Thriving 30, Volume 22: How I landed 8 Offers in 2 Months
There is this post I wrote about 3 months ago. Ref: How To Quit Your Job, I’m kidding… don’t do it yet. Think about it. The post was about what happens after you quit your job. I figured… people would be interested in what was the process like, aside from the mental breakdown (okay, this over dramatic… but you get the jist), what was my approach and what I did differently than all the times I’ve applied to jobs. I am sharing a lot of details, one may ask are you sure you want to share these details, aren’t you afraid someone might steal your ideas and you won’t be unique anymore? Absolutely not! You succeeding, does not limit me from succeeding. I want you to succeed, I want you to do well. I understand how much weight we hold in our careers in proving something to ourselves, to our parents, our peers. Some other disclaimer is that these details are unique to my values and is natural in my vocabulary. I speak of these details without cliff notes, so when I reference these points they reflect my honesty. Last disclaimer here, this is unique to PM roles in the tech space. I was working as Finance Project Manager role in fintech/lending company for 5 year prior to switching to a full Product Manager role. I’m still in the same niche of fintech but just more on the product side. Here is my checklist on how to get started.
First things first,
Check your attitude. Applying to jobs is extremely stressful and takes a lot of willpower. You can cry for a bit, but after it is knees to chest. You need to be prepared for a lot of rejections, be open to some really harsh feedback, and have an action plan on improving after you recognize what you need to do to be better. Be realistic. If you are in the Bay Area, know that you are not the smartest kid in the room. You are competing with a lot of people from out of state, even country.
Apply with Intention: One thing I did differently is applying to companies I care about. I did not submit my resume to every company that was offering a position I was interested in. I did a lot of research on the positions from 1) talking to someone who works there 2) read reviews on glassdoor and other web sources 3) reading their website for their mission, company values, anything on their website that talks about team and people experience. It is really important to me for my goals and the company goals to align, so when I talk about what I am passionate about, there is a clear understanding that I want to work this specific company. Companies can tell if you are applying on these greenhouse, lever, etc (name of application webapps) by just attaching your resume and writing a generic cover letter. Take some time to really narrow down the companies you are curious and passionate about. From there, the recruiter or hiring manager that is reading my cover letter has a connection to what you are expressing. This is also a great opportunity for you to shop for jobs, you have a say in your decision to work there as much as they do.
Cover letters? You got it. I believe I wrote a personal cover letter to every company applied to even when they didn’t even requested one. There is usually a section that says “anything more you want to share to the team?”. This is your chance to shine. Cover letters are used for you to talk about things you did not mention in your resume. I would suggest not to recite your resume in essay form, but use this opportunity to talk about how you see yourself in the company and what can you contribute to the company that hasn’t been mentioned. What are some values that the company have that you share? 2020 Cover letters are intended to short and to get to the point. How can you narrow down what is tried and true while showing your interest to the company?
Get references: I was extremely fortunate to have references to over half the companies I got offers to. It definitely gets your foot in the door, and brings your application to the front of the stack. Having a colleague verify you ahead of time cuts the recruiter work in half. It will even better if your friends knows the hiring manager to out a good word in for you. There is a really big difference from get referrals from a small company and a big company. With companies like Facebook or Google, they have a entire department that organizes these referrals. Getting a referral is a good first step, but large tech companies require so much more and hold a higher standard in referrals where the success ratios are as high as smaller companies. Keep in mind, don’t hold the weight on the referral, you’ll need to prove as much weight if not more.
Perfect your elevator pitch and nail that interview by predicting the questions. I created a document that I kid you not, I titled it “Make Me Better”. I listed out all the questions that I think would happen during an interview. Not only do I have the questions listed, I have answered them for you.
I broke this down in 4 categories (some of these questions can be versatile, and can be used for generic interviews, but some can be technical and be catered to the PM role :
Personal and Cultural Fit: Perfect your Elevator Pitch
Hypothetical Questions:
How do you handle a specific challenge in the past
Tell me about a time…
Give me an example…
Situation – What happened?
Task – What were you working towards?
Activity – Details, specific steps, what is your role?
Result – Accomplishment
Behavior Questions
Also known as situational questions, how would you handle a challenge you might not have encounter yet?)
Imagine that…
How do you approach a problem…
Did you understand the problem?
Problem Solving, are you asking questions, gathering all the data?
