How to Use Product Management to Make a Great Resume for Any Position

For any position you can use the mindset of product management to create a better resume that resonates with your audience…the users.

Use THIS Instead of Cover Letters

A different approach to set yourself apart and above other candidates while speaking to and being the solution hiring managers are looking for.

How is Product Management Like CrossFit?

CrossFit is a training philosophy to improve physical well-being; it is fitness while interacting in an accepting community environment. Its ultimate aim is to forge elite fitness in everyone, from an Olympic athlete to a soccer mom to a teenager to a grandmother.

CrossFit’s main principles are based on constantly varied, functional, high-intensity movements with the purpose to “IWCABTMD”— Increase Work Capacity over Broad Time and Modal Domains. This means a CrossFitter can run a marathon, dead-lift two times their body weight and do handstand pushups. It’s a wide approach across different physical disciplines of cardio, strength training and even body-weight-based gymnastics. This covers different modalities (disciplines) and different time domains (short to long). A CrossFitter may not run the fastest marathon or squat with the most weight, but, unlike most who specialize in each of those areas, they can make a good showing in each.

All this is performed for a score in time or reps that measures the effect that can be tracked on one’s fitness — namely evidence-based fitness. The additional magic sauce is doing it with community. Suffer together by practicing Nietzsche’s philosophical tenet: What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, while every day you get a little better.

So how does CrossFit relate to product management? The most obvious parallel is the constantly varying challenge of driving product offerings across various cross-functional departments to produce results, such as revenue and profit margins, to the delight of the user/customer.

Another similarity is in how both the CrossFitter and the product manager break down big problems into smaller, easier-to-tackle ones. Case in point: Every Memorial Day, CrossFitters participate in a workout called Murph. It is what is known as a “hero” workout. CrossFit has a long tradition of dedicating and naming specially made workouts that honor someone in the military, LEOs (law enforcement officers) or first responders who made the ultimate sacrifice to ensure our freedom or safety. Murph consists of running 1 mile; doing 100 pullups, 200 pushups, 300 squats; and finishing with another 1-mile run.

It’s a big problem with a lot of pain points. The CrossFitter strategizes the partitioning of the volume of moves in a way they know they can do it and succeed. The thinking is: What is going to cause the most pain, and what is going to drive failure — such as hitting muscular failure on the pushups? For some, that may be 10 sets of 10/20/30; for others, 20 sets of 5/10/15; and so on. Both the CrossFitter and the PM think about and understand the problem, then break it down to pieces that can be solved.

Finally, the industry and the work activity run at a very high intensity. Though PMs are not necessarily subject-matter experts, they understand, emphasize, and relate to each department and discipline that relates to the product’s success.

Product managers are not design engineers, NPI specialists, quality hawks — you name it. Nevertheless, they understand each part and its importance to delivering something that meets a market challenge or need that advances our customers forward. Like CrossFitters, product managers work within a community of cross-functional teams to score a technically advanced, competitive product.

The PM’s and CrossFitter’s objective is to create within the community/company a sense of pride by striving to be better than the rest … and in doing so every day, becoming a little better.

Epiphany via Quantum Physics with My Daughter

“Once in a while you get shown the light/In the strangest of places if you look at it right.”

The Grateful Dead has a profound lyric in their song Scarlet Begonias that goes “Once in a while you get shown the light/In the strangest of places if you look at it right.”

For me, this recently happened as a very cool epiphany. While helping my high school daughter as she was doing pre-course work for a summer research program, we were trying to understand quantum physics which I have to admit is something I haven’t had to tackle for many decades now.

While trying to understand the concepts, mathematics had to be employed for validation. This, of course, is where the women are separated from the girls, in my opinion. It may be easy to grasp the abstract concepts and framework, but having to prove it is true via equations and the resulting numbers is where things can get muddled, to say the least.

However, that isn’t the basis of the epiphany. What I realized while doing this exercise is that not only was it very mentally stimulating, I became cognizant that this is where I must have had the seeds laid in my early life to become what I am today, a product manager.

The love of the problem. The interest and engagement in the problem. Then validating it with equations and data. For product managers, this is our world where a user’s pain point identifies in the form of a problem, and assumptions are made that need to be validated all as part of product development. It’s the playground of the product manager’s mind and where we revel. A cowboy in a data-driven problem-solving rodeo.

That day, though, we were trying to understand the math behind Schrodinger’s equation. It requires one to engage in serious mental gymnastics. The challenge of breaking down complex ideas into understandable pieces. The energy generated in my mind and the awakened state of buzzing is something very cool.

For many of us, as we enter into adulthood and try to figure out our path ahead, we tend to bounce around trying different occupations or fields of interest like in a career clothing store with numerous visits to the fitting room. We usually know quickly what doesn’t seem to fit. We can spend some time in a position that is comfortable or at least doable. However, finding the right fit can be a challenging endeavor for many of us.

