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Prepare for your first PM job

Landing the first PM job is challenging. I collect some practical approaches to help you prepare for the coming journey.

The first job is always the hardest one to get. You will find challenges when stepping into Product Manager after graduating from college or transforming from other jobs.

Sharpen your experiences. You have more experience than you think.

Let's start by answering the question: What are working experiences?

Working experiences are what you have learned from your past work, and you can apply them to your current and future jobs.

No matter what kinds of work you have done, your experiences depend on how you learn and your ability to apply them. You have done many jobs or projects in the past few years. Your objective is to take a step back, think about them, and then find what you can learn and apply them to the coming PM jobs. During my career, I always saved two reflection weeks every year to review my work. Every time I did, I always learned new things. Here is why I said you have more experience than you think if you know how to learn.

The first step is to understand the Product Manager's competencies. The easiest way to do this is to analyze the job description by searching LinkedIn.

You can focus on the JDs from the companies you want to apply. This step helps you narrow down the learning area and build your curriculum.

Next, review all the things you have done in the past 1-2 years (or more if you can recall them), and focus on the following areas:

When reviewing, find the relevance between your past work and the jobs. Then, think about what you have done in the past that can apply to the PM jobs. A tip here is to pay attention to things that make you struggle or fail, then ask yourself, "What could I do to improve if I do it again?"

Here are a few examples:

Think about all of that as building a product. An exercise, an event, or a community are all products.

Write down everything you learn in mapping between competencies and lessons learned. You will gain more experience by learning from the past, even when you have not gone to any PM job.

Practice and show your PM skills.

You can apply what you learned to strengthen your skills. There are two items that you can do:

Build real products

If you have engineering skills, you can start building right now. If you can't code, no worries; many no-code platforms can help you develop your products without writing a single line of code.  Let's start with a product you find easy to build from the technology perspective. The point here is to practice the fundamental skills of a Product Manager, not to challenge your engineering skills. If you don't have any idea in mind, here are a few projects you can pick:

Analyze products and markets.

Years ago, my friend spent three months working on analyzing the Instagram app and making some suggestions for improvement. The post went viral, and she received many internship offers, including one from Instagram. In the Instagram analysis, she wrote about products, designs, user behaviors, and market landscapes using her knowledge during four years in college. She picks the products people around her use daily and reaches out to their friends and family members for user research. You can use these best practices to improve your skills.

Here are three areas that you can start with:

A skeleton to start your app analytics:

You need to write down your work and pay attention to answering the question "Why?". This exercise is challenging to do. When starting, you might find your points are not valuable, and your first analytics is short and needs more information. Don't worry, and keep practicing. Your analytic skills and critical thinking will improve along the way. These things are close to what you will do in your future PM jobs.

Feel the heat, and expand your connection.

Connect with people in your industry on Twitter, Reddit, and LinkedIn. Check the news from your community every day. You will know what is happening now, understand the everyday PM jobs, feel the upsides and downsides, and know what good and bad days for a Product Manager are. You should actively join the discussions by asking questions to learn more about the topic or sharing your points of view. Don't worry about saying something stupid. No one laughs at stupid questions from someone trying to explore the new world. If someone did, they did a stupid thing, not you. Here's the list of Twitter profiles and newsletters that share valuable points of view on Product Management. These accounts provide helpful content and help you reach the community around them.

Find your mentors

Mentors help you in multiple aspects:

ADPList is an excellent platform for finding mentors.

This post shares factors that you need to know when choosing your mentor

This article will help you understand more about mentorship

All three tactics above help you prepare yourself for your first job. I suggested building up your competencies and providing fundamentals before you go to the next step of researching, applying, and preparing for the interview. When doing those, forget about the application and interviewing process. Focus on you, your skills, and what you can learn. Overthinking the next step will annoy you and prevent you from thinking and practicing freely.

PS: I was lucky to have incredible mentors during my career, especially in the first years of my Product Management journey. Navigating your early career is challenging, and I'm happy to support you. I am available on ADPList at Mentor - Vu Tran. Feel free to reach out anytime you need my humbled advice.