How to Land a Product Job at a Tech Company (2020)
Table of Contents
1. Introduction
2. Finding the right roles
3. Getting an Interview
Getting a referral
LinkedIn
Cold Email
4. Crushing the interviews
Pre interview referral phone call
Product component
Behavioral component
Chasm after interviews
Voluntary research project
Take home assignment
5. Additional Advice
The day you become a better writer
Aligning the sub-conscious
6. Conclusion
1. Introduction
Most guides provide theoretical and abstract advice. The few practical guides out there are either outdated or ridiculously over-priced. I tried to make this guide as practical as possible. Most books and courses focus on the interview stage, which I have covered in this guide. However, I also spend a lot of time talking about the other 60%: finding the right company, finding the right role, getting a referral, and what to do between interview stages. These things are not entirely dependent on luck. There are proven methods. This guide demystifies them.
I enjoyed reading Cracking the PM Interview, Decode and Conquer, Design of Everyday Things. I also used https://www.tryexponent.com/ to improve my interview performance. These were helpful but not sufficient. Doing well in the interview is only 40% of the battle.
Patrick Collison says that “You could try to pound your head against the wall and think of original ideas — or you can cheat by reading them.” I unfortunately spent too many months pounding my head against the wall. Armed with this guide, I am certain you won’t need to.
This guide contains specific techniques that helped me personally land Product jobs at tech companies in the middle of a pandemic. My friends and peers benefited from using these techniques too.
Please note: This is not a magic bullet. It will still require execution from you.
This guide is not for you if:
- You don’t like working hard
- You don’t have any basic programming knowledge
- You are already a Product Manager at an evil large corporation
What you will need:
- A stable internet connection
- The ability to laugh off rejection and learn from it
- Patience
- Audacity and temerity
- An undergraduate education
2. Finding the right roles
First you must find companies that are interesting to you. It will be helpful if you have some experience in that industry. This experience could be from a prior job or some research project you did in college. Having basic experience in the industry will be incredibly helpful.
I would start by looking at portfolio companies of renowned venture capital firms. Check LinkedIn, Twitter, Tech crunch, and AngelList to see which companies have recently raised a new round of funding. Typically, companies that have raised >= $30 million will be looking to hire junior / associate product people.
If you’re lazy like me, you can just subscribe to newsletters from Tech crunch and AngelList. You can also follow partners at the top VC firms on Twitter and LinkedIn. You will be the first to know when a new funding round is announced for a given company. VC twitter can help you find a job. There is a silver lining to the farcical humble bragging show that is VC twitter. The self-aggrandizing does serve a purpose.
Say you have identified companies that you are interested in. Next, you need to go to the company’s website > careers / jobs and see if they are hiring for a role that matches your experience and interest. You must find a role that matches your experience. It’s okay if you have x years of experience and the job requires <= x+2 years of experience. The only thing that matters is that you are able and technically competent to do the work mentioned in the job description.
If you navigate to the company’s LinkedIn page, you can see demographics, skillset, and the number of people who have applied for that given role in the past few days. There will likely be 200 applicants for a single role. Don’t be alarmed. You have a massive leg up just by just from having read this guide. Plus, most of the other applicants are just dweebs and Politburo sanctioned bots.
The roles you’re looking for will be titled Product Operations Manager, Product Analyst (more data oriented), Associate Product Manager, Business Operations and Strategy, or Business Analyst within Product. Essentially, these roles are looking for someone with 3 traits: technical competence, an appreciation for product, and an ability to communicate with clients and business development.
Dan Romero’s blog was helpful here.
3. Getting an Interview
Don’t waste your time applying directly on the job board of the company’s website or LinkedIn. Use your limited daily hours to increase the probability of getting an interview.
Try to set up a 15-minute phone call with someone at the company. This person should be as close to the hiring decision maker as possible. If this 15-minute call goes well, which it will thanks to this guide, you will likely get a referral.
Here’s how you get a referral:
LinkedIn:
Go to LinkedIn’s advanced search criteria. Find all the employees who work at that company. Filter by mutual connections (1 and 2 degrees of separation). If no one pops up, filter by your alma mater or current/ previous company. If no one pops up, that’s still okay. Having something in common – an individual, a past company, a past college, or perhaps an ex-lover – will increase the probability of response. This is not essential. In fact, having the audacity to reach out to someone you don’t know is exactly what these companies are looking for.
