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It Can Be Easy To Take A Wrong Step When Changing Jobs

The global economy is roaring back again and it sure seems like everyone is starting to take stock of their job and decide if they want to stay where they are or move on to greener pastures. Product managers are no exception. Perhaps you’ve grown as far as you can or perhaps you feel that you’ve done everything that you’re going to be allowed to do where you are at. If you are thinking about moving on, you had better be careful that you don’t screw up your job change…

Failing To Do Enough Research On Where You Are Going

Considering the fact that doing research, collecting data, and then making the best possible decision is such a key part of the job of being a product manager, you’d think that we’d all do this well when it comes to looking for our next job. Well, guess again.

The folks who know such things, search consultants, say that product managers are dropping the ball in several areas. The first is that they don’t do a good job of sizing up the market for their skills. What this means is that product managers don’t have valid assumptions for how long it’s going to take to find their next job.

Next, product managers somewhat surprisingly don’t do a good job of checking out the financial health of the company that they are thinking about jumping to. Sure they may check out the salary, but not the bottom line situation.

Additionally, the culture of the new company is rarely considered. If a product manager is coming in from a free-wheeling Silicon Valley company and is considering going to work for a 100-year old insurance firm, culture becomes a big deal.

Finally, all too often product managers assume that they are getting what’s being advertised – that the job title matches the job. Just because the new company calls the job “product manager” does not mean that you’ll have the same level of control that you had in your old job.

Going When They Show You The Money

Hey, I like money, you like money. However, as hard as it is for both of us to understand, you can’t leave one job and go to another just because the new job pays more. This is a sure recipe for disaster.

When product managers were asked to rank what they were looking for in a new job, pay came in at the fourth or fifth place on the list. However, all too often product managers bump this factor up to first place when it comes time to make a decision — bad move.

Deciding To Go “From” Rather Than “To”

Just like everyone else out there, product managers can become dissatisfied with their jobs. When this happens, they can start to make poor career decisions.

When a product manager decides to switch jobs, it should be a carefully planned career move. However, if they are really upset with their current position, then all too often it becomes just a desperate jump to the nearest lifeboat. Since this often happens with little or no serious research into the firm that the product manager is fleeing to, these new positions rarely last for long.

As a product manager bounces from firm to firm, you can quickly develop a reputation as a job hopper and it will become that much harder to get your next job. No matter how bad your current job is, take the time to plan out what your next career step should be before you do anything.

What All Of This Means For You

Product managers are like everyone else: when the opportunity to move to a new job comes along, they can decide to make the jump for all of the wrong reasons. If you are aware of the most common mistakes that other product managers have made, then you’ll have a chance to avoid them.

The mistakes that product managers make are easily avoidable. The most common mistakes include not doing enough research on the company that they’ll be joining, being seduced by an offer of more money, and focusing on leaving the firm where they are and not taking a careful look at just exactly where they’ll be going.

Ultimately, being aware of the most common mistakes that product managers make is the first step in avoiding them. You can switch jobs smoothly and end up in a better place, just make sure that you’re switching for all the right reasons! /p>

- Dr. Jim Anderson
Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World Product Management Skills™

Question For You: Do you think that going to a company in trouble for a lot more money would be worth it?

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P.S.: Free subscriptions to The Accidental Product Manager Newsletter are now available. It’s your product – it’s your career. Subscribe now: Click Here!

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

Sure you did all of the research, you talked with all of the right people, shucks you even followed up on every Google link that you could find on the company that you were thinking about going to work for before making the jump. However, now that you’ve made the jump you are finding out that perhaps you’ve made a mistake. Now what do you do?

Related posts:

1. Breakthrough In Solving The Problem Of How To Evaluate A Product Manager Oh do I have a tasty dilemma for you this...
2. Now What? When Product Managers Make The Wrong Job Move… Sure you did all of the research, you talked with...

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Oops -- That Job Change Was Wrong, Now What?

Sure you did all of the research, you talked with all of the right people, shucks you even followed up on every Google link that you could find on the company that you were thinking about going to work for before making the jump. However, now that you’ve made the jump you are finding out that perhaps you’ve made a mistake. Now what do you do?

How Did This Happen?

Product managers are supposed to be smart people, how come we can end up making mistakes when it comes time to switch jobs? The good news is that we are smart; however, what can happen is that we can find ourselves under a great deal of pressure and this can adversely affect how we make decisions.

One such type of pressure is mental pressure – how do we see ourselves? When we are considering making a job change, we tend to make up our minds about how we think the next job is going to be and then we only pay attention to the information that we encounter that confirms this view. Researchers call this thinking “confirmation bias”.

In order to counter this kind of thinking we need to be constantly asking ourselves one question: what happens if I am wrong? Only by doing this will you be able to make yourself aware of information that might not fit the way that you want the world to be.

Another type of pressure you need to deal with when you are considering changing jobs is social pressure. This is most often evident when you have become so unhappy with your current job that you’d almost rather be anywhere else.

