Ryan Byun

How to accelerate your Product Manager job search (when your applications are being ignored): ➡️ If you don’t have enough experience for the roles, stop applying. Join a company in another function and transition to PM internally. ➡️ If you have the experience but still aren’t hearing back, tailor your resume and network to build relationships and get referrals. ➡️ If you’re struggling with interview questions, practice them daily using “Cracking the PM Interview” alone and with others on sites like tryexponent.com. 🔥 Remember: It’s the quality of your actions, not the number of applications, that will land you a Product Manager role.

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Most product managers think "searching for jobs" means one thing, while it means something completely different. If I asked you to sit down and start applying for jobs, what would be the first thing you’d do? If you’re like most people, you’d probably start by searching LinkedIn with some filters, writing a cover letter, customizing your resume, and then hitting submit. But here’s the hard truth: when you’re applying for jobs on platforms like LinkedIn or Indeed, the odds are stacked against you. You’re competing with 1,000 to 2,000 other applicants, and maybe 10-20 of them are truly qualified for the job. By the time your application reaches the recruiter or hiring manager, it’s just another “me too” submission. Their eyes glaze over. They hate this activity. Why? Because it’s repetitive. It doesn’t stand out. So how do you make your application *powerful*? Think of the last video you watched or ad you clicked on. What grabbed your attention? What made you stay or click? It comes down to two things: 1. **Intentional Intrigue** – something unique that grabs attention right away. 2. **Problem-Solution Match** – a clear, compelling reason to engage further. When it comes to applying for jobs, you need to see it through these lenses. The human brain is a pattern recognition machine. It’s wired to notice what’s different, what interrupts the usual flow. If your application looks like everyone else’s, it blends in. But if it’s unique, it disrupts the pattern—it stands out. Learn from the world of marketing and advertising. To truly stand out, your application needs to be both intriguing and aligned with what the employer is looking for. Break the pattern and show how you uniquely solve their problem. Remember, don’t just follow the crowd. Make sure your application doesn’t look like anyone else’s. That’s how you get noticed.

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How to accelerate your Product Manager job search (when your applications are being ignored)⇩ → If you don’t have enough experience for the roles, stop applying. Join a company in another role and transition to PM internally. → If you have the experience but still aren’t hearing back, tailor your resume and network to build relationships and get referrals. → If you’re struggling with interview questions, practice them daily using “Cracking the PM Interview” alone and with others on sites Exponent. 🔥 It’s the quality of your actions, not the number of applications, that will land you a Product Manager role. ׁ

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Here’s how to land your first or next Product Manager role “in this market”. This is what I’ve shared in my past ~40 coffee chats 👇 Landing a Product Manager job takes more than JUST rewriting your resume or turning on #OpenToWork (turn it on, it does help!) These are 5 things that I told people I’ve mentored - regardless of their years of experience or industry expertise (or students!) 1️⃣ Find your Niche I talk with a lot of people who share their aspirations “I want to be a product manager at Microsoft (or any company)” When I ask them these questions, 99% of them don’t have an answer: - Which part of Microsoft? Azure? Xbox? Office? Etc… - Within that group, what kind of PM? AI? Growth? Platform? Technical? B2B/B2C? The more you can narrow down your experience and find your niche, the “easier” (or at least faster) you’ll find your next role. ⭐️ Find your niche by matching your experience with: - B2B vs B2C - Industry (e.g., healthcare, developer experiences) - Technology (e.g., APIs, AI) - Internal vs External products 2️⃣ Tailor everything Resume? Tailor it LinkedIn? Tailor it Reaching out to someone? Tailor it Practicing for interviews? Tailor it Tailoring your resume (and everything) means that you should use the job description as a guide. For example, if the job description is for a technical/platform PM job: ❌ Developed the strategy and roadmap for a Notification Center - is not a tailored accomplishment ✅ Developed the strategy and roadmap for a Notification Center by collecting user feedback on API usage, and experience with platform Latency - add keywords from job description IN CONTEXT with your accomplishments. ⭐️ After you tailor everything, turn on #OpenToWork 3️⃣ Have a plan A, B, C and D Plan A: your dream jobs Plan B: jobs you are a great fit for in an industry you want Plan C: Plan B + industry from your experience Plan D: adjacent roles ⭐️ Execute these plans in parallel, but be precise about your strategy 4️⃣ Doing a project >>>>> certifications Doing a certification (in whatever you want, including PM) leaves your resume exactly the same… with one more line about the certification Spend more time thinking about building side projects/products than doing “one more certification” ⭐️Building Products also helps aspiring PMs much more than any other method 5️⃣ Networking is vital It’s important to know how to do better networking than: “can you please refer me?” Here’s how… Networking with: - Employees: approach them from a learning perspective. You want to learn about them, their experience, their role and you seek advice. Don’t ask for referral right away. - Recruiters and Hiring Managers: find them on the company page. Send them a message that includes which roles you applied to, WHY you are a GREAT fit and asking them to pass your profile to the right team What other advice do you have? — 🚀 need more help with landing your next PM role? Check my comment below! #productmanagement

