How I Built A Solid Network in a City Prior to Moving There, and How You Can Too — Part 1

I will be writing a few posts on how I was able to build a solid professional network in a city I did not currently live in (Vancouver), what I did when I moved there, and the aftermath.

*NOTE*

I want to give a BIG shout-out to Rahul Iyer for inspiring me to write this article, as there were plenty of overlaps in our approaches.

Someone sent me his post after I had shortly arrived in Vancouver (my destination city).

Here is his post on how he left Atlanta and moved to San Francisco and got into Product Management, without a job lined up: How I left my consulting career behind and broke into tech.

Now, doing this sounds scary to a lot of people, and it is.

There’s no way around it. Even if you have a super solid foundation prior to leaving, it’s still a tough thing. Depending on your circumstances, you may have even more hurdles to overcome.

Before I begin, I want to give more specifics on my situation.

In November 2016, I slowly starting taking the steps necessary to move out to Vancouver from Edmonton. It was something I had thought about for awhile, but it was at that time I started taking the steps necessary to start building a professional network out in Vancouver.

• For work, I have been in the product management space for about four years in the Edmonton area. This was my focus on moving out to Vancouver, where there are far more opportunities in the tech space.
• For moving, this was just me, myself, and I. I wasn’t moving a family. I wasn’t moving kids, a spouse, or any pets.
• I had no outstanding debts and enough money in the bank that I didn’t have to worry about paying my bills when I got there. I didn’t have a mortgage or car payments to deal with (I also sold my car prior to leaving). This can be both positive and negative. On the plus, it did remove a lot of stress, but on the negative side, I didn’t have the same sense of urgency about wondering how I was going to be paying my bills right away.
• At the time I was doing freelance work, so it was easy for me to take some time off and visit Vancouver (which I will get to later). If you’re currently employed, you could take some vacation days when you go to visit the place (which you’ll need to very likely do, more on that later).
• As well, I will be focusing on the professional network I built prior to moving. I had a number of friends that lived in Vancouver, and quickly got involved in the improv scene out there. I may touch on building your personal connections in a new city, but for now, I’m focusing on the professional network.

Depending on your circumstances, this may be more difficult for you to do, or in some cases, easier.

If you have a mortgage, a few kids, and you’re struggling to pay your bills, and you’re feeling the itch to move, you’re going to have to take some different steps and overcome more hurdles than I did. If you’re moving to a different country, you have the whole Visa issue to deal with.

Why am I writing about this?

1. Help others out.
   I know a lot of people who have thought about moving to a new city, but not having anything lined up can be very daunting and they don’t know how to start building connections. You may be in another country, you may be working in a different field than I am, but I hope that the process I am laying out will give someone some ideas to work off of and find value in. If one person finds it worthwhile, I’ve done my job.
2. Keep myself accountable.
   I’ve had ups and downs in this approach, but I know that I just have to be patient and keep at it, and tweak my approach as I go along.
3. I’ve gotten good feedback from this approach.
   The people I’ve met through this journey have been very complimentary on the approach I’ve taken and said that it would be a great idea for me to share it.
4. Validation for if there would be interest in me building a course or giving talks on the process.
   I think Slack (which I will get to later) is still largely untapped when it comes to a networking tool and finding a job, and I discovered that as I went along with this process.

The First steps

When I started to thinking about moving to Vancouver from Edmonton, what did I start doing to get the ball rolling?

Sure, I could have sent out resumes to companies in the area (which I did very briefly), but here’s the issue:

1. Applying to job applications and doing nothing else is such a crap shoot.
   Unless you have a huge reputation behind your name, this really won’t work, and if you do have a large reputation, you’re not taking this approach. You’ll have others reaching out to you, or you have a strong network to work with.
2. Applying to a different city as is tough.
   Why should they cover your moving expenses? Why should they consider you when they can find someone locally? How do they know for sure that you will be moving out? Sure, you may tell them that you want to move out, but showing vs. telling is a very different experience.

So, unless you’re a big deal in your field, moving to a different city, state/province, or country can be tough and it’s a whole different beast than applying locally.

In that case, where do you start?

I came across this video from Ramit Sethi and in few minutes, he breaks down how to get a job in a different city. This help lay the foundation for my process in getting a job in the Vancouver area.

Let’s look at some of these steps he mentioned, and what I did.

Reach out to your alumni network.
Through some Google searches, I was able to find a University of Alberta alumni group that were active in the Vancouver area. Though a small list, there was one I got in contact with who was in the software industry. While she no longer lived in Vancouver, she did put me in touch with past co-workers of companies in the software field.

From there, I slowly began to have some talks with some companies, and some product managers.

Another means of reaching out to your University alumni network of I picked up from Rahul Iyer’s article.

This is something I did once I arrived to Vancouver.

1. First, go to the college or university you graduated from on LinkedIn.
2. Go to the page and click “See alumni”.
3. At this point, you can now break down your search. I looked up product manager Vancouver, and it gave me a list of people who were in the Vancouver area and were product managers.
4. I either sent them a LinkedIn message (you can use LinkedIn premium for a month), or you can use the chrome extension hunter.io to find people’s emails. 9/10 times it would get their email.
5. I kept it short and simple: The Subject line was “U of A alumni in product management moving to Vancouver, looking for advice” and from there I would go into more details of my situation. This had a very high response rate.

That said, this was not the best method of building my professional network. Instead, one method helped me lay 90% of my network foundation in Vancouver.

Ready for it?

Use Slack!