Far too often these types of situations could be dealt with if you would only find the courage to sit down and talk things over with someone at your current company. However, all too often we are so resistant to having this kind of discussion that we’re willing to leave the firm and run to a new job.

Finally, the ever present specter of time pressure is always a factor when it comes to considering moving to a new job. When we don’t feel that we have very much time to make a decision, what happens is that we end up hastily making a bad decision.

The lack of time forces us to focus on the short-term gains that we’ll make by switching jobs. What happens is that we forget to take a look at the long-term impacts of making the switch. A good way of countering this tendency is to ask yourself questions such as “if the salaries & benefits were the same, would I make the job switch?”

What Do You Do Now?

Despite having taken the time to carefully consider all of the issues and to try to counter the pressures that will be driving your decision, sometimes we still end up making poor job change choices. The question then comes up: what should we do now?

The experts all agree on the answer to this one. You need to cut your losses and move on once again. However, this time around you need to do a better job. Don’t just flee a bad job and jump yet again into another poor position. Take the time to understand why you made a bad job change decision and make sure that you don’t repeat this mistake.

Ultimately the best way to protect yourself from making another bad career decision is to become more self-aware. You want to be able to understand your strengths and weaknesses so that you can evaluate your next job opportunity in a way that will reveal if it is really the right career move for you.

What All Of This Means For You

Despite our best efforts, sometimes we make mistakes when we are switching product management jobs. There can be a number of different reasons that we make this kind of mistake but more often than not they all come back to the different types of pressures that we are under: mental, social, or time.

If you find yourself having made the wrong choice in switching jobs, your next step is very clear. You need to cut your losses and move on to your next job. You need to be careful and make sure that you leave your new job carefully so that it doesn’t look like you are running away from it.

None of us is perfect – we all have the ability to make the wrong decision at some point in time. What can make us a great product manager is the ability to be aware that we’ve made a poor decision and then the ability to react and make the right decision.

- Dr. Jim Anderson
Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World Product Management Skills™

Question For You: How long do you think that you should stay at a job that you know is the wrong job for you?

Click here to get automatic updates when
The Accidental Product Manager Blog is updated.

P.S.: Free subscriptions to The Accidental Product Manager Newsletter are now available. It’s your product – it’s your career. Subscribe now: Click Here!

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

I’ve got a quick quiz for you: how many different types of toothpastes are being sold right now? According to survey company Spire LLC which tracks the shopping data for more than 30 million U.S. households, we are currently faced with 352 distinct types of sizes of toothpaste. The good news is that this number is down from 412 back in March of 2008. What the heck is going on here?

Related posts:

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2. Product Managers Want To Know: Was The Gap’s Logo Redesign A Bad Idea? There’s an old saying that goes something like this: “There...

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How Can You Keep Score On How A Product Manager Is Doing?

Oh do I have a tasty dilemma for you this time around! I’ve been working with one of my clients who is setting up a brand new product management department. He’s faced with a challenge that you’d think would be more common than it appears to be: just how should you evaluate the job that a product manager is doing?

Product Managers Are Not Project Managers

The newly minted manager of product managers was struggling. It was the beginning of the year and one of the things that he had to do on his list of tasks was to set up annual goals for his team.

This manager was coming from a project management background. In his first pass at creating goals for his team this training really came across: all of the goals had to do with meeting dates. Clearly there’s more to being a product manager than this.

He was facing a revolt from his product management team when I was brought in to see if I could broker a solution to this problem. The manager had a valid need to be able to manage his product managers, but they also had a reasonable expectation that they would be measured based on what a product manager does, not on what a project manager does.

Say Hello To The Puppet Master

I stated out by having a talk with the manager who was trying to come up with the goals. It turned out that he really didn’t have a clear understanding of what product managers do. In a nutshell, he viewed product managers as sort of a “super project manager”. The only problem with this is that the company had project managers who worked on every product’s team. Clearly there had to be something different in what these two groups of employees were doing.

I then took some time and met with the product managers themselves. It turns out that they were all busy doing exactly what you would expect a product manager to be doing: studying markets, guiding product developers, and putting out fires.

After having collected all of the available information, I brought the manager and his team back together. I started this meeting out by taking the time to explain to the manager the role that product managers played in his company.

Right or wrong, I used the analogy of a puppet master (you know, those old-time puppeteers who controlled the puppets by pulling on strings connected to their hands and feet). I pointed out to him that the role of the product manager was not so much to do things, but rather to make sure that things got done. Product managers are like information hubs. They ensure that the right information gets to the right person at the right time so that they can accomplish a task.

The difference between a product manager and a project manager can be murky at times. However, I pointed out that if the product manager told the project manager to build a 3-wheeled car, the project manager would make sure that the car got built on time and on budget. However, when the car flopped in the marketplace, it would be the product manager’s fault because he had said that a 3-wheeled car was what the world needed.

