How to Build the Perfect Product Manager Resume?

No matter which stage of your career you are at, you will always need a resume to apply for your next job.

That makes resume a very important document, and hence makes it even more important for you to know how to craft a perfect one ✨

Although, resumes in general are about sharing the highlights of your career, product resumes can be a bit different. Specially for aspiring product managers who don't have any prior product experience, resumes become a great way to showcase their skills and gain the trust of the recruiter as they are the first touchpoint between them.

So today, we will be talking about how you can craft a good product resume that will help you pass the first screening round.

Why do you need a resume?

The shortest answer to this question is - to apply for a job. But as PMs, we need to really understand the why - “Why do we need a resume to apply for a job?”

Resume is a collection of the highlights, achievements and learnings of your career, mostly fitted into a single page.

Your resume is the first touchpoint with the recruiter and the company in this journey of applying for the job. Resumes are a great way to brag about and selling yourself even when you are not in the room. Hence, we all need a resume.

But, just having a resume is not enough, your resume needs to be relevant too.

While hiring for any role, the company needs to make sure that they only spend time on relevant candidates. If you are hiring for a developer role, you need to make sure you only talk to people who have the right skills and experience to get that job.

Same thing applies to all the jobs, including Product Management. Hence, the purpose of a PM resume is to signal to the recruiter that you are a right fit for the role because of relevant past experiences and learnings.

This becomes crucially important in case of freshers and people trying to switch domains as they get the chance to showcase their skills and advocate for themselves in order to fight the bias any recruiter might have.

So, we have established that we really really need a resume, and specially when you are applying for a product role.

The Ideal PM Resume Structure

Creating a resume in product management is hard because you have to present a lot of soft skills along with hard skills, that too only in limited space without making it look ugly. That sounds pretty hard to me.

Lemme give you a structure that you can follow for the resume which might make things easier for you.

First, some basic rules of any resume that you need to follow:

1. Keep the length of the resume as 1 page.
2. Don't write long paragraphs, share information in bullet points.
3. Write about the impact rather than the experience.
4. Make sure you don't use any image in the resume. It impact the readability.

Also, your resume must have all these sections:

1. Header
2. Experience Section
3. Projects Section
4. Skills Section
5. Education Section

These sections cover the most important information about you that make you suitable and relevant for jobs. Hence, we will talk about them in depth.

Header

This is the section in your resume where you mention your personal details like name, email, contact details and other social links like LinkedIn and Portfolio url.

You don't need a “Summary” or “Objective” in your resume, so avoid it.

Experience Section

This might be THE MOST important part of your resume, specially if you already have some experience in the domain.

If you have some product experience while applying for another product role, the experience section becomes your priority because that's what the recruiter would be interested in.

If you are someone who is trying to transition to PM roles, it becomes important for you to modify and present your experience section in a way that it reflects your skills that are beneficial for product managers.

Here are some points you need to take care of:

1. If you are applying for an APM or PM role, try to highlight your problem solving, data understanding, analysis or product design related skills through your work.
2. Use bullet points to list your work experience and the description. It makes it easier for the recruiter to skim through your resume.
3. Keep it short, don't go above 3 or 4 bullet points for any experience. Do mention the projects you are proud of the most.
4. Include metrics and how much you impacted them in the experience section. Example: I helped increase user activation rate from 20% to 25% i.e. 25% growth.

Relevant Skills Section

Every resume, be it for PM role or not, needs a section with all the relevant skills for the role. This not only helps you go through the ATS softwares these companies use, but it also helps you gain the trust of the recruiter.

Ideally, you should include all the technical skills and the soft skills in the resume. Specially for a PM role, where soft skills are as important as being technically sound. If you are applying to a specific industry and have a lot of experience there, make sure you mention skills that reflect your expertise.

For Product Managers, it's important to focus and emphasise on these skills:

1. Communication Skills
2. User Empathy and User Research
3. Problem Solving
4. Analytical Skills along with SQL
5. If you have technical background, mention those skills too

Projects Section

This section is more relevant when you want to transition into a new and different role from your current role. When you don't have any past product experience, you need to showcase that you are capable of taking up the role as a PM with your side projects.

Mention side projects like case studies, building a project for real users where you acted like the product manager for the team. You can present this project's experience just like you would explain the work experience in a company.

1. Use bullet points. It makes it easier for the recruiter to skim through your resume.
2. Keep it short, don't go above 3 bullet points for any experience.
3. Include metrics and how much you impacted them.

Education Section

If you are a fresher, education should be closer to the top of the resume. Mention your college name, specialisation, year of graduation and scores.

If you are an experienced professional, the importance of your education goes down, hence it is better to place it below other important sections like experience and skills.

If you are experienced, you don't need to mention your scores or GPA.

Common Mistakes

A lot of advice that I gave above is readily available on the internet, it's nothing new. But people still make a lot of mistakes while building their resumes. Here are the most common ones:

1. Adding an “objective” to the resume.
2. Not using bullet points while talking about their experiences, projects and skills.
3. Giving ratings or stars to their skills. Don't do it.
4. Using pictures in resume.
5. Adding irrelevant information and experiences in the resume.
6. Not mentioning side projects in the resume.
7. Not talking about the metrics and impact they created in their work experience.
8. Using inconsistent fonts and spacing on the resume.
9. Not tailoring resume based on different job descriptions.

While making your resume, make sure you avoid these common mistakes.