Solution: Answer the initial question, are you weighing out the pros and cons,
What supports your solution? How can this be measured?
Structured? Logical? Detailed? Clear?
Case Study
These are tricky, here is the websites I used to help me. One thing I try to keep in mind is really understand the business that you are applying to. The case study will be somewhat general, but you want to incorporate their business into the case studies that will help make your case stronger.
https://igotanoffer.com/blogs/mckinsey-case-interview-blog/case-interview-examples
Quora is another great source!
Questions that are often repeated and how I answer them!
Why you?
Technical Aptitude: Able to create, define the root problem
Implement/delegate/connect the correct stakeholders that are impacted.
Support/Measure the success after launch to continue to manage the success of the project.
Communicate: Able to listen to multiple points of view and hen distill them into actionable tasks and clear outcomes. Simplify complex problems in order to collaborate with different teams.
Care: Care about the consumers and wants to be the voice of the consumer/user. Care about my team; accountable to delivering my best work. Supports PM’s to make they lives easier.
Other great things about you:
Creative: Ask great questions, open minded
Influential: understand goals, priorities of different teams.
Able to effectively communicate with all teams
Impactful: Leadership
Supportive/Kind: Able to support different teams. A good listener, able to understand what other teams’ goals are. Able to independently think and work alone with minimal support.
What do you want in your next career?
A company and a role that allows me to creative. I enjoy fast paced work that supports various projects. I want a lot of ownership in my own ideas and priorities. My expertise is in process improvement and a being a good listener. I am able to put pieces together and form my own opinion.
What makes a solid product manager?
Being able to create, define, and implement a process
Communication
Being able to listen to multiple points of view and then distilling them into actionable tasks with clear outcomes.
Being able to simplify complex problems into actionable parts
Ability to prioritize for efficiency and impact.
Strong work ethic component to operate with ambiguity
How do you tackle a project?
What is the root problem? What are we solving for?
Clear outcome of the project, what do we expect to happen? How do we define success? Clear communication?
What are the requirements? What are the pros and cons? What risks?
How do we prevent the risks from happening? If risk happen, how do we plan to solve for it/ adhoc it?
Who are affected? What are the different stakeholders?
How do measure success?
By defining a success measure and then using data to validate what is true and correct. What isn’t successful should show us the opposite data. Something out of the data that isn’t what we expect. A spike in different set of patterns.
Be sure to know what the defines the success of the project since each time defines success differently. For example:
# bugs
If it is easy to sell
Supports company’s objectives
Does it meet the needs of the customer?
We need to agree on the definition and the metrics to enforce it.
Is it stable? Can is crash? Preventable? Proper Demo? Training? Hooks?
Review feedback from customers
Categorize reasoning of success and failures
Analyzing positive and negative rates to improve or make changes.
Using data to leverage issues:
Reporting
Detecting based on what looks different, what is behaving abnormally. What are the inconsistencies, what can you draw from the data?
Knowing what data to look at.
Being able to connect the pieces, what functionalities work together, what processes connect the pieces together.
Having the knowledge/subject matter of the workflow.
Sets of data to categorize success and failures. If fail, which location.
User testing, user feedback. What timelines will be dependent.
Data experiments. A/B Testing for workflow.
Looking at different workflows. Suggesting recs to improve.
Draw insights from data experiments and feedback from users.
Make sure changes adds value to the business and user. ROV.
Use this flow to narrow down 3 big projects you’ve led. Be able to talk about these projects in detail.
How do you manage/prioritize multiple projects?
Not always black and white, you need to have a good understanding of the content and workflow to decipher what is priority
Urgency: Is there a pressing deadline?
Impact: Does it affect other functionalities. Which other stakeholders are affected? Does it impact customers? If so how much.
You’ll need to understand content behind each task, use intuitive skills to decipher and delegate tasks accordingly.
I’ll provide one example that was originally a Behavior Question that was also a timed exam paired up with a case study. This was for a product analytics role. The assignment is to analyse the negative feedback in a span of 3 moths that was provided on an app and make suggestions on how to improve. I took this created a chart from excel and then turned it into deck: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1ixoT6Uj0YijKhW6bSNPgL2V3THLlTsfv/edit#slide=id.p1
Hope this helps! Biggest drawback is patience, you’ll land a job, It is waiting for you somewhere, but here are somethings that I can speed that process up. Good luck.