welcome or welcome back to my series on how to recruit for various verticals so previously we
talked about venture capital which is what i work in and today we're going to talk about
product management which i did a lot of interviews and process for you as well
um by the way there's a primer video to all of this which is just about like networking
interviews small versus big companies generally uh but this video is going to be digging deep into
pm'ing and nick in particular is the expert on the process because hello i've been brought to
talk about product management um i was previously a product manager intern and
then became a full-time product manager over at google um also just as a heads up all of
my opinions are my own they do not represent the opinions of my current or former employers
anyways getting right into it okay so quickly let's get grounded in what a pm actually does if
you already know you can skip it but essentially they are the voice of the user so figuring out
what is going to delight a user about a product getting to conviction around that opinion and
then convincing a bunch of other people to share that opinion great and actually when you say pm
there are many things that start with pm at a company they're all great roles like program
manager or project manager but if you're trying to apply for product management roles make sure
you're actually applying to a product management role um different types of people and then as far
as what a pm actually does um i think what you said is great and essentially what you're doing
is you're establishing scope and then trying to keep all the different shareholders like executing
against that scope of what is the product and then you're also building out the narrative what is the
story of the product and tactically the way that actually works is you write product requirements
documents or prds and so these establish what is the scope and priority of the actual product
and then you also give presentations where you're trying to justify like why is this product this
way and you're doing this in front of like leadership or different shareholders in the
product okay so the actual timeline for recruiting now remember that there's a difference between
big company apm programs and small startups pm program slash drops but we're primarily talking
about the big company timeline so if you want the internship or a full-time offer you're going
to need to recruit the year before in the fall but really this summer because applications are
usually open towards the end of august and then continue on through that semester now
note some of these applications are super short like facebook's is like one week or something like
that and they all open at different times some are ruling some are not so there are like websites you
can find online that keeps track of all the dates and you should keep track of the dates yourself
yep that's totally fair um and something that you should consider with some of these programs
especially like google's where a lot of the full-time class is actually made up of like
50 50 the intern class from the year before um you might actually want to consider if you're dead set
on like a full-time role at something like google in a product management program then you actually
want to take a look at like recruiting to the or for the internship programs um the year before
um and as far as how you actually do the recruiting goes um first you're gonna submit
a resume and so you're gonna submit that at their portal online whatever and then you'll hear back
and get a phone screen and then after that phone screen you will get both the written assignment
as well as schedule your on-site interviews then you'll go to your on-site interviews and there
might be a follow-up interview but mostly it's just the on-site interviews and then you're done
those on-site interviews can consist of behavioral questions technical questions um as
well as product questions of course which we are going to go through in the section on interviews
so listing out some common programs now note recruiting apm has become actually so popular
that there are entire websites dedicated to tracking various companies apn programs whether
they are active what the due date is et cetera so you would just google that for the most up-to-date
information but we're going to talk about three of the ogs or some of the most popular ones
which are google facebook and microsoft but note like coinbase instagram twitter
classy and ibm walmart blah blah often or now all do have product programs as well yeah
um so i love being able to talk about the google apn program as i get x google api myself
um the google apn program is structured as kind of a two-year rotational program each rotation is
about a year long and you end up having all these other fun extracurricular activities you get to
go on all these trips you meet up with all the other apms it's very collegiate the size of the
program is only 45 people so you end up getting to know most of them pretty well i consider some of
the google apms some of my closest friends so awesome program as far as the people go
and then the kind of quirk of google apn program is they generally tend to look for technical
people most of us had some sort of cs degree minor background etc the other common program
that people will talk about is facebook's rpm program which stands for rotational programming or
rotational product manager um facebook's rpm program is structured also rotationally but
it's 18 months it's a little shorter and it has three rotations so you could see a little
bit more of the business i'm as far as breath go breath goes um it is also a very collegiate
program you end up i believe being very close to all the other rpms i think they all really enjoy
each other's company the actual size of the rpm program is on the order of like tens of people i
actually don't know the exact number um but it's also small and the kind of quirk of rpm program
is that it tends to be a little bit more business oriented and they actually pride themselves on not
requiring a strict technical background in order to join so it's also very cool
okay and lastly we're going to talk about microsoft now microsoft's pm program is actually
not a program you essentially just get hired to be a pm at an entry level just like many of their
other jobs in terms of size i think it's hundreds if not thousands of people like the way that they
hire lots of software engineers they also hire lots of pms now the quirk here is that this is
