What I Wish I Knew as a Non-Technical Major Breaking Into PM
Advice from business major, an ex-Microsoft and Affirm Product Manager
Advice for breaking into Product Management
Looking back on my journey into product management, my biggest hurdle to overcome was actually getting the interview. It’s quite common to see on a PM job description “Computer Science degree required,” but after talking to several PMs and now being a PM myself, I can confidently say that while most PM roles require technical experience, it’s not actually necessary to be a great PM. You just need to be curious about how the technology works. Being a PM is like being an architect of a house: you understand and set the vision of how the general construction of the house is going to be built, without having to understand how to use a chainsaw. Similarly, PMs need to understand the technology of the product and how it runs without having to know how to code.
At the core, PMs are problem solvers. If you are having trouble breaking into product, then let’s tap into your creative problem solving skills and prove you have what it takes to get your foot in the door.
One of the key components of breaking into product is to have relevant experience on your resume:
- Do you talk to customers?
- Are you analytical?
- Are you results oriented?
- Can you work cross functionally with team members?
- Are you scrappy and can solve problems with little to no costs required?
- Can you prioritize tasks and effectively communicate why you did so?
These are all relevant skills recruiters look for in a PM resume that you can still get working in a non-Product Manager job.
Once you have your resume in place it’s time to get your foot in the door. The best way to do so is by leverage the power of your network to get a referral. On average, for every open PM job listing 300 people will apply. That’s a 0.3% acceptance rate, making it harder to apply for a PM job than it is to get into Harvard! Stack the odds in your favor. Reach out to alumni from your school, ask friends of friends to help make intros to companies you want to apply to or schedule coffee chats with people on LinkedIn. Getting a referral is a way to ensure that a human (i.e. a recruiter) will read your application.
Once you get interviews, how do you ace them?
There’s generally two main “product” parts to an interview:
- Product Sense: These questions are meant to test if you can think through a large, ambiguous problem and work through it to come up with concrete product ideas that users will love.
- Execution: These questions test how well you can handle the day-to-day of a PM. These questions will involve prioritization, defining success metrics, evaluating tradeoffs, and handling situations where things go wrong.
Looking back at my time trying to prepare for PM interviews I wish there was a way I could understand what a “rockstar” PM interview looked like or how to create structure around the interview questions. I cringe thinking back to my first execution interviews where I was asked:
“What metrics would you look at to evaluate the success of video ads on FB?”
I thought I just needed to state metrics like “# of views, # of impressions, # of click throughs, ROI.” I was randomly spitting out metrics and didn’t even realize that you need to provide structure to your answer.
Instead, a better answer could have centered around grouping users based on usage: low, medium, high and go into the metrics that define each user (ex: avg # messages per day, initiated messages, # group chats they participate in).Then success could be moving the largest number of users — let’s say they were medium users, into high users and creating a funnel to measure that.
Or my first Product Sense interview at Microsoft (which btw, I got rejected from) was:
“How would you design an alarm clock for a deaf person?”
Once again, I cringe at thinking of my answer to this question back then. I immediately stuttered and said, “Oh we should, um, have a wearable device that the deaf person can better feel in order to wake up, and here’s how I would design the MVP…”
Wrong. The job of a PM is to ask the right type of questions to your team.
- How are we defining “deaf” here? Partially deaf? Fully deaf?
- How do deaf people currently wake up today?
- What problems still exist that we don’t believe alarm clocks are solving today?
- How do we even define an alarm clock? Does it need to to tell time, or is it just a device that helps people wake up?
- What are some hypotheses we can come up with about designing a better alarm clock for a deaf person?
I was quick to jump to a solution which is an immediate red flag to any interviewer.
A much better answer would have been grounded in stated assumptions which would have resulted in more creative answers. For example, if we assumed the user was fully deaf, then it’s important to understand what solutions currently aren’t working for them. Perhaps a wearable is a solution but the user is a deep sleeper. As a result, they don’t really feel the alarm.
What if dramatized our “touch” sense? Or tapped into other senses like smell or sight?
- A bed that could fully shake your body if you’re a deep sleeper
- An alarm clock that could wake people up with the smell of bacon
- An alarm clock that could auto-open curtains so you get a lot of light to come in
As you can see, now that we’ve defined and clarified assumptions, it makes the interview a lot easier and a lot more fun to come up with solutions.
If you’re looking for great case samples of interviews and want to better understand what a “rock star” interview looks like I’d really recommend Product Alliance’s Hacking the PM Interview, which teaches you how to answer ANY question thrown your way. Senior PMs from top companies show you what 10/10 responses look like, with the attention to the minute details like what to whiteboard, framing your answers, and what body language you should exhibit.
There’s also Core Company Deep Dives for future PMs that want further guidance on their PM journey. In addition to my own contribution, Product Alliance’s courses also feature content from Product Managers working at Google, Facebook, Amazon, Airbnb, and more top companies.
My Background: How I realized I wanted to be a Product Manager
If you’ve made it this far, then perhaps I should tell you a bit more about myself: My name is Christina Gee and I come from a non-technical background. I was a business major at Babson College and made the switch from marketing to product management.
But how did I end up in Product Management?
I had always been that kid that asked “why” or volunteered to take initiative for a sports team or club because I enjoyed working with others and wanted to be involved in improving the program. I got so much satisfaction from looking back and being able to say “Yes we accomplished that and look how far we’ve gotten.” In undergrad at Babson College, a friend actually recommended product management as a potential career for me because I’ve always been so curious about the “why” when it comes to both people and products.
The idea of talking to customers and building products to solve their problems appealed to me, but as a business major at a non-target school for tech, it was difficult for me to find PM internships. I decided that while I still wanted to be a PM and wanted to learn more about the role, I was going to stay open to pursuing other opportunities, and accepted a Product Marketing Manager internship at Microsoft.
At the conclusion of the internship, I accepted a role as a Microsoft Business Intelligence Analyst. I realized that while I really enjoyed analyzing data to understand consumer behavior, I also wanted to be able to act on the information I was analyzing to solve consumer problems. I knew I wanted to not only understand people but also create and build products to help them. After building up my data analysis skills in this role, eventually I was able to pursue PM at Microsoft and now Affirm.
If you’re interested in hearing the full story of how I made the switch from marketing to product management I encourage you to look at the listen to this bamboo&glass podcast.
Good luck with your interviews — I hope my article was useful! If you have any questions feel free to add me on LinkedIn or leave a comment! :)
I’m also including some other PM articles down here that I found particularly useful as I was trying to make the transition:
