People who work in product are an ambitious lot. There should be no surprise here as they are constantly looking to build something release it and think about how to improve it. Their career is likely to be built on this same principle.
One area where there is very little innovation is Product Manager CVs. Quite often people still write them as if it were simply a timeline that they had put together with a typewriter.
We need to think differently if we’re going to get people excited about what we could bring to them and their organisation.
The reality is that your CV is just a tool to help get and shape an interview. You can control the narrative. So long as you’re being honest about what you’ve done you will have integrity when people are quizzing you about your past success and experience.
What interviewers are looking for is the ability to find out your stories, both good and bad, about things you’ve done in the past.
Put hooks into your CV to allow you to tell that story. Draw people towards the things that you’ve done and you are most proud of, or even the biggest lessons that you’ve learned. You need to back this up with some kind of evidence, but you don’t need to go over the top. Some metrics help, like “I helped increase year-on-year growth by 20%”, or “I increased conversion by 5%”, for example, but they aren’t vital. Many of them are hard to substantiate anyway.
Some of the most successful interviews are the ones where the CV acts as a mechanism to start the conversation, but quickly gets left on the table as the conversation flows. This allows you to become more human and approachable.
Think about how you can make your CV a tool that starts a conversation and allows you to talk about you and your most shining successes – this will allow the interviewer to learn about you and what you can bring, which is more useful than any sheet of paper.
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