program management most of the time and not product management meaning you're doing a lot
more execution ops timeline stuff versus just product stuff so now we're going to go over
how to think about various parts of your resume which include education your experiences as well
as projects etc or extracurriculars now i'm going to do a whole video about how to write a good
resume because it is very hard but two important tips are go for cleanly lithium clarity ironic
versus comprehensiveness aka you'd rather have your resume be readable than have absolutely
everything you've ever done because people scan it in literally like two seconds also um don't be
creative when it comes to the formatting because they go through an applicant tracking system
for these big companies because they get tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of
applicants meaning that if you do create things with formatting such as you know including images
or doing crazy fonts or saving your resume as an image versus pdf or doc this software is not going
to be able to scrape for the things that they're looking for and you'll just be auto rejected
so those are just a couple things to note in terms of education aka what do people study quite
frankly i think most pms have a computer science degree in some way in the sense that it's a major
or a minor or they studied something adjacent to computer science like pure math or data science
or something like that a very common question that people get is do you have to be technical to be a
pm that is indeed a very common question i get it all the time so i philosophically believe that pms
should be technical now it's very scary sounding but i don't mean that you should be a great
programmer or know even really how to code i just mean that you should have a love of technology and
you should know a lot of how technology works to the point that you can estimate what's possible so
that you can scope out a good product so you can understand and interface with engineers
to be clear i don't believe you technically need to be technical because i believe to get the job
you can kind of come from any background and if you can kind of figure it out you'll be able to
get the job i do think though that at a company like google where it is very engineering first
if you are not technical i do think that you will make your life harder on yourself
yeah the exception is the facebook rpm program as we said above but by and large it's about
getting the respect of your engineers and being able to understand the world from their lens
okay so going on to work experience quite frankly if we're being really honest here people who get
full-time product drops tend to have experience as software engineers or in product itself this
is not always true so for example i did software engineering as well as business roles nick did
software engineering as well as research roles so you can come from a lot of places but that
tends to be a similarity yeah as mary mentioned my background was actually essentially software
engineering and some biotech research and then i ended up going into product um i do think
that when you're trying to get into a product management role there's really two things that
matter one is being outcome driven and one is being data driven so essentially in a product
role your job is to get everyone to align with you on some set of opinions on a product and then like
actually do it get it to be done and so if you are in a role where you are able to highlight
the like things that you're accomplishing the outcomes that are happening because of you
or the data that you're using to either tell a story or like data that is showing up as a result
of your product your metrics essentially those are the two key skills that are really kind of
showing up in product resume screens so if you can highlight that in your experience whether
it's a business role whether it's a non-technical product that you're building whether it's just
some sort of leadership role or other thing that you're doing highlight those things that's that's
really what matters here cool so the last thing that we're going to talk about resumes is projects
and extracurriculars um i think there's kind of three main categories of these there's things that
you can build things that you can lead and then entrepreneurial stuff that you can do um so stuff
that you can build building anything is actually quite useful um and most importantly that it gets
in front of some sort of user you want people actually using the things you're building um
even better if they'll pay you for it but that's more of a nice to have so in my case i actually
had built um a vpn product as a side project as a side project just kind of amount of time
it ended up being used by about i don't know like 50 to 80 people which is like a lot but it didn't
it just you know it was really nice and i got a lot of experience actually like building something
from an idea i had to getting in front of an actual person and so i talked about that a lot
when people asked in interviews and then of course the other category or one of the other categories
you can do is you can be a leader somewhere um so often this is through clubs but it doesn't have to
be it could be a team could be whatever in my case i ended up actually being co-founder and president
of a college cyber defense like competition team and club and i spent countless hours over
four years just working a ton on that club and trying to make it as successful as i could so
whenever someone asked i was able to tell them all sorts of stories and experiences that i had had
leading and running this club and i felt that that was actually pretty useful in that process
i think it's a lot better that you were you had dedicated so much time to one thing versus being
like mediocre or sort of participating at 20 things um anyways the third category i'd say
is like entrepreneurial so whether that's you're working at a startup or you started something on
your own it's the same skill set of driving towards an outcome with a team so for example
when i was in college i you know helped run a non-profit that built legal tech to help
immigrants and that's a great example of a team coming together to build technology to help users
which actually has obviously a lot of overlap with product and something you can speak to
okay so when it actually comes down to the pm interview we're going to talk about six parts of
this which is the phone screen slash behavioral written assignment product design questions