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To land Director to CPO jobs, Product Leaders must leverage Executive Search firms. They hold the keys to the hidden job market. Here is a lay of the land. Aakash Gupta and I wrote in depth about this in the Product Leadership Job Search and I followed up recently with the Tech Exec's Job Search Playbook. I recommend both reads. Comment if you want contacts or my thoughts on working with them as a candidate or hiring manager

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I’ve had many people reach out to me recently, unsure how to start their careers in product management. 🧐 🪜To address this, I wrote a guide on #MindTheProduct outlining essential steps and strategies for breaking into this field. If you’re looking to make the leap, it’s for you! https://lnkd.in/eJWeMcGA #productmanagement #product

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You can't succeed as a PM without this skill. My friend Satish (ex-Meta) has helped 500+ product leaders level up their influence skills via his 4.8/5 star course. He was kind enough to share his influence tactics with me. 📌 Sign up to get them tmr: creatoreconomy.so

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Since the YC deadline to hear back for W25 is coming up next week, here’s the story of how we went from 2 students coding in an MIT dorm room to being full-time YC founders building Delve in SF. For all you founders anxiously waiting to hear back, just keep building — you’ll be successful regardless of the decision. -- In Fall 2023, my co-founder Karun Kaushik and I were studying AI at MIT and spending all of our free time building an AI medical scribe to help doctors. We had vaguely heard about YC from a friend who had just gotten accepted but had no plans of applying whatsoever. However when the YC deadline rolled around, we spontaneously decided to put in an application on the very last day. We spent that whole day in Karun’s dorm room typing up the application and filming all the required videos. We finally hit submit the minute of the deadline! By the next day we had already moved on. We went back to the usual rhythm of coding in the dorm room, calling with doctors, attending conferences, etc. If anything, we were even more motivated now to get more traction and be successful regardless. Later that week, while we were eating in the dorm kitchen, I noticed I got an email saying we had a YC interview scheduled. My heart rate spiked. I jumped up out of my seat and immediately told Karun. I never seriously considered YC, but for the first time it hit me that it might actually be a possibility. When the day of the interview rolled around, we did mock interviews with former YC founders and focused mostly on calming our nerves. More important than the actual content of the interview, we wanted to show our excitement for building and hacking together as co-founders. Unfortunately the interview caught us by surprise. The group partners didn't seem to care as much about our actual AI medical scribe. Instead, they seemed more curious about a side idea we had listed in our application that we wrote up in a day. The idea was about streamlining HIPAA compliance (since we had to go through HIPAA for our AI medical scribe). By this point, we were already seriously considering pivoting into this and had made a lot of progress on the idea. The YC interview was our tipping point Not too long after, we got an ominous email titled “YC.” We were freaked out. I could not sleep the entire night. Then, in the middle of class the next day, I got a phone call from Karun with Surbhi on the other end of the line. My heart rate spiked. I ran outside of the classroom. That turned out to be our acceptance call:) -- For everyone out there still waiting to hear back, just keep grinding. Build as if you’ve been rejected and you might just be pleasantly surprised. I’m also always here to help with mock interviews/give advice! We’ve helped a handful of friends through the YC app process and are always here to support other founders!

