Two weeks into 2021, a new client contacted me to help with her resume. MK was a business analyst in a mid size IT consulting company coming up with 8 years in the firm.
An Indian immigrant who fought hard to get relocated to her firm’s San Francisco office, MK was in her early thirties, soft spoken yet driven, 6 months out from graduating an Evening MBA at a top tier program.
During coffee breaks MK was dreaming about a job where she could be more creative. A place where she could be challenged and inspired to be the best version of herself. Her intuition backed by a dozen of informal chats with her school’s alumni told her that Big Tech could be the career break she was looking for. She wasn’t 100% sure about the role, but she noticed that when she hangs out with her product manager friends, she feels inspired and free. It was almost as if anything was possible when you are part of the product world.
The challenge was, her resume was not getting any attention from the recruiters. In a sea of applicants, a second tier firm business analyst with an MBA is just another name on the list. MK was struggling to stand out: and she needed to do that in order to get a fair chance to pitch her story.
A friend sat down with MK and helped her think through the process — “If you’re not getting interviews, the only reason is your resume, after all, they don’t know anything else about you”. This sounded reasonable.
MK tried googling for product manager resume advice. Most of it was generic templates and “snake oil peddlers” promising unrealistic results like 100% guaranteed job offers. MK remembered that she had decent experience with Fiver, one of these online freelance marketplaces. She never looked for resume services on Fiver but she was able to hire a guy to design a flyer for a webinar she was hosting at work.
MK found my profile and we started chatting. I could see she was determined. I offered to jump on a quick call via zoom to help her think through her strategy and come up with a plan. The first step of the plan was making her resume into a recruiter magnet.
I’ve done it 100+ times before: I started by giving MK the 60 sec “recruiter’s eyes special”, and guided her to answer my questions in simple language, as if she’s meeting a friend over a coffee in a cozy cafe. My job was to make sure that this one page of text represents effectively her experience and helps her get a job interview she deserved.
I did what I normally do, I asked MK tons of questions about her achievements, things that made her proud, her day to day, her struggles, moments she asked for help, times she pushed back against the irrationality of the corporate machine. After almost two hours of intense back and forth rewriting the google doc shared on the Zoom screen-share, we made the whole page fit into one browser window again.
I did not anticipate what would happen next: MK rapidly scanned the new version of her resume. It was the first time she was looking at this new coherent story. And… she burst into tears. This was the first time for me. I made people laugh and mad with my work, never cry. Till now.
After a quiet moment, MK shared that this is the first time that she could see herself in a light of possibility. She could see a different version of her future self. Having another person genuinely care to bring her achievements to light and put them on “paper” in real time, using precise, impactful language gave her the permission to dream bigger.
MK realized that all this time she was a product manager trapped in the body of a business analyst. She already had most of the skills and the experiences expected from a product manager. The gap was the vocabulary she used to talk about her experience and the confidence she had that she could actually be a product manager in a big tech company.
MK’s story is still ongoing and I hope to tell you how it ends in future posts. For now, the update is that her new resume got her interviews in Amazon, Google and Microsoft.
There is another storyline here though. My experience with MK made me realize that the work I do with clients is not just about changing their resume bullet points. It is transforming the way they see themselves, their confidence and their idea of what they are capable of. The act of rewriting your resume in an impact-first manner has the potential of changing your career trajectory. This is big. This is exciting. And this is exactly why I do what I do.
After giving it some more thought, I realized that my 1:1 coaching service is out of reach for many people who would benefit from it. So I did what any product manager would do in my shoes: I created a product to make a remarkable (A+), top tier resume accessible to more aspiring product managers. I codified the experience I acquired interviewing 250+ product managers and reviewing 4000+ resumes into a simple tool.
I created a 100% FREE Product Manager Resume Scoring tool to help aspiring PMs like you assess the quality of your PM resume. Once you have the baseline, it’s just a starting point: you will know exactly how to improve your score and get you to a resume that converts to PM interviews.
The product is brand new and I would love to see where it adds value to you and where it falls short.
How good is YOUR product resume today ?
Leave a comment and tell me how would you score (0–100%) your current resume ?
I’ll send you a copy of the FREE Resume Scoring tool and you can see for yourself !
Cheers,
p.s. Hit that comment button below
