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What Goes On AFTER You’re Done With The Interview?

So what’s your job status? You either currently have a job (yea!) or you are looking for you next one (yea!) There is no shortage of job search advice out there on the Internet and otherwise. They’ve pretty much said all that there is to say about resumes, dressing nicely, researching the company, etc. How about if we talk about something different – how the company that you’ve applied to actually goes about filling their open positions?

Making The First Cut

Going for a job at a company is very much like trying to win a gold medal at the Olympics: many will try, but only one will win. Just imagine the job that the company that has the open is going to have to go through to sort out all of the applicants that they get for every open spot.

The first thing that you need to realize is that the first pass of work to weed out the clearly unqualified candidates will be done most likely by a team. This will be a bunch of employees / contractors who may not know much about the specific job, but who have been told what to look for in resumes and cover letters.

Product managers who want to get past this first cut need to include a cover letter. Your cover letter needs to contain two important pieces of information: you need to include words that talk about how you meet the key qualifications that were identified in the job posting and you need to include key words that have to do with this job.

Next Step: The Phone Interview

Whenever we apply for a job, time instantly becomes our enemy. If you become worried that your application for the job never got to the firm, then it is socially permissible to make a follow-up call to ask for confirmation after 5 days have passed.

You’ve probably heard this before, but the best way to get your next job is to connect with actual people instead of just submitting your resume to a firm. Candidates who come in via a recommendation from an employee or a trusted source often get to bypass the first round of applicant cuts.

Firms generally end up with a list of about 20 candidates or so that they’ll take to the next round: the phone interview. From the company’s perspective the phone interview has two missions: to make sure that you understand what the job is and to make sure that it lines up with your salary expectations.

However, there is another reason for a phone interview. It give the company a chance to evaluate your communication skills – are you a good talker, do you seem confidant?

Last Step: The Face-To-Face Interview & Selection

Every firm differs, but a good rule of thumb is that about 6 candidates are granted interviews for a given opening. Once all of the prospective candidates have completed their interviews, it’s time for the company to make a decision.

The actual hiring manager will meet with all of the people who participated in the interviews in order to get their recommendation for who should be hired. The key here is that they get only opinions, the final decision still rests in the hands of the hiring manager. This final selection is more often than not based on two criteria: how well your skills and experience fit the job and how much enthusiasm you showed during the interview process.

What All Of This Means For You

Interviewing for a new job is a numbers game: it’s you against the rest of the world. Knowing what goes on inside of the company that is doing the hiring can be your key to getting the job that you want.

A good cover letter will get you past the first round of cuts. However, you’re going to have to do well on the phone interview in order to get invited in for a face-to-face interview.

In the end, how much you’ve studied the firm and the job will determine your chances. Make sure that you let the interviewers know how excited you are about the challenges that come along with the job and you’ll be that much closer to being hired…

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

Question For You: Do you think that anyone still reads a cover letter for a resume today?

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What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

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…

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There Are 5 Skills That You Need To Be A Product Manager

Jeff Vance over at Sandstorm Media talked with me to get some inputs for an article that he was writing for the Project Manager Planet site. Yeah, yeah – I know that we’re Product Mangers not Project Managers. However, Jeff did a very good job of capturing a lot of what makes our job so hard to do.

Check out his article which is called 5 Signs You’re Not Cut Out to be a Project Manager. Give it a read and every time you see “Project Manager” just mentally replace it with “Product Manger” and it’ll work out for you.

Jeff has included the classic story of Charles Pellerin, NASA’s director of Astrophysics for the Hubble space telescope program which should serve as a good reminder for all product managers that you should never give up on your product…

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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

So I can only speak for myself, but back in the day I used to be quite good at video games – you know, the big stand alone game units that you could only find in arcades. Which brings up an interesting point, wouldn’t be be great to be a product manger at a video game company?

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Which Job Boards Work Best For Product Managers?

In these tough times, even  Product Mangers may find themselves out on the street looking for a new job. Over at the Cranky Product Manager blog, there has been a fast moving discussion about what to do when you find yourself “between jobs”. One topic that has not been dealt with has been what Internet job boards work best for product mangers?

It turns out that there are currently over 60,000 different job boards on the Internet. What this means is that there are way too many for you to search all of them. Looks like you are going to need some help in narrowing down your search.