Send a connection request to at least 10-15 people in the company with the same tailor-made message. Don’t send an in-mail. Not only do you waste money when you send an in-mail, but also you look like an idiot. Connection requests limit the number of characters you can use. Counterintuitively, this is a good thing. It forces you to be precise.
Try to reach out to individuals as close to the top of the totem pole as possible. Don’t be afraid to reach out to CEOs, Co-Founders, VPs, Heads of Product, etc. Even if they don’t like your profile, they will respect the hustle. They are looking for temerity. Trust me. Most people will reach out to other associate product managers, business analysts and so forth. Been there done that. Don’t waste your time. You could be at the bar. Drinking.
Here’s a sample connection request message I used that was successful.
Hi <firstname>, I hope this finds you well. My name is Prithvir and I'm a <school’s name> CS and PPE grad currently working at <current company>. I'm very interested in applying to <your company’s name>. Would you be willing to please spare 15 minutes of your time for a quick phone call? I would really appreciate it. Thank you.
This message exactly fits the max limit for an “add note to connection request” message on LinkedIn. It’s free. It’s short and sweet. It demonstrates interest. It’s polite. It’s not too aggressive, but not docile or pusillanimous. Did I mention it’s free? I have tried many different formats. This one seems to work best. However, you should have your own trial and error method to find what works best for you. For me, the ratio of replies to ignores was about 1 to 4.
Lo and – behold, using that exact message I got a response from the CEO and Co-Founder of a $500M valued company and we set up a 30-minute zoom call the next day. You will be surprised. If you know what to say and send a large enough volume of messages, I believe at least 1 out 4 people will respond to you. The probability of response is FAR higher than people expect. This is especially true, if your profile picture is professional and you have something in common with the person you are reaching out to.
Email:
Let’s say that you don’t want to use LinkedIn. Maybe you believe your profile is not impressive. Maybe you just watched the Netflix documentary The Social Dilemma. Or maybe you hate Reid Hoffman. How could you hate him? He’s such a cute chubby guy! Either way, I get it. While this isn’t ideal, there is a work around.
Cold emails are perhaps the most under-utilized communication tool in our arsenal. A well-made, surgical cold email can be wielded like a Tomahawk. You can find any individual’s email(s) in the world using a website like
https://rocketreach.co/ or https://www.apollo.io/lp/email-finder/.
Here is a sample cold email format below. Credit goes to Tim Ferris for this mail format.
Dear XYZ,
I know you’re really busy and that you get a lot of emails, so this will only take 60 seconds to read.
My name is Prithvir and I’m <introduction about yourself and why you are reaching out. No more than 2 sentences> ……
I wanted to ask you <your request: quick phone call with 2-3 specific time slots, book recommendations, specific question about some project they worked on, etc.>….
I totally understand if you’re too busy to respond, but even a one-or-two-line reply would really make my day.
All the best,
Prithvir
General advice about cold emails:
1. This might be surprising for some, but you must keep the email as precise as possible. The fewer words the better. Get rid of fluff. Notice how I did not start the email with “I hope you and your family are well” or something equivalent.
2. You want to stand out. You must grab the reader’s attention from the first sentence.
3. You must have a clear and straightforward ask. Notice how I didn’t say “I would love to have coffee or drinks or tea or, you know, get married”. Crisp and clear is the name of the game. People think that they need to be polite. That is correct. However, you need to be polite and concise, not polite and verbose.
4. If you are asking for a quick 15-minute phone call, I recommend giving the recipient 2 or 3 time slots. This reduces the amount of work they need to do to coordinate. You want to have them reply with as little effort as possible. If they respond saying yes, Monday 4 pm ET works well for me. Fantastic. Send a quick one sentence thank you and send the damn calendar invite.
5. The message must be tailor-made. Make sure to add in something that shows you’ve done your research about the individual to prove to the recipient that it’s not a mass email.
6. Depending on how well you follow 1-5, I personally found the response rate to be 1 in 6 emails.
4. Crushing the Interviews
The 15-minute pre–referral phone call
You have a quick 15-minute phone call with someone you’ve never met and know nothing about. The internet is a crazy place, isn’t it? Here’s how you should prepare for the call.