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This is how I coach people to land Product Manager internships and APM roles: Dedicate more time to fewer, hyper-tailored applications. Here's how: 1. Use apmlist.com to select and research the roles for which you’re the best fit. 2. Cold message people working on those teams to learn what most don’t know about the role, product, and company. 3. Tailor the content in each application to what you learned each company is looking for. Send the same resume to 100 roles and you’ll go unnoticed. Focus your efforts the right way and they won't be able to ignore you. 🔥I deep dive into these strategies in my free course to land a PM job ➡️ arijanover.com

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From Product Talk: How to Take Notes During Customer Research Interviews For those of you following along with my "Life of a Product Manager' research, in this article, I outline how I've been taking notes during my in-depth interviews. I cover why I changed my mind about recording interviews, the trade-offs between handwritten versus typed notes, and the specific details I carefully denote and how. Read more: https://buff.ly/4gn82hY ❓ How do you prefer to take notes during customer interviews, and what strategies do you use to stay engaged and maintain rapport with participants? #prodmgmt #ux #engineering

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Product Manager Interview Experience - Google The interview process: 1 recruiter phone screen 45 min product sense with a Product Manager 5 rounds with individual product managers spanning design, strategy, metrics, tradeoff, leadership, hypothetical. Spaced out across 2 months Interview questions: 1. [craft & execution + sense] - You are the PM of google flights and we need to monetize our strategy. What would you design? 2. [strategy + sense] - You are a PM at google and we are considering designing a lawn mower - what should we do? 3. [analytical + craft and execution] - You’re the PM on Search “snippets” which is an algorithmically derived tagline for organic content on search that appears under results to give people a sense of what the page is about. Say your engineering team comes to you with an improvement to the algorithm and wants to implement it - what would you do? Once you decide what to do - how would you implement this? Who would you work with? What if you implemented it and you saw paid content from advertisers take a hit? Then a couple behaviorals like why are you leaving Meta now? 4. [cross functional collaboration + craft & execution] this ended up being more strategy? — Lots of behavioral scenarios including “time you faced conflict” “time team disagreed” “what was the impact you landed” then a follow up on “you’re a PM at Snapchat - what is our 3 year strategy” 5. [googleyness & leadership] Why Google, Why are you leaving, Who are your closest ally’s on your team, What would happen if Google fired all of its PMs tomorrow? Then we broke out into a design —> design an experience as the PM of search for people to book flights who are traveling for the first time ever. Source: Glassdoor

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This is how I coach people to land Product Manager Product Manager internships and APM roles ⇩ → Use apmlist.com or APMseason.com to select and research the roles for which you’re the best fit. → Cold message people working on those teams to learn what most don’t know about the role, product, and company. → Tailor the content in each application to what you learned each company is looking for. Send the same resume to 100 roles and you’ll go unnoticed. 🔥 Focus your efforts the right way and they won't be able to ignore you.

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Leading a large product team is exhilarating but challenging, especially when managing conflicts. Here's my quick guide to fostering a culture of constructive conflict resolution: 1. Embrace Psychological Safety Create a space where team members feel comfortable voicing concerns and ideas without fear of judgment. 2. Foster Active Listening Encourage team members to truly listen to each other's perspectives to build empathy and find common ground. 3. Focus on the "Why," Not the "Who" Understand the root cause of the disagreement instead of assigning blame. 4. Facilitate, Don't Dictate Guide discussions to promote collaborative problem-solving and ownership. 5. Celebrate Diverse Perspectives Value different viewpoints to drive creative solutions and a stronger product. 6. Celebrate Wins, Big and Small Acknowledge successful conflict resolution to reinforce positive communication and collaboration. Transform conflict from a productivity killer into a tool for innovation. What are your tips for managing conflict in a product team? #ProductManagement #Leadership #ConflictResolution #Teamwork #Innovation