A New Way To Evaluate Product Managers

What was needed here was a new way to evaluate product managers. Others have discussed this topic and they’ve focused on getting the product’s requirements correct. I think that this is important; however, the product manager’s job does not end there.

What I told the manager and his team was that a much better way to evaluate product managers is to focus on the four areas that a product manager actually controls. These all have to do with the up-front work of determining what product to create, creating the product, and then ensuring that the product is a success once it’s been made.

The four areas include: knowledge of the market, providing a well understood business strategy, empowering the company with product tactics, and directing the creation of product related content. Each one of these areas has plenty of room for individual performance metrics to be created that can be used to evaluate how well a product manager is doing his / her job.

What All Of This Means For You

Product managers, just like every other employee in a company, need to be evaluated in order to determine if they are doing a good job. The problem is that nobody really seems to have come up with a good way of doing this.

Product managers are not project managers. This means that the traditional management metrics of delivering a product on a given date and keeping it on budget, don’t really seem to apply to product managers.

What a product manager does is pretty much all “behind the scenes”. We deal in relationships as we get people to do different things at different times. We are an information hub that provides the right information to the right people at the right time.

A much better way to evaluate product managers is to focus on the four areas that a product manager actually controls: knowledge of the market, providing a well understood business strategy, empowering the company with product tactics, and directing the creation of product related content.

The performance of a product manager can be measured. However, you need to be very careful to do it in terms of what a product manager does, not what a project manager does. Once you establish the proper metrics to measure your product manager by, you’ll be able to determine just how successful your products are going to be.

- Dr. Jim Anderson
Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World Product Management Skills™

Question For You: How big of a role do you think that doing a good job of defining a product’s requirements should play in the evaluation of a product manager?

Click here to get automatic updates when
The Accidental Product Manager Blog is updated.

P.S.: Free subscriptions to The Accidental Product Manager Newsletter are now available. It’s your product – it’s your career. Subscribe now: Click Here!

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

Lessons in how to be a better product manager can come from the strangest places – including a Monster Truck event. I’m willing to confess, I dived deep into my redneck past over a recent weekend and took the family to the Monster Truck Jam event that was being held down at the local football stadium. Little did I know that I was going to get a lesson in product management…

No related posts.

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How Will Your Resume Look When Viewed On A Blackberry?

When you go hunting for your next Product Manager job (and it may be sooner than later), will your resume be up to the job? Come to think of it, when was the last time you dusted off and updated your resume? Do you still have that quaint “objective statement” or “career goal” hanging out at the top? If so, you may be in for a shock – that’s not going to be the best use of resume real estate when it’s being reviewed on the hiring manager’s Blackberry…

The Need For A New Resume

Parting is such sweet sorrow… or so the classic line goes. Look, when did you first create your product manager resume? Awhile ago? Even if it was only a couple of years ago, the world has changed dramatically since then and it’s time that you (and your resume) kept up with it. It’s time to say goodbye to your old style resume.

About that “objective statement” up at the top – ditch it. The next company that will be hiring you really doesn’t care about what you are looking for. Instead, they are facing pain right now and they are looking for someone whom they can hire to come in and make that pain go away. That’s what really matters.

This means that we’re going to have to make some changes to your current resume. Prepare to get out the sharp knife.

Length

How long is too long? How long is too short? This rule of thumb has not changed even in the 21st Century – a resume should be two pages max. In fact, it’s really only the first 25% that you can count on a hiring manager reading so that’s where you’ve got to really shine.

If you’ve had some amazing product management experiences that you think would really help your case, then feel free to include them – as an addendum. This extra stuff can be anywhere from 4-12 pages long; however, remember that there is no guarantee that anyone is going to read it.

Skills

Are you the world’s best Cobol / Fortran / Java programmer? Drop it. Look, you’re going for a product management job and it’s really your leadership and project management skills that are going to get you the job – not your programming chops. Use your limited resume real estate to explain how your product management skills have made your past products successful.

Skip The History Lesson

A resume is designed to tell your next employer about how you’ll perform in the workplace. This means that pretty much anything that does not have to do with the workplace should be dropped. This list will include civic accomplishments, professional associations that you belong to, charity work, etc. Use the freed up space to provide more details about your most recent job and how it relates to the job that you are applying for.

Say No To Descriptions, Yes To Accomplishments

I must confess that this has been a mistake that I’ve made in the past and I found it hard to stop doing it. Instead of providing your work biography by listing every single job you’ve ever had, use the space instead to list your accomplishments. Ultimately this is what your future employer really cares about. Don’t worry about all of those “title only” promotions that you’ve gotten over the years, instead just focus on the products that you’ve managed and the challenges that you’ve mastered.

What All Of This Means For You

Everyone has a resume. However, not everyone has a resume that will work for them. In this day and age of everyone having too much to do and too little time to do it in, you’re going to need to shape your resume to be scanned quickly on your future boss’ Blackberry as he/she dashes off to their next meeting.

What this means is that you’re going to have to cut to the bone and get rid of everything that doesn’t pertain to how you would do in your next position. Detailing what you’ve accomplished in your most recent product management positions is what that Blackberry scanning hiring manager is going to be looking for.

Take the time to craft a new resume that is tailored to read quickly in digital form and you’ll be one step ahead of everyone else who is applying for the same job. If you make it easy for them to see why you are the perfect fit for the job, then you’ve just shown them why you’re the product manager that they need to hire…

- Dr. Jim Anderson
Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World Product Management Help

Question For You: If a hiring manager is only going to scan the first half of the first page of your resume, what do you think that you need to put there in order to land the job?

Click here to get automatic updates when
The Accidental Product Manager Blog is updated.

P.S.: Free subscriptions to The Accidental Product Manager Newsletter are now available. It’s your product – it’s your career. Subscribe now: Click Here!

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Your Resume Should Do More Looking Forward Then Looking Backwards…

It is the time of year that a product manager’s thoughts turn to … searching for a new job? During the global recession, things were so bad for so long that most product managers were just trying to hold on to the jobs that they already had. Now that things appear to be slowly getting better, the calls from the recruiters are starting to ring once again. Will you be ready when you get a call?

It’s All About Your Resume

Sure, sure – we live in the all-digital 21st Century where the old ways of getting your next job are long gone and now candidates are automatically selected by computers that spend their days trolling Facebook and LinkedIn. Well, not quite.

It turns out that how you present your product manager experience in a resume still matters because eventually once you get past the robots, real live humans read the things. How you go about structuring your resume can have a significant impact on how well it works for you (or doesn’t).

Perhaps we should spend a moment or two talking about how to create a resume that will do the job for you.

Which Way Should Your Resume Be Looking?

Phyllis Korkki over at the New York Times has done some digging into just what makes a resume work and she’s come up with some interesting findings. The first thing that all product managers should realize is that a resume is first and foremost a way to market yourself – it’s your very own personal product brochure.

That being said, what your resume should really be doing is telling the reader what you are capable of doing in the future – not focusing on what you’ve done in the past. This means that you should take the time to figure out what kind of job you want to have in the future, and then make sure that your resume focuses on those jobs & skills that have prepared you for the future job that you want.

Here’s an important point: your resume is not designed to be your personal work autobiography. What this means is that you really don’t have to list every job that you’ve ever had. In fact, anything that is over 15 years old should get very little space or perhaps should be dropped all together…

It’s your most recent jobs that will count the most when you are searching for your next job. This means that you are going to want to quantify what you’ve been able to accomplish in those jobs as much as possible – this is a good way to use your precious resume real estate.

Make It Easy To Hire You

I’m always amazed at how often I see product manager’s resumes that make me work to find the answers to my questions. When you are submitting a resume for a specific job, be sure to customize it so that it contains key words that have to do with that job as well as inserting some terms from the job description that were used to define the job. This makes it easier for the reader to understand how your experience relates to the job that they are trying to fill.

What All Of This Means For You

In order to land your next job, there are a lot of things that have to go just right. You need to discover that someone has a product manager opening, you’ve got to look good to them both on paper and in person, and they need to end up picking you. Can this happen – yes. However, your resume can be a key tool for making it happen quicker than later.

You’ve got to make sure that your product manager resume is saying the right things: focus on telling the story about how your past jobs have prepared you for the job that you are now looking for. Although we are often proud of all of the jobs that we’ve had, it’s not necessary to list them all on your resume, especially if they happened a long time ago.

Resumes still do count even in this day and age. Product managers who take the time to create a resume that does a good job of marketing what they have to offer will be able to find their next job faster than everyone else.

- Dr. Jim Anderson
Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World Product Management Help

Question For You: Do you think that making your resume fit on just one page is still necessary or can you go to 2 or even 3 pages?

Click here to get automatic updates when
The Accidental Product Manager Blog is updated.

P.S.: Free subscriptions to The Accidental Product Manager Newsletter are now available. It’s your product – it’s your career. Subscribe now: Click Here!

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

When you go hunting for your next Product Manager job (and it may be sooner than later), will your resume be up to the job?

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It Turns Out That A Cover Letter DOES Count When You Are Applying For A Job

When it comes time for you to go looking for your next Product Management job you’ll be facing a major decision. I’m not talking about if you should use online resume services or go with a headhunter. I’m not even talking about if creating a more technical or a more business-focused resume is going to land you that next job. I’m talking about something even bigger – the question of whether or not you should create a cover letter when you send someone your resume.

The Purpose Of A Cover Letter For A Product Manager

The product managers that I’ve been talking with seem to be split down the middle on this issue. Many of them have decided that since their resumes are just going to get scanned in and then checked for keywords, why bother with the cover letter? Others realize that by including a cover letter they have a better chance of setting themselves apart from everyone else who may be applying for the job and that’s got to be a good thing.

All cover letters are not created equal. Product managers who are applying for multiple jobs need to realize that a cover letter can help them stand out from the crowd. Each letter needs to be both brief (keep it short!) and custom tailored to both the job that is being applied to as well as the employer who will be doing the hiring.

Rarely do any of us grow up hoping to become a product manager. We often just happen into this profession. This is something that may need to be explained in your cover letter.

How A Product Manager Can Customize A Cover Letter

In order to make your cover letter read like it was written for the person who is reading it (and not like you copied it out of some book), you’re going to have to customize it. It turns out that this really is not all that hard to do.

An easy way to customize a cover letter is to make a reference to the employer’s products or services. Another way is to make a reference to some information that they have on their web site such as their latest press release. If neither of these seem appropriate, then you can do some research and make a reference to something that is going on in their industry.

Your ultimate goal here is to take the time to customize your cover letter to support the position that you are applying for. This means that in the limited space provided you should take the time to show how the work that you’ve done in the past has prepared you for this position better than anyone else out there.

The real power of a cover letter is that it allows you to put all of your work experience into context for the person who is reading it – you get to explain why you are the best candidate for the job.

What A Product Manager Should NOT Put Into A Cover Letter

Right off the bat I hope that we can agree that any obvious errors such as misspellings or grammatical mistakes in your cover letter will count against you. These simple-to-avoid errors show sloppiness and lack of attention to detail on your part. This is why you always want to get someone else to read over your cover letter before you send it off.

Form cover letters are also a big no-no. What product managers seem to forget is that the people who will be reading our cover letters do this for a living. That means that they’ve probably seen just about every form cover letter out there. Take the time to write a custom cover letter!

Once you’ve got one cover letter written, you might be tempted to reuse it. Don’t! Since much of the job application process has been digitized these days, using the same cover letter to apply for more than one position will be found out quickly and you’ll be out of the running.

One final thought, although much has been written about the power of a hand-written letter that is delivered by the postal service, it turns out that recruiters just like the rest of us live and die by email. If your cover letter can’t be forwarded to the hiring manager by the recruiter, then it loses much of its power.

What All Of This Means For You.

Applying for a new product management job can be a nerve racking experience. In order to boost your odds of success, take the time to create a cover letter to send along with your resume.

Make sure that you create a custom cover letter that matches the position that you are applying for. Spelling errors or trying to use a form cover letter will end up counting against you.

Getting your next job is often a numbers game: you’ve got to be in the right place at the right time. If a well-done cover letter can help your chances of getting the job, then I say go for it…!

- Dr. Jim Anderson
Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World Product Management Help

Question: Just how long do you think a cover letter should be: half of a page or a full page?

Click here to get automatic updates when
The Accidental Product Manager Blog is updated.

P.S.: Free subscriptions to The Accidental Product Manager Newsletter are now available. It’s your product – it’s your career. Subscribe now: Click Here!

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

It is the time of year that a product manager’s thoughts turn to … searching for a new job? During the global recession, things were so bad for so long that most product managers were just trying to hold on to the jobs that they already had. Now that things appear to be slowly getting better, the calls from the recruiters are starting to ring once again. Will you be ready when you get a call?

No related posts.

Things are tough all over. If you were counting on getting a promotion this year, you might want to scale your hopes back just a bit. A lot of product managers are discovering that their career plans are having to be put on hold. Maybe we should spend some time talking about what you should do now…

The Root Of The Problem

Have you noticed just how far down the U.S. stock market has dropped over the last couple of years? Since most of the baby boomer generation that is currently working has their retirement funds tied up in stocks, they’ve seen their dreams of a well funded retirement take a hit. What this means is that they won’t be retiring any time soon.

What this means for product managers is that the normal process of staff retiring each year and opening up senior management positions that are then filled by junior staff won’t be happening this year. Dang!

The folks over at Watson Wyatt Worldwide Inc. have done a survey of more than 2,200 U.S. employees and they’ve found that 44% of workers who are over 50 plan on postponing their retirement. Just to make things even worse, about half of these folks are now planning on working at least three years longer than they had originally planned on.

The Promotion Problem

So let’s talk frankly here: no matter what level your product management career is currently at, you are going to be blocked. Just to make things even worse, the experts are telling us that we shouldn’t expect promotions to come back any time soon.

So what should you do? Quit? In this economy? I don’t think so. Instead we should take a look and see if we can come up with a different solution.

As always, if you are expecting a promotion and you don’t get it, you need to take a look at the underlying reasons for you not getting the promotion. If you determine that your promotion was postponed because of either the company’s economic situation is poor or because there is a human logjam before you, then you still have hope.

Now you’ve got to plot your next step.