The Big Boys

Let’s start out with the ones that everyone knows (because of Superbowl ads): Monster.com and CareerBuilder.com. The job search experts pretty much all agree on these ones: they are actually a good place to go looking if you are are a young person looking for an entry level job. The older you are and the more experience you have, then you’ll want to look elsewhere.

What Job Boards Should I Be Looking At?

Here’s a quick list:

• Jobbing.com – good for local employment, covers 41 metro areas, has staff that physically goes and meet with professional associations to talk about how to get hired.
• Jobcentral.com – passes you right through to the web site of the firm that is posting the job so you know that your information will get to the right people.
• Craigslist.com – you know it, you love it. Surprisingly enough this is one of the most open / transparent sites out there. Be careful though, it’s easy to start a scam and so don’t reveal too much too early.
• Execunet.com – it’s a serious job site that really does a good job of cutting down on the noise and focusing on the jobs that are available.

Should You Pay To Get Access To Job Postings?

Some sites, like TheLadders.com and Execunet.com charge a fee if you want to respond to a job posting. Are they worth it? The answer seems to be yes. You don’t really have to pay too much and you seem to get access to good solid job postings. You will need to be careful because once you have paid to access the sites, they will keep trying to see you upgrades and more features.

Any Final Words?

You already know what I’m going to say – job boards of any type are not the ideal way for you to find your next job. The key is to get out there and network like there is no tomorrow. Remember, they say that 70% of jobs that get filled were never advertised!

When you go looking for  a product manager job, do you include online job boards in your search? Which sites do you use and why? Have you ever gotten a job this way? Leave me a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

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Product Mangers Can Do Things That Will Make A Layoff Less Likely

If you are a product manger at one of the big 3 car makers or even if you work for Motorola, times cannot be good for you right now. The rest of us are also looking over our shoulders trying to figure out if our jobs might be on the chopping block next.

Every Product Manger would like to think that he/she is so valuable to the company that there is NO WAY that their name would ever get put on the RIF list. However, I speak from experience when I say – it happens! So pehaps the big question is really, is there anything that you can do to get yourself spared the axe? Well, it turns out that the answer is maybe…

Look, if the company is shutting down, then you are out of a job no matter what. However, if they are going to keep going, then you have a chance to hold on to your job. Now, there are no guarantees, but you can improve your odds by doing the following things:

• Look Like You Are A Survivor: Interestingly enough, you want to do this because it’s much easier to can someone who looks like they have already been canned. This means that you’ve got to lighten up – don’t drag around all moody like. Research has shown that if you are fun to be around, people will want to be around you especially in bad times. Good natured colleagues are chosen over ones in a bad mood and that’s always a good thing.
• Become A Beacon Of Hope: People often survive when they do things that others don’t do. You need to realize that upper management is feeling the downturn just as much as anyone else, and maybe even more if a large part of their salary is based on their bonus. If you become upbeat and don’t fight the changes that come your way, then you will be seen as a leader and as an advocate that upper management can rely on. Once again, this is a very good thing.
• Practice Good Citizenship: In good times, we hate to go to those big meetings, all hands meetings, etc. Who needs the pep rally, I’ve got real work to do. However, when times are tough, you need to start attending all of these meetings. Become visible – make sure that everyone knows that you are going, that you are there, and that you are a supporter of the message that is being delivered.

You don’t have control over the future of you company nor do you really have control over your career’s future – you’re pretty much just along for the ride. However, that doesn’t mean that you can’t try to tip the odds in your favor.

Sometimes just buying yourself just a bit more time can make all the difference in the world. Hanging on until the bad times are just about over will make finding that next product manager gig that much easier!

Have you ever been let go from a product manger job during a down cycle? Had you tried to do anything to hold on to your job? Did it seem to help for awhile? What should you have done differently? Leave me a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

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Coke Product Managers Have Over 450 Different Products To Manage

So I just happened to be leafing through an issue of Information Week and I ran across an article that was talking about how IT is run over at Coke. In a nutshell, the article was a glowing review of the changes that Jean-Michel Ares has been making. However, what really caught my eye was a discussion about how Coke is running their product manager activities. It turns out that Coke currently has over 450 separate brands including Coke, Diet Coke, Minute Maid, Dasani, etc. Just how can product managers at Coke possibly manage so many different products globally?

