You’ll Never Be a Product Manager There: Choosing The Right Companies

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This post is part of the So You Want To Be a Product Manager series. 

When we talked with Colin Murphy a couple of weeks ago, he hit on a key element of a successful job search. Colin, looking for his first product role, said, “I realized early on I would never get a PM job at Google … They hire technologists with business acumen and not the other way around.” Today, we’ll look at how to target companies where you are more likely to get the job and avoid the companies where you simply aren’t a good fit.

The first thing to ask yourself is, what are your strengths?

Are you an engineer with a strong technical background? Are you coming from sales and have a knack for understanding a customer’s unique needs? Are you a business analyst with a keen eye for data trends?

Then you want to ask, what companies look for product managers with this strength? 

Companies with more technical products – think search engines, micro payments, and cloud storage – are going to look for product managers that can understand the technical constraints of their products. These are great roles for engineers moving into product management.

Companies exploring truly innovative products where they are creating the market – think TiVo in its early days, Pinterest more recently, or even Evernote – are going to look for product managers who can observe, ask the right questions, and design unique solutions. These are great roles for sales people, anthropologists, or anyone who spends a lot of time trying to understand people.

More recently, there’s been a wave of companies focused on big data problems – think Google, Netfix to some degree, and soon any number of up and coming healthcare companies. These companies are going to need product managers who can crunch the data and find the meaningful patterns. Business analysts and information visualization experts will have an easier time trying to transition into a product role at these types of companies.

When looking for a job, you don’t want to ask, who is hiring? You want to ask, where can I be most effective? Who can best use my strengths?

In answering this question, you want to generate a short list of companies, think 3-5, not dozens, where you have a unique advantage over other people. Focus relentlessly on this list.

Learn as much as you can about each company. Know their product inside and out. Research the team. Understand what problems they are facing. Take some time to sketch out what you would do during your first 30 to 90 days on the job. Act like you already have the job. Then apply. 

But you can’t stop there. On Thursday, we’ll take a look at how to get your resume considered after you apply. In the meantime, do you have any other tips on how to choose the right companies?

This post is part of the So You Want To Be a Product Manager series.