Solutions

The easiest way to solve this problem is if you are willing to accept an alternative to a promotion – like money. This is sometimes called a “retention reward” and it’s a bonus that is paid to employees when they deserve a promotion but one is not currently possible.

Once you realize that your deserved promotion may be delayed, you need to start to take steps to boost your value to the company. What you really want to do is to make it very easy for the company to slide you into the promotion once it becomes available. This means having a talk with your boss in order to find out if there are ways to get some of the experience that goes along with the promotion position even if you can’t get the title right now.

As with all requests like this, you do need to be careful. You don’t want the company to get too comfortable with you doing the work of the higher level position while being paid at your current lower rate.

What All Of This Means For You

The world is working against you – just when you are expecting a promotion, everything gets flipped upside down and you find your way up the career latter blocked. These things happen and you need to find ways to deal with it.

Quitting is always an option; however, unless you have another job already lined up it’s probably not the way to go right now. Instead, ask if you can get a bonus to replace the promotion that you won’t be getting right now. At the same time see if there is any way that you can gain more experience doing the type of work that you will be doing when the promotions free up once again.

Promotions will eventually return. As a top-notch product manager you need to use this delay to build the skills that will ensure that you will be one of the first to get promoted once things start moving again. Take these actions now and you’ll be ready for the big day whenever it finally comes…

- Dr. Jim Anderson
Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World Product Management Help

If your next promotion gets delayed, what steps would you take?

Click here to get automatic updates when

The Accidental Product Manager Blog is updated.

P.S.: Free subscriptions to The Accidental Product Manager Newsletter are now available. It’s your product – it’s your career. Subscribe now: Click Here!

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

How times have changed! As little as 10 years ago, cigarette smoking was no big deal – lots of people did it. No matter which side of the fence you fall on, it’s important to realize that just like every other product out there, there are product managers for cigarettes (remember: there are also product managers for things like bullets). The interesting question for us is how do you go about managing a product that creates such strong for / against emotions in your potential customers…?

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Could You Be Damaging Your Job Prospects And Not Even Know It?

Product managers may be very good at managing a product and making it a success in the marketplace; however, all too often we do a really bad job of looking for our next job. I’m not talking about poorly formatted resumes or even answering questions incorrectly during a job interview. My point is that it’s all the other actions that we take during a job search that really end up shooting ourselves in the foot. Still confused? Maybe I should explain myself…

The Problem With Black Lists

When you are in the middle of a job search, it’s pretty easy to start to think about the firms that you are trying to get an interview with as being these big, impersonal “things” . In reality, you are really dealing with a small group of people that can include recruiters and members of the company’s HR staff.

Working as a product manager has conditioned all of us to view the world in pretty narrow terms: things either work or they don’t. We have a bad habit of bringing this view to our job search. This is what can get us into hot water.

It turns out that all of the people involved in the hiring process, recruiters, HR staff, etc. all talk to each other. When we tick them off, they’ll put our name on their personal “blacklist” and then life just got a lot harder. This is something that we tend to forget.

Reasons That We Screw Up

When we think that we’re being clever and trying to get a job interview with a company by going in through the front door (job postings on their web site) and the back door (with a recruiter) at the same time, we end up making everyone mad at us.

Recruiters don’t like it when you’ve gone direct because they don’t make any money if they place you and the company already knew about you. HR staff don’t like having your name show up multiple times for the same position. What can happen very quickly is that your name gets place on a “blacklist” .

Once your name is on the unofficial black list, you’ll find that recruiters won’t return your calls (they talk to each other also) and the company won’t acknowledge your emails.

How To Fix Problems That You’ve Made

Getting off of a black list once you’ve landed there is very difficult. First off, you need to understand that it’s going to take time to get off of the list. It took time to get on the list, it’s only fair that it should take time to get off of it.

Your first action should be to stop doing whatever got you blacklisted in the first place. Just because you soured your relationship with one recruiter doesn’t mean that you have to compound the problem with other recruiters.

Next, you need to find ways to be a giver, not a taker with the recruiter / HR staff that you’ve offended. This doesn’t mean sending them gifts – those look fake anyway. Instead, you should look for ways to make their jobs easier. One way would be to send them highly qualified candidates for their open positions (no – you can’t recommend yourself). Also, acting as a good reference for someone that they are considering can also win you points.

Things You Should Never Do

We are living in the 21st Century and that means that the number of ways that you can hurt your job search efforts have multiplied. Here’s a quick list of other things that you should never do:

• Don’t post anything on Facebook or MySpace that you wouldn’t want your mother to read / see.
• Don’t bend the truth in your resume.
• Don’t spam the world with your resume.
• Don’t submit the same cover letter for multiple positions in the same company.
• Don’t send your resume to multiple recruiters and HR hiring managers at the same company.
• Don’t apply for jobs for which you don’t even meet the basic requirements.
• Don’t send your resume to the same recruiters over, and over, and over again.

What All Of This Means For You

Looking for your next job has always been a challenge. In today’s online hyper-connected world, some things have become easier while others have become much more difficult.