You’ve probably used Slack at some point (especially if you’re in tech), or, at the very least, have heard of it.

Slack has become a powerful tool not just for companies to use, but communities have formed. If you want to connect with other Ruby on Rails developers, or film lovers, it’s very easy to find Slack teams with a specific focus.

Here is what I did with Slack.

I joined a couple of Product Manger slack teams.
One Slack team I joined was ProductManagerHQ. Within this slack team, there were a number of channels, including one specifically for Vancouver. Perfect! I posted on the channel along the lines of the following:

Hi! My name is Paul, and I’ve been doing product management in Edmonton for about 3.5 years. I am thinking about moving out to Vancouver over the next few months, and would love to chat about your experiences. Thanks!

Shortly after, I received a message (thanks Eric) from a member of the channel, and he invited me to a different Slack team, called Product of Vancouver, which was specific for product people in Vancouver.

I posted the same message as above, and I had a number of product managers reach out to me, including a number who had moved from Edmonton. I had some chats, some phone calls, and some video chats.

One of the most important things that I asked, and you should as well, is to ask if they know anyone else or other companies you should talk to, knowing what you are looking for. Now, when you’re beginning, it’s OK to not have a picture perfect idea of what you’re looking for, but you should constantly be working on that as you go along.

From there, I would follow up with the person they would recommend I talk to. For a number of people, they were already on the Slack team, else I got an email introduction or I reached out to them myself (either asking for their email from the person I talked to, or using Hunter.io to find their email).

These were great initial chats and helped get my name out there, and got me in contact with people in the field. They said that I need to come out for Product Camp, which was a conference in February.

Now, as Ramit mentioned in the above video, one of the most important things that you MUST do is visit the city for a time.

If you are really serious, this won’t be an issue for you. If you’re in a situation where the flights are expensive, or your funds are limited, listen to what Ramit says. This is a decision that can potentially impact the next several years of your life, you can fork over some money for the flights, whatever it may be.

Now, everyone said to come out to the conference in February (which I did), but I also came about in mid January for 1.5 weeks. This wasn’t a vacation (although in some of the downtime I had I visited friends or did tourist things), but instead it was me meeting with the people I had been talking with through email or slack.

These were informal chats: I didn’t go in throwing my resume in their face asking for a job. I just had casual chats, and while most of these companies had openings, I wasn’t focused on that. It was more about getting a feel for the product community in the Vancouver area, and to get to talk to people face to face that I have been chatting with through email or Slack the last couple of months.

Plus, when you’re only in town for a few days, people are more willing to fit you in their schedule.

From there, I received more introductions to other product manager or companies, and some of these talks I had when I was there, or continued them when I went back to Edmonton.

Here were my results:

I had a large network established in Vancouver. Most importantly, I kept in touch with them as I began to prepare in moving out to Vancouver. I would continue our Slack or email talks. I kept them updated on my progress. They knew I was serious because I came out to Vancouver to talk further.

If someone tells you that you should reach out to someone, or a company, keep them updated on that. Show that you’re serious. Tell them when you’ve had a chat with the person they recommended, or that you sat down with someone at the company they recommended. You would be surprised how few people actually follow through with what they suggest, but even less, people will not tell them about it.

I also had a few job interviews. I had a number of product people who I sat down with send me recent openings at their company, and I was able to interview with a few companies. Some I didn’t get very far in the interview process, while others I got very far in the interview process. Now, not being in Vancouver did work against me (and one company was upfront on that), but they were good experiences to have. That said, had I just randomly sent them a resume without getting to know anyone there, I don’t think I would have had any interviews.

Most importantly, I now had a solid foundation for my professional network in the Vancouver area.

When I moved out (which I did in late April 2017), I didn’t have to start from ground zero. A couple of weeks before moving, I began to set up meetings so I could hit the ground running when I arrived in Vancouver.

Before concluding, I do want to make a list of some of the tools I used in this process.

Now, I’m sure I could’ve found better tools for the process, but this is what worked for me.

• Slack. As mentioned, this was the #1 means of me getting in contact with product people in the Vancouver area. I used Slackbot for reminders like followups or setting up meetings. Here is a list of over 400 Slack communities.
• Insightly. This is what I used to keep track of who I talked to, where I talked to them, and who they were connected to. I didn’t do anything fancy with it. I used the chrome extension to auto-add contacts and email conversations while using gmail. I would tag them accordingly, such as where I met them (whether through a slack team or other means), and connected them to others in my list (for example, if they were given as an introduction to another). This helped me keep track of these connections between people.
• Bananatag and Boomerang for Gmail. I used this for reminders if people didn’t get back to me within a set amount of days, or if someone was out of office, I could bump the message back up to the top of the inbox at a set date.
• Trello. More for basic tasks, like “look into company x” or “reach out to joe bob”
• Pen and paper: For my chats, whether over the phone or in person, I would keep notes of what they said. Easy to do follow ups or remember something interesting that they said.

In Conclusion -

Moving to a new city is tough, especially if you don’t have a job ready to go when you get there, or you don’t know anyone. However, with a little bit of work, it’s easy to start laying the foundations of your professional network in the area you are thinking about moving.

Once you go out for a visit prior to moving, you’ll have a very solid foundation of who to talk to. You show people that you’re serious by coming out for a visit. From there, you can return home, keep these conversations going, and prepare for your move.

In my next post, I will write about what I did when I moved out Vancouver, and what my process and experiences were like.

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Originally published at www.pmpaul.com on May 19, 2017.