Perhaps because of the IT focus of the article, there was a lot of discussion about an application that Coke has implemented to help it track all of it’s ongoing projects. They selected an application called Clarity from CA (are they still in business?) It appears as though they have mated this app with an Oracle DB and now use it to track all of their development projects. What was interesting is that Coke appears to use a gate process as their project management process that most companies use as a way to remind themselves to kill a project if market conditions have changed – just getting the green light for a project does not mean that it will ever see the light of day.

Coke is in the process of moving to a new way of managing their products (product managers pay attention!) They are getting ready to implement a new application called the Common Innovation Framework. The reason that Coke gives for doing this is that they want to provide a global view into their product pipeline. It appears as though they are trying to set up a form of knowledge sharing in the hopes that product managers in different countries will search for brand or beverage ideas that worked well in other countires. Oh yeah, they are also hoping that if they have duplicate efforts going on at the same time, this application will allow those to be spotted and combined.

It appears as though the future that Coke’s Product Managers are working towards will allow them to quickly identify customer’s changing tastes, rapidly introduce new products, and kill off products that are no longer meeting customer’s needs. Interestingly enough, Coke views Japan as being the leading market for new products because their consumers quickly get bored with existing products and are always looking for something new. As products die in Japan, they get pulled there and can be introduced in new markets.

It sure looks like there is no shortage of information available to Product Managers at Coke. The entire company has standardized on SAP’s ERP application and they have even been able to extend it down into parts of their bottler and distributor network. The big challenges at Coke appear to be that the costs of raw materials are rising at the same time that consumption of their flagship product, Coke, is declining due to changing consumer tastes. What this all means is that Product Mangers at Coke need to move quickly. Coke has a number of competitors: Pepsi, of course, but also 100′s of local brands that have been fine tuned to meet local tasts.

We all know that relations between departments are never perfect, no matter what people tell magazine reporters. I suspect that the 450+ Product Managers at Coke had their own thoughts about the new product tracking applications that were put in. However, Coke is a successful company that has very deep pockets. One can only hope that at least some of their Product Managers have been able to build bridges to the IT, bottling, and regional teams in order to simplify and smooth out the challenges associated with trying to “… teach the world to sing…”

What do you think that it would be like to be a Product Manager at Coke? Do you think that Product Managers have an easier or harder job to do than Product Managers at other companies? Do you think that things will move even faster for Coke Product Managers as they move into the future? Leave me a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

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Product Management and Project Management are two different jobs that often get confused

Ok, so how many times has this occurred: someone asks you what you do for a living and you tell them that you are a Product Manager and they fire back at you “Oh, so you manage projects?”. Grrr, it’s really no fair – the two disciplines really have nothing in common. Well, wait a minute, maybe they do. No, no they really are different. Dang it. What’s the difference between the two?

A lot of the confusion comes from the simple fact that the two jobs do share a lot of things in common. However, never fear, they really are completely different no matter what your friends or your boss tell you. In a nutshell, the differences fall into three different categories: scope, execution, and results.

Scope: A project manager has the somewhat enviable benefit of having the hope of there existing clear cut boundaries that define what he/she is responsible for. They are responsible for a project that uses resources, has a schedule, and has a clear set of deliverables. A successful product manager on the other hand has a less defined job of creating a successful product. The product will be driven by not so much a set of requirements, but rather a customer need which may be fickle and change over time. A product manager has to be able to see through requirements and determine what the root cause of the customer’s issue is and create a product that solves that.

Execution: The project manager is responsible for basically reporting on the status of the project and he/she has a whole host of tools to do this with. However, the project manager is not responsible for designing the product. In fact the project manager does not have to be a subject matter expert – they can mange projects that they know nothing about the underlying technology. A Product Manager on the other hand desperately needs to know everything about how the product works. They need to know the motivation behind every design decision so that they can explain it in non-technical terms to a customer. A product manager is going to have to be able to sell (something a project manager never has to do) his/her product to others both internally and externally.