It’s all to easy to become too eager when looking for your next product management job. If you work with too many people or send your resume out too far and wide then you risk being black listed by recruiters and hiring managers.

Keep your job search focused and stay honest with what you tell people about yourself. You will find that next job but only if you treat the people who will help you to find it with respect.

- Dr. Jim Anderson
Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World Product Management Help

Question For You: Do you think that you should apply directly for jobs even when you are working with a recruiter?

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What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

Are you looking for love product manager? Even if you aren’t, there appear to be plenty of other folks out there who are and this has created a booming business in the Internet-based dating service business. Now if you think that your product management job is difficult and confusing, just imagine if you were trying to manage and market a product that promised to not just make your customer’s lives better, but to also help them find the love of their life…

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It Turns Out That Your Resume Is Still Your Best Form Of Self Advertising

As the global recession starts to fade away, product managers who are searching for a new job are starting to feel some new hope and product managers who still have jobs are starting to get the itch to take a look around at what other opportunities there might be out there. Sounds like it’s time to get some resumes in order…

Overall Format

A quick search of the Internet will reveal suggestions for a large number of different formats for resumes: classic, modern, etc. What is the right format for you? Sure, if you are applying to a progressive firm, a novel formatted resume might be eye catching, but since you can never tell what they are really looking for I’m going to suggest that you stick with the classic format.

This means that you should start out with your contact information and follow it up with a summary statement. After this you should list out your career in reverse chronological order (what you’ve done most recently is always the most interesting). Each job needs to be described by a list of bullet points. Wrap things up by listing your educational accomplishments.

Things That Need To Be In Your Resume

Ok, so clearly your resume needs to be both well-organized and easy to read. The person who will be reading it will probably be moving quickly and if your resume is hard to read, they won’t read it. Depending on how long you’ve been working, a three-page resume is just fine – you’ve probably done a lot and so there’s a lot for you to document.

We live in a world where more often than not resumes now get scanned by computers before a human ever lays eyes on them. What this means is you’ve got to write your resume in such a way that a computer can process it correctly. This means that you’ve got to load it with keywords that recruiters would be using when searching for candidates. You can figure out what these keywords are by taking a look at job descriptions for the types of jobs that you are looking for – work the words used to describe the job into your resume.

In the world of product management we use a lot of acronyms to describe technologies and certifications. Feel free to include the acronyms in your resume, but make sure that you also spell them out at least once.

Three Things To Avoid

It’s all too easy to get caught up in worrying about what font to use and how to cram everything that you’ve done into as small of a space as possible. However, spending too much time on things that don’t matter can easily let a product manager skip over three things that are important. Here they are:

• Include Enough Detail: As we cut and trim the descriptions of what we’ve done in the past, we can accidentally cut out too much information. You should view your resume as telling a story about how you’ve advanced in your career. The goal is to show a prospective employer that you have the ability to grow in any role. Make sure that your resume has enough details about what you’ve done in each position.
• Don’t Be Ambiguous: The older a product manager gets, the more likely it is that we’ll start to fudge some of the information contained in our resume. Leaving off dates such as when we graduated from college is a common technique in order to obscure our age. Don’t do it, if the company decided to hire you they’ll verify your degree(s) and so you should include graduation dates to begin with.
• Grammar Counts: Those squiggly red lines and green lines that show up as you are typing up your resume in Microsoft Word really do mean something. No matter how impressive your past accomplishments are, if your resume is littered with misspelled words or poorly constructed sentences then that will take away from how you are perceived.

What All Of This Means For You

In this age of Internet everything, product managers might think that all that it will take to get their next job is to have an account on every social networking site out there. It turns out that the old standby, your resume, is still an important communication tool.

Not only does it matter what work experiences you’ve had, but how you structure your resume and what information you put in it are what will make it work for you. Make sure that you include the essential details about your past jobs, eliminate any ambiguous information, and make sure that there are no spelling or grammatical errors.

Every job that you apply for ends up being a competition between you and other candidates. In order to give yourself the best possible advantage, you need to make sure that your resume does a good job of clearly telling your story. Follow these suggestions and you’ll be well on your way…

- Dr. Jim Anderson
Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World Product Management Help

Question For You: Which do you think is more important: what you’ve done recently or how many job experiences you’ve had?

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The Accidental Product Manager Blog is updated.

P.S.: Free subscriptions to The Accidental Product Manager Newsletter are now available. It’s your product – it’s your career. Subscribe now: Click Here!

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

As product managers who live in troubling times we are always trying to do two things: hold on to our jobs and make our product more successful. One of the best ways to do both of these, or so we have been told, is to go out and get an MBA. Maybe it’s time to look for a better way to accomplish what we’re trying to do…

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Product Managers Need Mentors To Be Successful (c) - 2008

I’ve got a quick question for you: what is the next step in your career? What do you want to get promoted to? In fact, as long as we are talking about that, what comes after THAT promotion? In product management the career ladder generally goes: product manager, director, executive director, VP of marketing, Sr. VP, CEO. Got a plan on how you are going to get to that next step?

