Product Management jobs are in huge demand in the tech industry! Many job seekers aspire to work as Product Managers in FAANG companies. Breaking into the top tech companies is challenging, but a resume that shows exactly what value you bring to the table with your skills and expertise can be your first step towards landing a Product Manager role 💪
In this blog, we’ll guide you step-by-step on how to build a resume for Product Manager positions to get into FAANG+ companies! 🎯
Let’s get started! 🚀
1. Personal Details 📝
Like a resume for any other position, this section must contain your personal details, that is, your name, phone number, email address, location, LinkedIn profile address, and Github profile/website address.
A few tips to keep in mind to make it easier for your recruiters or hiring managers to reach out or learn more about you are:
- Always ensure the links in this section are clickable. Hiring managers should be able to click on your email address and LinkedIn/Github profile address and immediately connect with you without having to copy the address manually.
- Most candidates mention their current location in their personal details. You could also consider adding your desired location instead to convey you’re open to relocation.
Tips: How To and into a Product Manager role: Ultimate Career Guide by FAANGPath.
2. Education 🎓
The responsibilities of a Product Manager fall at the intersection of business, technology, and user experience. Recruiters often look for education related to these domains in the resume.
New grads can place the education section at the top of their resume to highlight their academic background.
If your educational qualifications are closer to the product management domain, ensure to mention them along with relevant coursework to demonstrate your knowledge about product management. However, candidates from a different educational background can also place the education section later in the resume.
Enrolling in Product Management courses on online platforms like Coursera, Udemy, EdX, or online boot camps might be a good idea to enrich this section of your resume. To indicate you’ve spent time learning about the domain, summarize your learnings from the course to show you have the required knowledge and skills to succeed in a Product Management role.
3. Work Experience 🧑💻
The best way to show you are the perfect candidate for the Product Management role is by highlighting your relevant work experience.
Suppose your work experience is more relevant to the role you’re applying for than your educational qualification. In that case, you should consider placing it at the top of your resume.
To craft the perfect work experience section for your PM resume, here are a few points you do not want to make errors in:
1. Take a look at the job description of the role you are applying for. Although the job title might be ‘Product Manager’, there are different kinds of Product Managers in the industry. Here’s a quick overview of different types of PMs:
- Technical Product Manager - Technical Product Managers work closely on technical products and focus more on the engineering and tech aspects.
- Business Product Manager - A Business Product Manager would typically focus on business aspects of a product by looking at the larger picture. They may/may not necessarily have a technical background but have a strong understanding of tech, their industry, and the product they are working on.
- Designer Product Manager - Product Managers who focus primarily on design are often experts in understanding how to build a product for the best user experience. They have a strong understanding of user needs and can visualize a successful product's design.
- Growth Product Manager - Growth Product Managers focus on throwing problems of the product to innovate solutions that can help the company grow. They work closely with data to understand the psychology of its customers and come up with solutions that contribute to the growth of the company.
- Data Product Manager - A Data Product Manager is likely to work on data products to optimize the company's data-driven decision-making by leveraging their analytical abilities.
Go through the job description to identify the industry in which the company you’re applying to operates and which set of PM responsibilities your role requires you to perform. Further, optimize your work experience section to highlight the relevant professional experience to help you stand out from other applicants.
Read: Product Manager vs. Project Manager vs. Program Manager: What's the Difference?
2. Focus on actions and their results rather than the job description. In your resume, mention what YOU have done, i.e., talk about your efforts to solve a particular problem and its result for the company. Talk about problems that are meaningful to your target role and mention the impact your work had on your previous experiences.
3. Describe your experience using the X-Y-Z formula. Ensure your experience description is result-oriented and includes concrete metrics. You may want to consider using the following format to craft a compelling description:
“Accomplished [X] as measured by [Y], by doing [Z].”
Keep in mind that Product Manager roles are multi-faceted. It is always a great idea to highlight a range of skills to convey to the recruiter how you leveraged them to achieve measurable results.
A few skills you should consider highlighting in this section through your work experience are:
- Business Skills - A product manager must possess the ability to break problems down into parts and develop a solution that can help achieve the company's business goals. The business goals may be to maximize ROI or achieve KPIs by focusing on different aspects like marketing, sales, tech, finance, design, strategy, and more.
- Design Skills - Products are successful when they provide an excellent user experience. A product manager should have a strong sense of design to ensure their product offers a compelling customer experience. PMs also often work closely with UX/UI teams during the product life cycle, making it essential for them to have a strong understanding of design.
- Tech Skills - Although a product manager may not require working on engineering tasks, understanding tech is the backbone to building a successful product.
To give you an idea, here are two examples of the work experience section for a Product Manager resume:
Let’s first take a look at this one:
In the above example, the job description barely reveals any details or skills that a Product Manager role in a big tech company would demand. It fails to stand out in the eyes of a recruiter and does not portray you as a strong PM.
On the other hand, here’s another example:
This example, however, ticks all the boxes a company would look for in a Product Manager. It carefully demonstrates technical, management and soft skills that recruiters would look for in a candidate.
Transforming your previous experiences into a result-oriented description will help you win interview calls from your dream companies. 💯
4. Skills 📋
A common mistake job seekers often make with the 'Skills' section is listing a range of skills that may or may not be measurable in isolation.
While it is a good idea to list technical skills like Agile methodology, product roadmap development, programming languages, data structures, algorithms, etc., in this section, mentioning soft skills like communication, teamwork, decision making, etc., will not add much value to your resume.
Consider integrating all the soft skills in the work experience section by showing how you leveraged them to achieve significant results in the tasks you've carried out in the past. Let your numbers vouch for your soft skills rather than the Skills section.
5. Other Sections
While these are the main sections of a Product Manager resume, consider adding the following sections to your resume to demonstrate any experiences that can help you justify your fit for the role you are applying for.
- Projects
- Leadership Roles
- Certificates
- Achievements and Awards
A perfect Product Manager resume is optimized for the role you are applying to. A Master Resume is always a good start, but before applying it to jobs, don't forget to tailor your resume and personalize it for the particular application.
Build a resume that demonstrates you’re capable of making things happen and land an interview call from your dream top tech company. 🤩
FAANGPath can assist you to build the precise resume you need to land interview calls from top tech companies. We are a team of industry professionals that provide resume writing, resume review and LinkedIn makeover services to make your job search process easier. Our candidates work at companies like Meta, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Bloomberg, Netflix and more.
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