So what does this epiphany, this awareness, mean? Why does it matter?

For me, it was quite appropriate that this one came from attempting to understand quantum physics. The principle of which explains how discrete units can move together in what resembles and behaves like a wave.

In our life and career pursuits, each work experience entry in our resume seems to be discrete and separate. We rarely take the time or do the “math,” so to speak, in identifying them as parts of sine and cosine waves towards a destination rather than just tangential occurrences with limited connection. connecting the dots and realizing the connection and flow.

I spent most of my career in management and corporate governance. Now I am in product management, back to building things. “Back to” are the keywords here. The epiphany that day had shown the light that I could see the dots connecting and flowing into where I am today.

Co-authored: Jor Amster and Gaz Rk

Zooming during a stochastic change like the pandemic has forced a paradigm shift in how we interact socially and work while unintended consequences like fatigue, stress, exhaustion, and burnout are being raised.

According to The Verge, Zoom usage surged from 10 million daily participants in December 2019 to 300 million in April 2020. The tremendous increase in volume indicates the service is being strongly vetted by its users.

What used to be a mere side dish to our daily diet of face to face interactions and a supplementary tool for remote communications has now become the entree.

In addition, recent articles suggest social scientists believe the fatigue and stress experienced in using the platform could be due to the rapid adoption of the technology. As humans, we need time to assimilate and adjust to any new advancements or service. Acclimation is required just as one must do prior to climbing Mt. Everest by spending time at the base camp. It may be that the users of Zoom collectively are experiencing altitude sickness in the struggle to adapt.

There is an urgent need to maximize the use of Zoom to its full benefit. The current challenge is the ability to manage our time effectively while utilizing this tool, still deliver work outputs, and protect our sanity.

As product people, we are constantly thinking from the users’ perspective and their pain points. Frustrations of this product are being amplified. We have some ideas on how to alleviate the stress and discomfort from a product improvement angle.

The underlying purpose of Zoom is to be a tool to facilitate the most basic human elements — Communication, Connection, and Social Interactions. All of this via a screen and a camera. Meetings, catching up, conferences, classes or workshops, family reunions, birthday parties, and even graduations are now exclusively virtual.

Zooming adds idiosyncrasies that arise and cause dissonance of social cues. Poor bandwidth creates delays. Lack of uniformity in camera quality affects the ability to synchronize interactions while trying to maintain natural eye contact. The tool requires the user to continuously multitask by forcing simultaneous focus on the conversation, the chat window, and a grid of participants on the call. All this and the feeling of never-ending meetings… we have a perfect recipe for a disaster!

With the original idea of a contrivance to our regular interactions, Zoom has a very generic approach to the format. Contextually, the user is floating in what feels like a huge body of water — an ocean. It is hard to get one’s bearings. What is needed are familiar landmarks or landscapes. The other pain point is the inefficiency and waste with the inordinate time spent by users, especially new ones, on technically interfacing with the service and software.

The answer, we believe, is looking at other analogous experiences such as spreadsheets or presentation software that have supporting themes and features. Templates guide the user. These preformatted themes bring familiarity with frequently used functions and assist in navigation as well. The adoption and comfort of the tool are faster and seamless.

The templates can function as a virtual moderator running the meeting. Different themes would replace current Zoom sessions with pre-configured layouts for 1-on-1s, 3 to many attendees, a briefing, catching up, presentations, and others. The idea would be to allow the meeting organizer to input their agenda and choose a format for the session.

Possible variables could be the number of attendees, agenda, and time limit for the meeting based on the topics. The virtual moderator will set up, schedule, contact, manage, facilitate, capture action items, and record for post review, documenting, and tracking. In a sense, many of the rudimentary facilitation and technical finesse is taken care of, producing a more comfortable meeting experience.

One apparent key issue is privacy and security. These are fair concerns and the recent problems Zoom has experienced mean that this is not a subject to be taken lightly. Encryption and other cutting edge security features must be better integrated into the product.

The haphazard structure for Zoom meetings needs to be quashed. When meetings are disorganized and attendees do not feel connected they will get bored. Participation does not translate to contribution. In fact, it is merely an illusion of productivity. A construct with scheduling assistance, targeted participants, and focused time-limit dashboards will allow for more succinct and effective meetings.

In roadmapping this feature the program could incorporate ML to learn and improve these features. Curation or customization of templates to fit a specific user or organization’s needs can also be integrated into the offering. The result would be a more structured and socially stimulating tool for virtual meetings and interaction.

In the end, virtual meetings and the technologies that make them happen will not completely replace in-person human interactions. However, they can be improved in a way to make the virtual experience a more human one.