The Problem With Product Manager Career Mentors

It used to be that what you needed in order to climb out of a product management position was a mentor - someone who would take you  under their wing and guide you during your career. Bad news – those days are long gone.

It wasn’t that there was anything wrong with the old way, it’s just that the world started to move faster. Nowadays nobody stays in a given position long enough to act as a mentor to you for any reasonable length of time. Even if they did, they are probably too busy to spend enough time with you in order to keep your career on track.

The old way of picking a mentor and having them work with you over time to shape and guide your career is gone – things move too fast and change too often to allow this to work any more. Instead, product managers need to discover how to create networks of mentors that they can use to provide the career guidance that they will need over the years.

If you thought the old way was tough, just wait until you try to figure out how to do things using the new way!

The New Way Of Managing Your Career

Dr. Dawn Chandler (CA Polytech State University), Dr. Douglas Hall (Boston University) and Dr. Kathy Kram (Boston University) have spent some time looking into this problem with the modern product management workplace and they’ve got some ideas about how we can fix things.

Since there is really no way for you to get a single individual to agree to act as your mentor for the 40-45 years that your product management career is going to last, instead you are going to have take a different approach. You are going to have to create a network of mentors that you can use to accomplish what you need to get done.

Oh, there is one small problem with this clever solution: most of us are not all that good at creating a mentor network like this let alone trying to maintain it. It looks like you are going to need some suggestions on how best to do this.

Building And Maintaining A Mentor Network

One of the first things that you are going to have to realize about building your mentor network is that the people that you are going to ask to be a part of your network will not all be the same. This means that you are going to have develop a special set of skills in order to be able to (1) find them, and (2) create relationships with them that will make them want to mentor you.

Here is what you are going to have to do in order to create a mentoring network that will help your product management career move to the next level:

• Talk, Talk,Talk - you are going to have to be willing to take the initiative and reach out to those people that you want to be a part of your mentoring network – they aren’t going to contact you. Once you’ve contacted them the first time, then you are going to have to work at maintaining contact with them so that they don’t forget about you.

• Be Sensitive – Not everyone that you talk to is going to want to be your mentor. It’s going to be up to you to take the time to pick up on the message that they are sending your way. Few  people will actually come out and say “no”, so it’s up to you to detect those folks who would like to decline the opportunity.

• It’s The Takeoff That Counts – when you’ve found someone who is willing to be a member of your mentor network, then you’ve got to be willing to make an extra effort to make sure that your initial interactions with that person go very well. They will set tone for the rest of your relationship. Show up early for meetings, follow up quickly on actions, and pay attention when they are talking.

• Be Prepared – make sure that you get ready for every meeting with someone who is in your mentor network. Research what you want to ask them, make sure that you can show that you are making progress in your career, and come prepared to ask questions about challenges that you are currently facing.

• Information Is The Key – you need to be willing to share information with your mentoring network. This does not mean that you have to tell them all the details about what you had for breakfast today, but rather that you be willing to lay out your current challenges and failures that you’ve had – you know, stuff that can be hard to talk about.

• It’s A Two-Way Street – if someone agrees to be a part of your mentoring network, then you have agreed to do your best to help them out also. This means that you have a responsibility to help your mentors out whenever you have an opportunity to do so. This can be as simple as passing on information that you run across to actually doing work for them.

• Be A Nice Person – Nobody want to work with a jerk and they certainly don’t want to mentor one. No matter what kind of day you’ve had, always be on your best behavior when you interact with a member of your mentor network.

• Be Positive – how you choose to view the world is a key part of how others see you. If you have a positive attitude you will naturally attract people to your mentor network and you’ll be able to keep them there. If you’ve got a negative attitude, then nobody is going to want to lend you a helping hand.

Final Thoughts

As a product manager you are undoubtedly busy. However, it turns out that you have yet another job on top of your “day job” – managing your career. You can’t do this by yourself and so you’re going to need to have someone guide you – a mentor network.

Creating and maintaining a mentor network is no easy task. However, if you go about doing it in the right way it can become a powerful force that will cause your career to shoot ahead and make sure that you don’t get left behind.

Product managers who can do this will have have found yet another way that great product managers make their product(s) fantastically successful.

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The Accidental Product Manager Blog is updated.

P.S.: Free subscriptions to The Accidental Product Manager Newsletter are now available. It’s your product -  it’s your career. Subscribe now: Click Here!

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

Whenever I stop at a 7-11 with my kids in tow, they start instantly clambering for me to allow them to get a soda. On those occasions that they have worn me down enough that I’ll do almost anything to get them to shut-up, I’ll give in and let them. What they proceed to do next would take the breath away from any sane adult…

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