You should have read every single publicly available piece of information about the company. Study the company’s website. Know the different types of products the company builds. Know its clients. Know its competitors. Know its financials (whatever is available). You don’t need a premium Crunchbase or Pitchbook account. You can find everything you need on TechCrunch, Axios, LinkedIn, and Twitter.
Take a large sheet of paper and physically write out the important building blocks of the company. List out the products and what each does. Write the company’s financials (funding, revenue, valuation, whatever exists). List out the competitors. Having this sheet of paper in front of you during your call is psychologically helpful. You must convince yourself first that you have done the work and are deserving of the phone call. Only then can you convince the other party of this.
We rarely use pencil and paper anymore. I do think there is something to be said about the thoughts and emotions that are elicited when the pencil touches the paper. It triggers a deeper level of thinking that just can’t compare with Microsoft Word, Roam research, Notion, iNotes, or whatever new age note taking app you use.
As Blake Scholl the CEO and Founder of Boom Supersonic puts it -
“Think on paper.” It’s like first gear for thinking: you go slower but can climb much steeper hills.”
In addition to understanding the company, you must come up with a list of at least 7-10 questions to ask the individual about their own prior experiences leading up to this role. It’s okay to be stalkerish. People have LinkedIn profiles for a reason. Come up with intelligent questions about the company, the industry, the products, the competitors, and the individual. Do your research.
This blog is helpful for questions to ask https://medium.com/future-vision/how-to-make-the-leap-from-consulting-to-a-startup-ee02fd80dbf7
Below are some questions you can ask. Don’t just resort to this list. Make sure your questions go deep into the company and the individual. You must subtly demonstrate that you have done your research. Your questions are the easiest way you can stand out from the other candidates. Every word you use is a strategic weapon wielded to defeat to the other 200 dweeby LinkedIn candidates and Kremlin bots.
- Why did you choose to join company x?
- Now that you’ve been at company x for y years, what are some positives and negatives of working there?
- Who are your biggest competitors? What differentiates your product(s)?
- What do you want to be doing in 5 years? Do you think you’ll still be at company x?
- What was the interview process like?
- What are the key characteristics you’re looking for when hiring for this role so that the individual is as impactful as possible?
- Say I were to join next week, what would I be expected to accomplish in 30, 60, and 90 days?
- What are the current OKRs (1) of the company?
- What is the growth of customers like?
- What is the churn like?
- What does your day to day look like?
- What is company culture like?
You should also practice answering some of the basic / fundamental questions that you are guaranteed to be asked. I recommend recording yourself doing this on video. Watch the videos, find mistakes, edit, and redo the recording. Again, and again. Treat this as a work-out. Do your reps. Photobooth (2) is your swimming pool. You are Michael Phelps.
Yes, this will be painful and cringeworthy. There’s no denying this. But at least this way you only embarrass yourself in front of the NSA and the CIA who are watching and not the important stranger you will soon be talking to.
Here are some questions I would prepare 2 or 3-minute-long answers for.
- Tell me about yourself?
- Why are you interested in this company?
- Why are you interested in this role?
- What is your long-term plan? What do you hope to achieve on a 5 or 10-year horizon?
- Why do you want to leave your current job?
During the phone call, DON’T ASK FOR A REFERRAL. If you come across as intelligent, well – researched, passionate about the problem the company is solving, your job is done. The individual will likely offer to give you a referral at the end of the phone call.
If not, you can subtly ask them “The xyz role listed on the website seems particularly a good fit and interesting to me. Do you reckon I apply directly online or is there another better way to apply?” This should do the trick. If it doesn’t, you know that either the role is not the right fit, or you messed up with your research and questions. This is fine. You will have to go back to the drawing board and fine tune your process. You will have to do some stochastic tinkering and A/B testing. Try to pin-point the exact thing you said that changed the individual’s tone towards you.
Interviews
You managed to get a referral. Of those 200 nerdy LinkedIn applicants, only about 20 made it so far. Well done you cheeky bugger. Depending on the company, you may have 1 to 10 different interviews. Your research from the pre referral conversation will likely come in handy.