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I’ve been interviewing for different product roles, and have been doing a bunch of “Product Sense” interviews. —-What’s a “Product Sense” interview?—- It’s a type of product interview commonly used to evaluate a candidate’s ability to think strategically and creatively about products, users, and markets. The goal is to assess how well you can identify customer problems, design solutions, prioritize features, and articulate the value of a product or feature. These usually start with a short prompt (examples to come), and then the candidate needs to ask clarifying questions and guide the interviewer through their thinking. Think of them like consulting case study interviews, with a product focus. I’ve found that these Product Sense interviews come in 3 different flavors: Product Design, Metric Change, and Product Strategy. I’ve made my own study guides to handle these sorts of questions, and I thought I’d start sharing them here. — Product Design — Example: “You work at Meta, and we’ve decided to build something in the fitness space. What would you build?” Approach: Clarify the question, then set your goals. Identify a user segment to focus on, and brainstorm what problems they may encounter. Choose a problem, brainstorm some solutions to that problem. Choose a solution and describe what metric or metrics you’d track. — Metric Change — Example: “You work at Spotify- You come into work one day and see that song plays are down by 10%. What do you do?” Approach: In my opinion, these are some of the easiest questions to answer, because you can usually follow a standard framework to walk through them. It starts with asking clarifying questions, and then going through the major factors that could affect this change. I break it up into Internal (Metric Logger & Business factors) and External (Business Factors and Non-Business Factors) — Product Strategy — Example: “You work at Google, and you’re launching a new project management tool. What’s your pricing strategy?” Approach: The above example is specifically a pricing strategy question, but these questions have a few other variations. In addition to pricing, you might be asked questions about market entry, go-to-market strategy, and growth strategies. There’s so much more to say about all of these types of Product Sense interviews, and many resources on it. However, I found Exponent to be one of the best of those resources. They offer specialized courses for specific FAANG product interviews, a question bank forum on the types of questions you might be asked, and can set up a mock interview with other folks looking for interview practice. They're a great investment and I wouldn't have learned as much as I have without their help.

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You cannot be a great product manager if you cannot be a great leader. A common misconception I run into when people describe what they think a product manager is is that they are "independent contributors" in the sense that their deliverables are not influenced by other teams. If you've been in the world of product for awhile, you already know that this is far from the case. We may be "independent" in that we march to our own beat, but we are still "contributors" in that we are responsible for influencing, aligning, and leading others towards the big vision of our product. So, how can we do so? A great place to start is to focus on: (1) vision, (2) empowerment, and (3) execution. A clear and compelling vision is the cornerstone of any high-performing team. Without being aligned and understanding of what we're here to do, we have no where to lead. Empower your team by fostering an environment of trust and respect. Enable your teams to make their own decisions. This autonomy not only boosts morale, but also encourages accountability and innovation. Without that, you'll be doomed to micromanage which, as we all know, typically does not end well. And finally, setup effective processes and communications to execute on your vision and its strategy. Measure progress in ways that others understand. It's all about making things efficient and effective. If you have any tips and tricks to help product managers become better leaders, please share and comment below! #productmanagement #productmanagers #innovation #leadership #teamwork

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On Saturday, I met with a group of aspiring product managers, and they shared a common challenge: landing entry-level product roles. Sometimes, there are macro factors at play. Right now, the job market favors employers. There’s a surplus of experienced talent competing for limited roles, and when that happens, entry-level opportunities often get squeezed. While you can’t control the market, you can control your preparation. Keep honing your product thinking and sense. Study great products, network intentionally, listen to PM podcasts, read PM books—immerse yourself in the craft. Keep working until product management seeps out of your pores. That way, when your chance comes, you’ll be ready to shine. For those who successfully landed roles in this market, what worked for you? #ProductManagement #AspiringPMs #CareerJourney #KeepGoing

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Attention New York product managers still struggling on the job hunt. We are hosting a product manager meetup on December 10 at 6:30 PM EST focused on solving your favorite problem which is cracking the code to generate 10+ product manager interviews a week. 2024 flew by and most of you still don't have a product manager. Let's change that. RSVP in the link below and let's get you this job. https://lnkd.in/gsEDuQD3 PS Please come on time and dress to impress. Just joking!!! Come casual and comfortable. #productmanagement #productmanagementjobs #productmanagementcareers #productmanagementtransition #productgym #speedtolead

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