” for yourself that is more than a bunch of bullet points in a word doc?

I have decided to do this by creating a deck for myself. A presentation hosted on Google Drive to which I linked from every email and resume attachment sent to recruiters and companies. Wrapped in a bit.ly URL I also knew how many views the presentation got, giving me another signal of my progress.

The deck itself should probably be a post of it’s own, but the gist of it was having 5–6 slides covering products I’ve worked on, screenshots, highlights and very importantly what I’m looking for.

I’ve had great feedback from recruiters and hiring managers alike and have no idea why more PMs don’t create portfolios for themselves, it seems so obvious now.

Search smart.

While recruiters are of great help, you’ve got to go the usual route of applying to companies directly. In my opinion most job boards are pretty awful. Poor UI, endless forms, messed up resume imports and email spam made the few I tried unbearable. After a few attempts I just kept to LinkedIn as well as contacted companies directly.

While searching on LinkedIn is pretty obvious, here’s a neat trick that worked well for me when reaching out to companies.

There are awesome companies out there who don’t publish their job postings. This happens for a variety of reasons: jobs only posted on their site but not syndicated, no recruiter working with the company, headcount just became available but role is not very well defined or lastly they are just too cool for school and are not actively looking.

The way I found some hidden gems was going to Crunchbase and using their advanced search to look for recently funded companies. I have “cold called” a few of them with my resume and presentation and while they weren’t actively looking, they saw a potential matching role opening up for me in the near future and I got several interviews set up this way.

The service which eventually led to me getting a job was Hired.com. I was already nearing the end of my search with a couple offers in hand, but when a friend recommended it I checked it out and had a very good experience which very quickly led to several interviews and my meeting the awesome team at Revinate.

Getting lucky with Hired.com was still just a part of the important big step of talking to as many companies as possible through a variety of channels.

Organize Well and Create Volume.

I know you don’t need an intro to conversion funnels, but let me remind you of the obvious part — volume at the top. You want to find as many leads as possible in the shortest amount of time. This takes being pretty organized about your search, which hopefully as a PM is second nature for you and also making the time to go through the process with all the companies.

This part of your search is fairly straightforward it’s about rinse and repeat of the seek and reach out process on a daily basis and then staying on top of all the scheduling pieces. I kept all the progress info in a spreadsheet and meetings in my Google Calendar and had no problems using those tools to juggle dozens of calls and meetings during this time.

Having put all this together I realize now that there are quite a few other parts of the job search experience which are not covered here, which is why I suggest you subscribe to my mailing list and I’ll let you know when I write more posts on topics like Homework, Presentations, Final Round Meetings, Negotiations and Decisions.

Even without details on those particular steps of the process, the outline here should set you on the way and as long as you make up your mind, decide on what you want and get smart about finding your way into the hiring managers inbox, you will get a great new gig in no time.

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Lastly if you made it this far, you’re likely seriously looking for a new job. The company I picked, out of all the ones considered during this process, Revinate is hiring a Senior Product Manager right now and if you are interested in joining me and working on some big and exciting products, contact me on LinkedIn and let’s see if there is a match.

Good luck!