Each interview will likely be conducted by the hiring manager (a senior product person at the firm), the HR manager, or lateral employees in other departments that you will likely work with. The lateral employees will range from Engineering to Sales to Customer Support and so on. The interviews will have a behavioral component and a technical product component.
I will not attempt to demystify the technical product component. Far braver souls have done a better job than I could ever aspire to achieve. However, since I have studied all these resources thoroughly, I will point you to which portions of which books are particularly helpful.
Product Component:
- Most people will have read Cracking the Product Manager Interview, Decode and Conquer, and the book from Product School.
- I personally much preferred using https://www.tryexponent.com/. If you decide to purchase exponent, you will not need the books.
- Some additional resources include Good PM Bad PM, Design of Everyday Things, High Output Management
Cracking the Product Manager Interview by Gayle Laakmann McDowell
I can guarantee that every single aspiring PM has read this book. I read this book many times in college. It was not enough. Yes, it’s a good primer and can perhaps be your bible. But instead of reading it again and again I recommend utilizing the other resources available in the cornucopia that is the internet. In terms of specific sections, I recommend reading chapter 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15.
Decode and Conquer by Lewis Lin
This book is a little different than Cracking the Product Manager Interview in that it’s made up of only question and answers. It solely consists of actual Product Manager interview questions with perfect answers from PMs at Amazon, Google, Facebook, and so on. It’s an intriguing take on the Socratic method. While interesting and helpful, it’s again, not enough. Don’t read this again and again. I suggest reading it once, highlighting what’s important and then moving on to other resourced.
In terms of specific sections, I recommend reaching chapter 1, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16.
Product School Book by Product School
This was recommended to me by many successful PMs. I have never read it. It’s free on Amazon Kindle.
TryExponent.com
The website is built by Stephen Cognetta. He’s an ex-Google PM, Princeton undergrad, and Stanford MBA. Believe me when I say it, if you buy the PM course you won’t need to buy any of the books. And no, he is not paying me to give this review.
The course consists of videos and tutorials on how to answer the various categories of Product Management Interview questions. The course also contains videos of sample interviews with real PMs. It contains the frameworks from the various books and articles all in one. It also gives you access to a Slack group chat where you can reach out to the founders and instructors and other fellow PM applicant warriors. You can even use the slack chat to set up practice interviews.
The most valuable thing you can get out of this course is the video series. Reading the books can only get you so far. You will be better off practicing on your own and recording yourself on photobooth and re-watching/ redoing the videos.
You need to learn and practice the verbal and non-verbal cues PMs use while answering product questions. I think you can learn far more in a shorter period by just watching how the pros do it than by reading about structures and outlines. You will learn things like how to split the time you’re given in answering a complex product design interview. I could not recommend this course enough. I genuinely learned a lot from it and don’t think I could have landed the offer without it.
Behavioral Component:
An early mistake I made was just focusing on the product, engineering components of the interviews. The behavioral component is more important. If you read the books and do the courses, it’s likely you will pass the Product component. However, with the behavioral component, it isn’t so simple. You need to practice. Here’s what you should do.
Take the job description and break it down. For each bullet point in the job description, come up with one story / experience that relates directly to this. You can use some project you did in college, something you did at your prior job, or some other bull shit side project. Yes, you must have done those things. But what’s more important is how you package your story and structure it.
Break down each story into three components. 1. Why is this important/ related? 2. What did you personally do? 3. What was the outcome and learning? Try to use as many numbers as possible to quantify your outcomes. Listeners latch on to numbers amidst a sea of words like a sailor to lighthouse on a stormy night.
This is the most annoying, painful, and cringey part of the process. I understand. I promise that this is the only part of the process that feels like some sort of Faustian Bargain. Unfortunately, like the pre-referral screen, you will need to practice this. If you didn’t have the pre interview referral process and somehow magically reached so far, go back, and read that section. The advice there will still be helpful here.
Video record yourself answering questions. See where you make mistakes and see where you don’t. The more you practice this, the less rejections you will face. You should have at least 5-7 stories. Each recording should be approximately 3 minutes long. You don’t need to have memorized the stories word to word. But you should practice enough that you can visualize the flow of what you’re saying and minimize the “ummms”, “uhhhs”, and “likes” as much as possible.
