Breaking into product management can seem daunting. We can assure you, it gets easier after your first job search!
Have you checked your resume to ensure it focuses on strategy, technical ability, or something else? How do you talk about your personal projects? What skills do you include?
We’ve helped thousands of product managers break into the field, and these five entry-level product manager resume templates and cover letter writing hacks are the result of what we’ve learned.
What Matters: Your Skills & Work Experience
The first thing you have to establish on your entry level product manager resume is that you have the right technical skills for the job.
Read the job description of the job you’re interested in. If you have any of the skills mentioned, add them to your resume.
Don’t go overboard. You want to include 5-7 of your strongest skills. The ones you wouldn’t mind being interviewed on.
Here are a few ideas:
9 Top Entry Level Product Manager Skills
- Microsoft Excel
- PowerPoint
- Power BI
- Data visualization
- Customer retention
- Regression analysis
- SQL
- Attribution
- Google Analytics
Sample Entry Level Product Manager Work Experience Bullet Points
If your skills section is to pass the multiple choice part of the test, the work section is to pass the essay section. Here you want to demonstrate how you’ve used your aforementioned skills in practice.
Is your background in development? Then make that the focus. Are you more of a data analyst? Center your work experiences on that.
The key is to call out, then emphasize, the skills that you’re bringing to product management. It’s the beauty of such an ill-defined job title, a lot of skills can be useful in different contexts.
Here are a few samples:
- Analyzed Google Analytics, discovering age gaps, and suggested marketing solution that closed age gaps by 14%
- Collaborated with product managers to determine drop in subscribers, and modeled potential solutions in SQL, effectively increasing subscribers by 8%
- Tracked marketing data across social media platforms, and problem solved with 3 product managers to run A/B testing to determine optimal ad placement
- Scoped out features, created basic wireframes, and built the product roadmap for a mobile app that allowed users to vote on which band should play the spring concert NYU
- Conducted user research interviews and metric tracking in Google Analytics to optimize feature set, which improved daily engagement by 16%
Top 5 Tips For Your Entry Level Product Manager Resume
- Focus on what’s in the job description
- What a product manager does varies from company to company. That’s why it’s so important you customize your resume for each job description. Update both your skills and some work experience bullet points to make them as relevant as possible.
- Always measure your impact
- Product managers need to focus on measurable impact. It’s just part of the job. Not focusing on your impact as a product manager in your past roles is therefore a huge red flag to prospective employers!
- Project ideas can get creative
- A huge part of product management is project management. Can you demonstrate you’ve owned an end-to-end project before? Can be for a club, for friends, for a reunion, a personal project, anything!
- Highlight your education
- When you’re looking for that first product management role, your education might be your biggest asset. Make it front and center! Ensure you have a dedicated “education” section with relevant courses listed.
- Keep your bullet points concise
- Real estate is valuable on your resume. Especially if you want to keep it to one page. Your work experience bullet points should be concise but jam packed with useful information. Be specific about your contribution then the overall impact of the project.
Frequently Asked Questions
- Should I put a career objective on my entry level PM resume?
- More times than not, the answer is no. The exceptions are if you are willing to customize it for each company or if you need to convey something not in your resume (like a career change).
- Do I include my non-relevant work experience?
- If you demonstrated skills that are valuable to product management, then absolutely! Most jobs require project management to some capacity, so it’s always a safe fall back. It’s a good idea to delve into how these experiences translate well into product management when writing a cover letter.
- Which template should I use?
- Any template (within reason) can be made to work well as long as there is ample spacing and easy-to read font. These resume templates have been optimized for that already.
