Mirela Mus

Understand what skills the company and hiring manager are looking for and what’s their assessment criteria. Adapt to their hiring process. Yes it’s ok to network but don’t sidestep too much in your attempt to stand out as that could backfire. If it doesn’t work the first time, try again. Most companies let you re-apply after a cooldown period. 🙌🏼

This is a chicken and egg problem: the easiest way to get clients is to have happy clients who recommend you to their network. It’s hard to get a first client as Product Management is not commonly handled by externals. The easy way is to join an agency or consultancy that already has the dealflow and pays a monthly salary. You get to work on multiple Products without having the financial risk and hardship of finding clients.

This is your second priority after jumping on things that the Manager wants you to look at and getting those topics under control. Think of things you can get off their plate and proactively work towards that (proactively align with stakeholders who have a tendency to escalate, direct your manager’s attention to important topics, offer input in a way they can easily digest and reuse e.g decks / documents or whatever your organization likes doing).

You’ll need to grow a thick skin and be very comfortable in picking up a messy/fuzzy topic then bringing clarity to it across the organization. Being ok to deal with lots of people from various parts of the organization that have strong personalities is a big plus 😎

Be helpful, volunteer for tasks, ask questions, and deliver what you promised. The PMs are usually busy, so even shadowing them to take good meeting notes or double-checking if a bug is fixed, if the slides for the Product review need polish or if tracking works as expected goes a long way.

Don't learn from competitors. You may copy their mistakes. Figure out the problem you're solving extremely well for a large enough group with a willingness to pay. The rest is just noise.