You could ask a friend to look at these. However, this will lead to irredeemable cringe. I don’t believe that you don’t need anyone else. Just watch your recordings. Redo them. Improve them. Master them. Trial and Error are your only friends here.
If you’re really struggling with interviews and need some additional help, seek it. Go to themuse.com and find a coach. The returns on the investment will probably be commensurate.
Chasm after Interviews
You’ve done one, two, three, four, five or a million interviews with the same company. You think you have done well in all of them (unlikely). In fact, this was perhaps the 5th or 6th company you interviewed with. At this stage, you’re quite certain that you did not mess up your behavioral or technical answers. You read everything I told you to read. You practiced your answers many times.
However, there is no response from the recruiter or the hiring manager. You diligently sent them a follow up. And then another follow-up a week later. The trail has gone cold. What the F*ck?! Welcome to the chasm. Most candidates fall into this abyss and fade away here.
People think that you can land a dream job in Product at a tech company Via Negativa (3). You cannot get this job by just avoiding mistakes. You must step outside the box. You must stand out. Here’s a little secret. You can tilt the scales in your favor by doing a voluntary research project. In fact, think about it from a purely empirical and statistical basis. It’s likely that the candidate who does get the job, amongst 100s of other applicants, will have done some voluntary additional project. Whenever you fall into the chasm, the voluntary research project is your ladder out. If you get really cheeky, you can even preemptively prevent falling into the chasm.
Whether in the pre-referral phone call, interview 1, interview 2, or interview n, once you have asked your questions and you are about to say goodbye and thank you, say this-
“Hey, I was actually particularly interested in xyz feature/ product/ API and I took the time to do a little project. Could I send that over to you to get your thoughts and feedback. I really enjoyed doing the project and I do think your company will benefit from my learnings.”
Boom. Mic Drop. Silence. The listener will undoubtedly be impressed and will likely move you to the next round regardless of how awful your project is. If you forget to do this during the interview, that’s fine. You can send the project as an attachment in a follow up email.
Voluntary Additional Project:
So, your project shouldn’t be awful. It should be respectable. You must spend at least a few hours doing it. If it’s well researched and well-written, you should be fine.
- You could do a usability test for a product from the company.
- You could run the company’s public API and write a pros and cons list of what worked and what didn’t and what could be improved upon.
Whatever you decide to do, make sure to write a 3-5 page word document about it. This will go a long way to show the recruiter and hiring manager that you are not like other candidates. You will stand out. You will demonstrate that you really want this job and that you are qualified for the role.
These two blog posts do a phenomenal job of explaining how to do these projects and how to write about them. They have specific examples too. These projects will probably take a whole day to do. Don’t do these projects for all the companies you apply to. You should probably do them for about 3/5 companies that you really like, and you think the role is perfect for you.
- https://medium.com/@RaghavHaran/how-to-get-virtually-any-job-you-want-even-if-you-dont-have-the-right-experience-a622149262d5
- https://medium.com/bridge-collection/a-guerilla-usability-test-on-dropbox-photos-e6a1e37028b4
You don’t have to send this project when you’ve fallen into the chasm. You can send it in whenever you think there’s a good opportunity. This little project will go a long way. I guarantee that 95% of applicants will not do this. This is how you stand out. I wrote .8x number of voluntary projects for every x company I went to the final round of onsite interviews with.
Take home assignment
You did well on the interviews and maybe even sent in the voluntary research project. You are now presented with a take home assignment. The point of the assignment is to see how technically competent you are and how well you can communicate in writing. They are also testing to see how far you can go before you need to ask questions. Unless you are GPT-3 level AI, you will likely need to ask clarifying questions to the hiring manager to answer the assignment completely. My advice to you is to first make sure you have tried everything (google search, hours of tinkering, asking a friend, etc.) before you reach out to them. Yes, you must eventually reach out to them with questions. But make sure you have exhausted your own resources first.
The assignment really varies company to company. It’s quite difficult to provide specific guidelines on how to do well on the assignment. The Medium articles on the voluntary research assignment will be helpful. At the end of the day if you do the work, write well and clearly, and spend time thinking about your work, you will be fine. Remember to attach screenshots of your code, results, terminal window, etc. in the word doc to demonstrate that you did the work.
You can skim through these too.
