I have been working as a Product Manager at a large B2B tech company for a while. After realizing there is no bright future for the company, I decided to look for new opportunities. It has been almost 10 months since I started preparing. The result is not too bad: 4 offers from 2 startups, 1 pre-IPO and 1 big company. It takes much longer than I thought. I’m very excited about the scope and challenges of the new job.
There are a few valuable lessons in this process I think worth sharing.
Have a Clear Goal
For me, I don’t like to change job too frequently. So I want to find a job and company that I’m passionate about and stay in long-term. My belief is that if you don’t have enough passion, you won’t get motivated to keep improving yourself and doing a better job. As a result, you will not perform as good as you should.
I like the work of Product Management and has no intention to switch function. So the problem then becomes what type of companies and products I want to work on. After initial inspection, I listed the following criteria:
- Innovative: I personally like innovation. A company that has strong focus on growing its business through innovation will make me more excited and the PM job more interesting.
- Customer Centric: It is almost impossible to create a successful product without deep understanding of its users or customers. As a PM, my impact will be much larger if the company wants me to be the representative of customers.
- Fast Growing: I like to take challenges and have the opportunity to grow. A growing team will offer more opportunities to take broader responsibilities and grow with the team.
So every company and job I applied will meet the criteria above. For example, I will not apply openings in stable companies like Oracle, but will do so for a startup. This ensures I will at least seriously consider join the company if I get the offer, and not waste time from both sides.
Narrow Down the Scope
It’s OK to start broad. But it would be much more efficient if you can be more focused, which means you know exactly the openings you will target in terms of markets and type of companies. In my opinion, the perfect focus come from the overlap of the followings:
- The areas you are passionate about. For example, I’m most interested in machine learning, embedded systems, video processing. If you don’t know, you should take some time to figure it out.
- The areas that have strong market demand. Your work experience will be critical for you to build career success. So it is important to investigate which market/domain will have plenty of openings now and likely in the future.
- The areas that you have something to leverage. To be practical, it would be extremely challenging to even land an interview if you don’t have any relevant experience for your desired positions. You must have skills, experiences, or education that can bring immediate value to the company. Otherwise, they won’t talk to you. (Please note this may not be true if you are still at school. Generally speaking, employers are more open to graduates who don’t have relevant experience but with great potential.)
My own experience is a good proof of the theory. In the beginning, I did not know which company I want to join, so I just applied to any opening that seemed to be interesting, which turned out to be extremely inefficient. I only have a general resume. The response rate was very low. I got less than five interviews over dozens of applications, and they didn’t go anywhere. As I applied more, I spent time finding the sweet spot that is the overlap of the three areas above, and found out Big Data / Machine Learning is the right focus for me. Then I tweaked my resume for Data PM related roles. The result was even better than I anticipated. The conversion rate from application to interview increased from less than 10% to more than 70%! There was a period I was concurrently interviewing for 4 companies.
You probably don’t know what’s your sweet spot in the beginning. The point is to keep experimenting. Treat yourself as a product. Tweak your resume, try different markets and roles, and measure the result. Eventually you will find the right direction to focus and best use of your time.
Don’t Fall in Love with Any Company
When you start looking for new opportunities, you will likely find a few big names as your “dream” companies. Then you got an interview, spent huge amount of time preparing, and unfortunately got a “No” in the end. I think this happens on most of us. After the rejection, you will probably feel frustrated and can’t recover for a while. But life is long, you need to keep going anyway. I learned the lesson the hard way.
Based on my nearly decade professional experience, no job is perfect. It will have some sort of problems. You must identify which aspects are more important to you. For example, although the big brands are nice to have on resume, you also need to compete with more talented colleagues for promotion and oftentimes have very limited scope.
After getting hit a few times, I try to avoid falling in love with any company. Strategically, you should believe your value. If a company doesn’t hire you, it’s their loss. There are plenty of great companies that you can apply for. Tactically, you still need to seriously prepare the interview because you will learn something and improve your skills no matter the result. Don’t get me wrong. If you find an opportunity which is very exciting, definitely show your passion to the interviewer. But still remind yourself from time to time that this is not the end of the world if it doesn’t work out.