Results: How is a project manager judged? If a project follows a set schedule, delivers what was requested when it was promised and does not exceed its budget, then it is considered to have been a success. Basically, the less attention a project attracts, the more successful it is deemed to have been. The product manager on the other hand is expected to have created a product efficiently (similar to a project manager’s project), but has the additional burden of having to be successful no matter if it is delivered to an internal or external customer. If the product is a runaway success and gets lots of vocal praise from the customer than the product manager is deemed to have done a good job.

Yes, there are a lot of similarities between the jobs. However with due respect to both project managers and product managers, you can’t switch them around and expect success. Product Management really does require a special set of skills – it’s an art, not a science.

Have you ever been confused with a project manager? Does anyone in your family really understand what you do for a living? How do you get along with project managers – are you friendly or bitter enemies? Leave a comment and let me know what you think.

Tags: project, project management, product management, IT Product manager, product manager jobs

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I had a chance to talk with one of my friends the other day who is a product manager working in the telcom space. Carol is basically happy with her job, but she’s tired of always gathering requirements and she is already starting to think about the next step in her career – becoming a Director. She told me that she was thinking about getting an MBA; however, she had not made up her mind yet as to if it would be worth the time, energy, and expense required to get one. She wanted to know what I thought?

Just a little background info for you here: I’ve collected four university degrees. I’ve got a BS, MS, and PhD in Computer Science and then I went on and just for good measure I picked up an MBA with a focus on Marketing. All in all this took me about 15 years to do. Because of the time, energy, and expense that I’ve gone through I felt that Carol was talking to the right person!

The first thing that I asked Carol was where she wanted to take her career and what she thought that she needed to do to get there (besides getting an MBA). She said that she had been doing some studying of the last four or five IT people who had been promoted to a Director position. What she had found that they had all been at the company for at least 5 years, they had been associated with a successful project, they were well known to the Executive Director that they would be reporting to. She then said that only two of the five new Directors had an MBA – the other three had at least a Masters technical degree.

Carol had done her homework! We then spent some time talking about what you can expect to get if you get an MBA. Assuming that you can’t take time off from your job to go to school for two years, then you are probably looking at going to night school for 4-5 years. I realize that there are other options such as the University of Phoenix and Executive MBA programs; however, my experience has been with the traditional butt-in-a-classroom-at-night approach. One of the first questions that I asked Carol was if she expected to be living where she was right now for the next 5 years – nothing could be sadder than moving half-way through a program! Carol said that yes, she expected to be in town for the next 5 years.

I got my MBA for two reasons: I wanted to have the vocabulary that was needed to work with the people who are running the business and I wanted to network with other people who were at the same stage of their career as I was. In the end, I feel that I got the vocabulary that I wanted. A lot of that vocabulary has to do with finance, organizational behavior, and marketing and these had been things that I didn’t know much about before starting my MBA.

The networking with other folks who were working on their MBA didn’t work out as well. When one attends the big Ivy League schools to get an MBA, you have the advantage of moving though your courses with your peers in lock step. The MBA program that I was in had more people in it and so we were spread out both over time (some people completed in 3 years, some took as long as 7 years) and in courses – there were a lot of courses offered each semester. This meant that few close relationships were formed that lasted more than a semester or two. In my case I moved out of town after completing the degree and so the value of the networking was even more minimized. All that being said, I believe that if you went into the program with networking as a key goal, you could build up a healthy LinkedIn network by the time you were though.

The final benefit of getting an MBA is that you get a chance to be exposed to a great deal of business information that you may have heard of, but never had a chance to study before. Depending on what your background is, this material may be very straightforward. Unlike technical degrees, an MBA requires you to work in teams, give in-class presentations and really doesn’t have that many problem sets to turn in. Rather, questions require wordy answers – you have to memorize a great deal of information that does not have a formula or numbers associated with it. I found the studying to be easy because it was all new. It kept my interest and was easy to memorize.

After I had shared all of this with Carol, she decided to go ahead and take the GMAT in order to apply to enter an MBA program. What helped her to finally make her mind up is that she took a look at the people who would be her competition for the next Director position and decided that an MBA would set her apart from them.

What do you think about Product Managers getting an MBA? Do you think that it helps make them better Product Managers or is it just so much window dressing? At your firm, do people with MBAs seem to go higher, faster in their careers? Leave a comment and let me know what you think.

Tags: MBA, GMAT, product manager, product manager jobs, software product manager

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