business strategy questions estimation questions as well as technical questions now you're going to
hate me for this but we're actually going to do it in the next video and that's because if we were to
combine all this stuff with examples it's going to be more than an hour long and no one wants
to watch that so that is coming up so now we are talking about quote unquote my strategy which is
the part of the series where i say if i was to do it again and i knew that i want to be a product
manager how would i have done it throughout college so in terms of freshman and sophomore year
um i'm gonna start by saying in terms of freshman year if you have some amount of privilege what i
mean by that is like you feel like you have some amount of safety net i would instead of
doing the corporate thing do something crazy i try to explore as much as you can in college
because you will have the rest of your life to be an employee there's a short period of
time where it's very socially acceptable to just explore freshman year should definitely be that
um but when it comes to sophomore junior years there are more programs that are targeted towards
that group that are professional and quite frankly there are a lot of feeder programs that go into
these pm roles so for example like google ep or any of the big tech suite roles tend to be
feeders into the big tech pm roles unsurprisingly um i would another like random tip i would say
it's not really a tip but it's just something to note if you have more experience it can help
your application or can give an edge to your application for example if you take a gap year
and you do another internship or if you do a winter internship or if you take a gap semester
and have another kind of life experience or work experience because you are applying with other
people in the same peer group as you if you have one more experience in them that often is actually
like a little bit of an edge that's not a good reason to take a gap year but i'm just saying like
that's true um and then also finally i would have followed the extracurricular tips we talked about
earlier yeah and then once you get into kind of junior senior year things get a little bit
more serious you have an eye for like what are you actually going to be doing after you leave school
so junior year and senior this same kind of tips apply but essentially your goal is practice and
you're really just trying to get as much volume as you can um what you kind of start with is you're
just applying to as many of these programs as you can so you're just trying to get your job your
resume um in front of as many of these companies as you can because these programs are small so you
want that probability spread there is a piece of a numbers game even if you're hard to set on one
of them make sure you're applying to as many of them as you can remember they have like different
due dates kind of different rolling periods um a lot of them you want to apply as early as
possible some of them are rolling so you want to actually get your resume in as quickly as you can
then once you have as much reps on kind of applications make sure that you're also trying to
get as many referrals as possible so referrals are where someone who actually currently works at that
company says hey this is a great person that i know i would like to recommend them for that role
try and get as many referrals as you can but keep in mind that quality does matter so if you have
someone who can say this person was in the top 95 percentile of like people i've ever worked
with that is more useful than it's like oh i vaguely know this person asked for a referral
so that's important to keep in mind but do note that having a referral is better than no referral
especially for getting past that initial resume screen um and then once you actually have your
applications you've referred then it's going to be interview time and you want to make sure you're
getting as much interview practice as possible so interview practice that means you're either
like recording yourself and then looking at it or practicing with friends or people who actually
have the role that you're practicing to try and get so interview practice treat it like the real
thing get as many of them as possible when you're practicing with friends try and select for friends
that kind of have the skill that you're after and have them evaluate you only on that skill
do not do general interview practice it's kind of a waste of everyone's time you're much better off
getting practice with like a very technical friend have them ask you technical questions product
friend who's really good at designing things have them ask you product design questions it
will just make the whole thing a little bit more focused and honestly i think a little bit more fun
and then of course what you're actually trying to do is get all the way through this process get to
the offer stage where you are actually receiving an offer from the company um try and get through
that with as many companies as possible and the reason for this is actually like yes you can kind
of like leverage and try and get a better offer or whatever but that's not really the actual point
the real point is one you'll get more practice but two you are also going to be remembered by
those systems so all of these tech companies they're going to track every application you've
ever submitted they do a really good job of it and they use that to inform later decisions so
when you have a process where you got all the way to the offer stage they essentially then believe
like oh we would have hired this person at some point in time that is a very useful signal if
you ever want to apply to one of those companies later so do try and get all the way through the
process be respectful and kind hearted whenever you're doing this also if even if it's a company
you might not be interested in um you probably will get a lot of good practice from doing that
interview and you might turn out to be really interested in that company i'm not gonna lie
a lot of my friends have discovered that they actually ended up in the role that was perfect
for them even though they didn't go into it thinking they wanted to join that company so
yeah thank you so much nick for joining this video and um as a reminder i'm going to link
all of the relevant other videos in this recruiting slash how to get a job series
below and let me know if you have any questions and you know like and subscribe that will feel