Keep Your Life Going
Job searching is a long journey with lots of up and downs, especially if you are not in hurry and want to find the perfect fit for the next step of your career.
At the beginning of my searching, I stopped almost everything in my spare time just for preparing interviews and applying new openings, which resulted in a huge backlog of other responsibilities and was stressful for me as well. After a bunch of rejections, I finally realized this is unfair to my family. The stress is not good for my health, and also negatively affects my interview performance, even my relationship. So I started to get “irrelevant” tasks done even there were interviews coming up.
You will probably have a lot of downs in the process, so it is important to let the stress out. Feel free to take a break when you are in a bad mood. Go to a nice restaurant. Watch a movie. Play sports. Read novels. Do whatever you want to do for relaxing. After a whole weekend or so, you will feel fully recharged and get ready to continue your search.
Summarize What You Have Learned
The whole process is a number game. The more openings you apply, the more interviews you will get. With more interviews, you will get used to phone screen, onsite, and eventually offer will come.
The key in this process is to learn from every single interview you get. I did this by recording the questions I got soon after each interview. Also, I wrote down my answers and thought about how I could improve them. If I can’t figure out by myself, I would seek advice from more experienced people. Try to practice similar questions. By continuously repeating this process, you will be more skilled and confident in your interviews. It is also a good idea to find peers to prepare together. Mockup with them and encourage each other. Sometimes peers may not be able to provide enough constructive feedback. It would be necessary to find experts who can give you guidance. I found the investment very worthwhile.
Prep Tips for Enterprise Product Manager Interview
I mainly interviewed for B2B product manager positions, and found that employers are generally more interested in finding your past experiences and want them to fit to their needs. Most likely, there is no need to spend too much time on consumer type of questions, e.g. estimation and product design. In terms of preparation, you should at least focus on the following areas:
- Your experience: Make sure to prepare a few stories that show your typical product management work, e.g. design a feature using lean methodology, launch and iterate a product. PM experience will almost always be asked.
- Behavior stories: This is mostly Amazon style, but can be helpful for many other companies. It would be important to polish 5 to 8 stories that reflect various aspects of your skills, such as ownership, leadership, cross-functional teamwork, creativity, etc. Additionally, prepare stories of how you work with engineers are very helpful.
- Product questions: Although I was rarely asked to design a new product, sometimes interviewers want to measure my product instinct by asking what’s my favorite product, how to improve, how to define the roadmap for the next year, etc. So it is valuable to refine your own framework and prepare a few ready-to-use answers. For me, I prepared two mobile apps, one physical product, and one product I don’t like. It is also important to take a look at the company’s product/service and think about the potential improvements. There are plenty of reference books for this type of questions.
- Go-to-market: Sometimes you will be asked to define the GTM strategy which is often part of the work for enterprise PM. Prepare at least one story of how you launch a product. Plus, make sure you have a framework of how to handle GTM. Pricing and working with sales are often tested during interviews as well.
- Technology: In contrary to consumer product manager, enterprise PM usually needs to be more technical and face technical customers. As a result, interviewers often validate your technical skills by asking to explain some technical terms, the architecture of your current product, even do simple system design. Make sure to talk with your developers to dive deep into the technology, esp. the trade-offs you have made.
I think the areas above will cover 80% of the interview questions. There will always be questions you have not prepared. Just practice and interview more, you will be skillful to handle such unexpected questions. Similar to any job interview, you must spend significant amount of time on researching the company, products, and the market. It would be very helpful if you can find somebody inside the company to talk, especially for the private companies.
Conclusion
This post aims to summarize what I have learned during the job searching experience, which is good practice for me. In the meantime, I hope it will be valuable for you in your career transition. Please let me know any suggestions to make the content better. Best of luck in your adventure!
