The War Chest!🎁
PMs ought to highlight impact but its the trepidations, indecisiveness, follies / errors over the job that help define one's mettle, a war chest if you will. So have you built your "war chest" yet?
Get on the internet today and take a look at a LinkedIn job listing for a product role from a reasonably well-known organization. You are most likely to witness an exodus (200+) of applications under 2 hours of listing, at times that number is beaten well within an hour itself.
What happens after tendering that application for most candidates?
A “reject mail” surfaces in about 3-4 days!
How many of you correlate to this?
And FYI, you’d be surprised how much this happens across the hierarchy, yes, even some product leaders seem to face this issue, which is quite painful to stomach given 10+ years of nuanced experience in product.
Some stats here from my current sessions:
NOTE: Over the first 2 weeks of December 2023 I have taken 55 calls with Product Leaders, PMs & Aspirants who have had a similar kind of an issue - religiously applying for jobs & failed to make the cut, even to that exploratory call from the TA team – the first shortlist.
Promotional hook:
→ Are you an aspirant looking to break into product roles?
→ Are you a PM facing issues that seem to be bogging you down over your job / workflow?
Feel free to reach out to me. Just drop me a line over these channels:
Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn
What’s happening? Who is to blame for this ruckus?
Orgs. being too niche / choosy with those mandatory requirements
The competition, owing to an exodus of talent pool available for hire today
Ratio [No. of Vacancies : No. of Applications]
Algorithms (like ATS) that set matching criterion to filter out profiles
Advent of Gen-AI & how its eaten into job roles
“You’d rather worry and pay heed to things within your control, working your way & wading through issues sorting them out one by one, rather than rue about / complain over an external entity you don’t have any control over whatsoever”
Whatever it is, that can’t be undone or overhauled. But, what can be done is to focus on things well within your control, to understand the expectations of the orgs. in the market, gauge where you stand and then chart out plans to bridge that gap via some smart upskilling.
Depth over Breadth
The era we are living in has been fraught with blinding automation everywhere driven entirely by AI, some really enterprising, but some not all that much given how it has been a source of worries, at least some segments of the market.
For ex: ATS (Applicant Tracking System) has seen some major adoption across organizations aiding their hiring process and how it goes about filtering candidates from a talent pool.
FYI: you can fork into Git to pull ATS code already being employed widely, or you could even build your own thoroughly tested & functioning ATS using Python within a matter of a few hours, it is really that simple.
When that does have some major advantages, the disadvantages could be listless. Like it or hate it, the ATS is in place and has been serving its purpose. The only thing that one can do as a candidate is to rethink & wholly realign to it.
Given the importance of highlighting impactful work done, achievements, outcomes over social fronted channels / CV / résumé the tendency is to employ a brand of heavy language that’s enmeshed with keywords alongside numbers as relevant to the ask. But that again leads to other problems, some of which are:
For ex: Consider this to be one of the bullet points highlighted over a profile.
Improved DAU by 10% leading to better retention
As soon one sees that as a standalone point all by itself, it could end up being a big red flag 🚩 for most interviewers owing to these unanswered questions leading to ambiguity:
So, is there a way to overcome all of that?
Hmm… that’s perhaps where building something like a WARCHEST could come in really handy.
The WARCHEST
Given how PMs ought to pick prioritize & fight many battles it’s obvious that they would have had many close shaves, encounters that may have been 50:50 taking that bet / decision to march ahead in spite of having vague information about the chaos that perhaps ensued them.
The length, the magnanimity & the eclecticism of that whole WARCHEST is what could go into defining your ability helping you prove your mettle as a PM over interviews or F2F interactions.
So, a sample WARCHEST ought to look like this:
“It is not deemed enough for a WARCHEST to be covering a good breadth, it ought to be substantially immersive depth-wise as well, which means to cover issues, blockers, problems & the approach taken to overcome all of them”
Let’s now take a deeper look at what one ought to cover over each of those 10 sections of the WARCHEST.
So, as you can see, building the WARCHEST would not only help you prepare for any nuanced questions that someone may have over an interview, but it could also lead to a better understanding of yourself, the job you did, the role you played and how it all added up to those outcomes.
Conclusion
Am sure everyone of you may be putting in quite an effort in preparing for your interviews. But, it would help a great deal if you could take each of those points you have chosen to highlight the impact via numbers and get down to asking yourself these questions and trying to filter out the noise and frame the best answers possible.
After all, it isn’t rocket science to know that the questions you may face over the interview would fall well within the scope of the WARCHEST.