Before getting started, please read my previous post on product management for full context.
First, let’s take a look into how a job is offered. A job is offered when “what you have” meets with “what the job needs”. That is, a PM job is offered when job requirements match with what you have to offer. Let’s dive into the “what you have to offer” section first.
What You Have To Offer
In order to understand what you can and should offer, you need to evaluate yourself in three different areas as indicated in the picture above.
- Skills: Your capabilities such as your analytical strengths, writing expertise, or technical understanding.
- Interest: What you enjoy doing, like you are a music lover, travel enthusiast, or you just love talking to people.
- Value: What the world values. If you do something that the world values then you will get paid for it.
Make a list of 2-3 items within these 3 areas for yourself and find companies that are at the intersection of these 3 areas for you.
Minimum Variable Transition
Now that you have self evaluated, let’s shift gears into how to transition from your current role to a product manager role.
There might be many variables you’d need to consider to make a transition. For example, you’d need to change company, location, industry, or looks for different level of experience. It is already hard to find the right PM role and it becomes even more complicated if there are too many variables to make that leap.
Hence, I recommend the “Minimum Variable Transition” plan, where you minimize the number of variables you’d need to change to make the transition. This way you could change just one or two variables, test the job market, learn, rinse and repeat.
The easiest way to make this transition is to find a PM role in your current company. The next up is to look for a different company within the same industry, and so on. This way you minimize the number of variables between you and the PM role.
The above picture, shows a few example PM roles depending on your current role.
Finding the Right PM Job
Now that you have evaluated yourself, picked the minimum variables to transfer, it’s time to shortlist 10 companies for PM jobs. By now, you should know the industry in which you’d like to be a PM.
In my previous post I covered that PM roles can be confused with marketing, program, or project managers. So, the first step is to read job titles and description to determine if it’s the right kinda PM job.
Lets’ looks at the below job description:
Product Manager
Maintain and Own all aspects of your product:
- Vision for a comprehensive roadmap
- Detailed product specification documentation
- UX, customer experience, and QA
- Market positioning, customer segmentation, and targeting
Senior PM
- Breakdown incoming feature requests into smaller size pieces for development team.
- Collaborate with multiple teams to gather requirements, design, and deliver product features.
- Triage, troubleshoot, and drive to root cause issues across hardware and software.
The above role is more like a technical project manager, with the ability to diagnose and debug issues.
So how’d you know which roles are product manager type role? Look for sentences describing product vision, roadmap development, customer segmentation, customer interviews, market positioning, and product requirements ownership.
Job Research
For this portion, let’s imagine a job seeker called “Tom”. Tom is a software engineer in energy industry within US. He has been wearing a partial PM hat in his current role. Tom is also interested in learning more about UX.
Let’s assume Tom wasn’t able to find a PM job within his current company. so tom researches the PM jobs using the following 4 tools:
- Internet search: Search for top energy companies within his current location
- Linkedin connections: Looks for connections that could refer him at those energy companies
- Groups: Understands more about the companies and roles by connecting with people in Linkedin groups or blind app.
- Job boards: Searches for jobs within those companies in job boards such as indeed, glassdoor, careerbuilder etc to understand the volume of the jobs.
In general, if you are starting a PM career, it’s better to pick a company with a large PM community, so that you can learn and improve your craft.
Job Search Criteria
Now, to shortlist 10 companies among your list, below is a recommended approach. But feel free to customize it to your liking.
The companies shown in the above example picture are fictitious. Again assuming our job seeker is “Tom” here, the company EnergyB in the second row is a great match.
It is heavy on UX which is great for Tom. It is a public software company and suits well with Tom who is a software engineer at another public company. EnergyB has 10,000 open PM jobs which is great. Tom also has great connections that can refer him to the PM role.
On the other hand, the company Low Energy is bad match, as it is heavy on hardware with only two open PM jobs. It doesn’t really match with either Tom’s skills or interests.
Conclusion
I hope you can create your shortlist of 10 companies by using the research method suggested above. But once you this list, then it begs the question of applying to those companies. And that is the topic of my next post: How to craft a killer resume and Linkedin profile. Please leave comments if you have any questions.
