Product manager resume: top 3 mistakes

This post is mostly for product managers with some experience looking for a new position but can be relevant also for those looking for their first product management position.

Key takeaways for writing a product manager resume

1. Spell out the activities you did
2. Clarify in which the type of companies, products, and teams you engaged with
3. List your achievements

Spell out activities you did as a product manager

Product management is a highly collaborative work type, where your influence is mostly indirect. You don’t deploy code or create pixel-perfect designs, you influence many teams to eventually move the needle. But as a hiring manager, the question I as myself is “Should I hire this person?” not “Should I hire that product team?” Therefore, your resume needs to make it clear to me what did you personally do in your product positions.

Write down explicitly the activities you did hands-on, and clarify which of them you led and in which you participated, for example: writing PRDs and handing them over to a dev team, analyzing support tickets, conduction user interviews and research, developing product metrics and tracking them in Mixpanel, demoing to sales people, scoping MVPs, managing backlog.

As a hiring product manager, I will use these to verify that you have the hands-on experience and skill that I’m looking for, given the specifics of the open position.

Clarify companies, products, and teams you engaged with

If I’m hiring for a product manager position in a SaaS B2B company in the digital marketing domain working with agile methods like scrum where each squad is led by a product manager and a developer, I will try to understand if candidates have experience in any of these domains, work methods or types of organizations. Don’t let my Google your past workplaces to find out. Write it down in your resume. Also, link or specify company websites.

Add information about the types or domains of products you worked on. Especially if you worked in a larger company that offers multiple products, or that you personally worked on features that are not part of the publicly know product of your company.

Last, let me understand the organizational settings of your past positions. Did you work in squads? With multiple development teams?

For example, I would write down the following:

Product manager, Duda

2018-2021

B2B2C SaaS Website builder (duda.co). Co-leading a squad with a dev lead.

Product under personal responsibility: App Store, payments and billing.

List your achievements

Product managers should work to move the needle, to achieve impact on business metrics. As a hiring product manager, I’m looking for people who know that that’s what they need to do, and that have made it.

Write down explicitly how you made an impact in each one of your positions. Don't let me think you achieved nothing. Don’t be shy and don’t hide it. Sure, don’t take credit for achievements that are not yours. Specify numbers as much as you can.

You might struggle at first with this, so here are some examples, mostly for junior product managers:

• Improve funnel performance
• Reduce support tickets around a specific topic
• Shipping product, especially large or complex
• Productizing manual processes
• Reducing churn of a feature
• Plan and execute A/B test