As a product manager, your resume is the first thing you should learn, and know how to manage, before proceeding to meet your prospective employer.
Note, you must not know everything being a product manager, but if you do, kudos! However, for those who want to improve their skills on this topic, this content concerns you primarily.
Before we get into a detailed discussion on the product manager resume, take a cursory look at the sample of a product manager resume below:
You’re a great product manager. You can balance feature requests, talk to customers, and jump between conversations with marketing and engineering folks with ease.
You shouldn’t have to be an expert in resume writing to show that to potential employers. We’ve helped hundreds of PMs perfect their resume to land jobs at great companies like Slack and Google.
Use our free product manager resume templates below, or choose from dozens of other management resume templates that are proven to work.
We even have 10 brand-new free resume templates you can download to your Google Drive and 10 sophisticated Word resume templates.
After you choose the right resume template for you, we can show you how to put your best foot forward with these resume tips.
Four Expert Tips to Perfect your Product Manager Resume
Here are the four things you need to do to create a successful product manager resume:
1. Highlight your diverse skill set in such a way that you get past automated ATS filters but also so that you appeal to the humans who will review your resume.
2. You need the right format. Fancy shading and styling can distract from the core aspects you need to get right with your resume layout.
3. Quantify your impact. Demonstrate that you can contribute to product development in a meaningful way by showing your impact on your past work and projects.
4. Tell a narrative with your resume. “Product manager” can mean a lot of different things at a lot of different companies so make sure you’re telling your own story.
Product Manager Skills to Include on your Resume
In a case the applicant possesses invaluable skills, these are a few of the ones he/she should include in the resume:
SQL
Google Analytics, Adobe Analytics, Mixpanel
Google Tag Manager
Hotjar
A/B Testing
Optimizely
Basic Python scripting, APIs
Agile, Scrum, Waterfall, Kaban
Jira, Github, Confluence
Google Analytics, Microsoft Excel
Now that you’re past the first stage of the resume review you need to make your resume appealing to humans.
This means you should not include a laundry list of skills on your resume.
It’s a huge red flag for hiring managers if they see a candidate with a paragraph of skills they have. Why? Because it signals one of two things:
The candidate is lying.
‣ They can’t possibly be fluent in all those skills.
‣ They are a jack of all trades and master of none.
It’s better to demonstrate expertise in a few skills than a passing understanding of a lot of tools or methodologies.
Check Here for The Correct Resume Format
Make sure you Indicate your Educational Background
Always include the school you went to and the degree you got in the education section of your resume.
Also, include a minor if you had one. If you’re applying for an entry-level role you’ll also want to include classes you took that might be relevant to the role you’re applying for.
For product managers, this will include any statistics, design, or engineering classes you took.
Similarly, if you’re applying for an entry-level role and you’re GPA was greater than a 3.2 then include it on your resume.
If you have 2+ years of experience then you don’t need to include your GPA in your resume.
You also don’t need to include the college courses you took. Use this real estate instead to talk more about your work experience or projects.
Make Sure you Indicate Work experience
Always include work experience in your resume as a prospective product manager.
If you’re an entry-level product manager you likely don’t have work experience to talk about. In this case, you should talk about personal projects you’ve worked on.
Did you do customer research for a potential app idea you have? Did you create wireframes for a website you wanted to build?
You should still aim to quantify the impact or scope of these projects.
For entry-level roles, companies want to hire people who have demonstrated an interest in product management.
So if you don’t have any projects you’ve worked on then now is a great time to make that happen.
Reach out to local small businesses you can help, do market research for a potential product and put together a Powerpoint, do a competitive analysis for an existing product you like.
Anything to demonstrate you know what it means to do product management and you have the skillset to do it.
Find More Sample Entry Level Product Manager Project Here
The Takeaways
You’re well on your way to creating the perfect product manager resume and landing your dream job.
To save time, use the templates we have at the top of this post. Then follow our major resume writing tips:
‣ Include only hard skills in the skills section of your resume to get past the resume keyword filters.
‣ Keep your resume to one page.
‣ Triple-check for spelling and grammar errors.
‣ Keep your resume simple. No graphics or images or anything that are hard for a computer to read.
‣ Quantify the impact of your work experience and projects.
‣ Tailor your resume for each application based on the scale of the products you’ll work on and your related industry experience.
With a great resume comes great responsibility. So go forth and apply wisely.
Before you know it, you’ll have interviews lined up for your next product manager role!
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