- https://www.themuse.com/advice/heres-what-the-hiring-managers-actually-looking-for-in-that-dreaded-takehome-assignment
- https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/interview-process-take-home-project-sean-hurley/
5. Additional advice
Say you are technically competent and have done a good usability test of a product or API. It’s still imperative that you can communicate your results well on the voluntary take home assignment. Furthermore, the take home assignment also necessitates that you are be able to clearly communicate your thoughts well in writing.
I learned about Scott Adam’s writing advice via a Naval Ravikanth podcast. I make sure to leave this article open on a sticky note every time I write. It’s brilliant and immensely helpful. I have added it below.
The Day You Became A Better Writer by Scott Adams of Dilbert Comics
I went from being a bad writer to a good writer after taking a one-day course in “business writing.” I couldn’t believe how simple it was. I’ll tell you the main tricks here so you don’t have to waste a day in class.
Business writing is about clarity and persuasion. The main technique is keeping things simple. Simple writing is persuasive. A good argument in five sentences will sway more people than a brilliant argument in a hundred sentences. Don’t fight it.
Simple means getting rid of extra words. Don’t write, “He was very happy” when you can write “He was happy.” You think the word “very” adds something. It doesn’t. Prune your sentences.
Humor writing is a lot like business writing. It needs to be simple. The main difference is in the choice of words. For humor, don’t say “drink” when you can say “swill.”
Your first sentence needs to grab the reader. Go back and read my first sentence to this post. I rewrote it a dozen times. It makes you curious. That’s the key.
Write short sentences. Avoid putting multiple thoughts in one sentence. Readers aren’t as smart as you’d think.
Learn how brains organize ideas. Readers comprehend “the boy hit the ball” quicker than “the ball was hit by the boy.” Both sentences mean the same, but it’s easier to imagine the object (the boy) before the action (the hitting). All brains work that way. (Notice I didn’t say, “That is the way all brains work”?)
That’s it. You just learned 80% of the rules of good writing. You’re welcome.
Aligning the Sub-conscious
This is probably going to be the section that will receive the most criticism. You might completely dismiss it. That’s fine. You can probably land a job in Product at a tech company without reading this section. Read this at your own peril. Your life may not be the same after reading it. Don’t worry this is nothing like Roko’s Basilisk.
Say you’ve hit rock bottom. You’ve been getting rejected left right and center. You’re not making any progress.
Take a sheet of paper and write on it 15 times “I will get the right job for me.” Do this consistently at the start of every day for 30 days.
Science behind this:
Have you ever noticed that when you’re in a crowded public place and there is a lot of noise, you can’t really differentiate between the different conversations? You can’t clearly understand a conversation unless you direct conscious effort and thought to it. But if someone quietly mentions your name from across the room, you suddenly hear it? How does that work? How does your brain involuntarily choose what to pick up on and what to ignore?
The truth is that your neurological machinery can only filter so much. It physically can’t render every single stimulus that it receives. The number of inputs it receives every day far exceeds the number of available neurons to process this information. Thus, it naturally has a filter to automatically choose what to render and what to ignore. From an evolutionary standpoint this makes sense, right? Your subconscious will be hyper-aware of stimuli involving the most important things concerning your survival.
It’s possible to communicate with this neurological machinery. You can prime it. You need to prime it. You need to prime your neurons to be extra aware of something you want to achieve. Therefore so many productivity gurus and coaches recommend writing down your goals and aspirations. You need to prime your subconscious to filter out the ideas, recommendations, and insights that will not help you get closer to this goal of finding the right job for you.
Now, I don’t know if this is voodoo. But it helped me. It could help you. It seems like an asymmetrically positive behavior. You spend only 5 minutes a day every day for 30 days and it could radically alter your life for the better.
6. Conclusion
Remember, patience is key. It will take at least a couple of months to receive your first offer from the moment you first read this guide. It will take time to study the product and behavior guides. It will take time to find the right roles. It will take many iterations to improve your interview performance. Rome was not built in a day. You will persist.
Footnotes:
1. Objectives and Key Results. https://www.whatmatters.com/get-started
2. If you don’t have a mac use whatever equivalent product you like you heathen.
3. 3 “The path to heaven is achieved by studying how not to get to hell” – St. Augustine. Nassim Taleb calls this Via Negativa.