In the past, most tech companies only hired product managers with a CS degree or engineering experience. But over the years hiring managers have come to realise that product sense, customer empathy and knowing how to collaborate with engineers does not require a technical background.
Today, someone like me, a fashion design grad, can become a tech product manager at a company like Atlassian.
Whether you are working in tech and trying to pivot to product, trying to make the change to tech, or finishing up study and looking for your first full time role, I’m hoping this will give you some insight into one of the many different paths into product management, a few tips for applying for PM roles and the PM interview process, and last but not least some confidence that you don’t need a tech background to land a job in product management.
Now I know what you’re wondering — how on earth did a fashion designer become a product manager?
After graduating from Fashion design at university, I went to work in the fashion industry running an ecommerce site for a fashion label for almost 4 years before making the switch to tech.
Believe it or not, that is where my passion for product was first sparked. I ran everything in that store — I selected and photographed the products, when the orders came in, I packed and shipped them to customers. The most crucial and informative part of my role however, was that I answered every email and took every phone call from our customers.
I spent hours on the phone helping them understand more about our products, learning about how they used them, where they wore them, what they wanted, what fit well and what didn’t, how they wanted it packed and shipped. Little did I know that I was building that core skill of customer empathy and understanding the user experience which is so crucial to product management.
A few years later I was looking to move into tech as I’d always had a keen interest in it, and a friend of a friend offered me a role in his tech startup doing anything that wasn’t development. There were 4 of us in the company, the Founder, a UX designer, a developer, and me. I have to admit I was super overwhelmed when I first started. I didn’t know what to do or how to work in a tech company and there were so many new terms and phrases like Agile and Scrum that I’d never heard of before.
I tried my hand at a few things like marketing and sales, but I found my comfort zone working in tech support. I loved getting on the phone and talking to our customers, learning about who they were, why and how they were using our software, and what problems they were having with it.
I found it immensely satisfying finding solutions and workarounds to the problems they were having, or better yet, passing their feedback on to the development team and actually getting them fixed. I learned the product and how our customers used it so well, that the dev team started to get me to test their fixes before they released them, and even asked my advice on how to improve the user experience based on what I knew of our customers.
Eventually I got tired of putting out the same fires again and again. I wanted to get ahead of them, and build fireproof features instead of firefighting all day. I asked one of the investors of our start up, who was and an ex Atlassian, ex Twitter product manager, to mentor me. His best piece of advice to me at that time was —
“Get involved in the product industry — go to meet ups and meet product managers, get amongst it!”
So I did. I went to meet up’s every week, I started learning about this thing called a roadmap, and why prioritisation is the never ending task for product managers.
I spoke to as many product managers as I could, learning about what they were working on, what problems they were working on. Most were disinterested in talking to me at first — I was just a noob who wasn’t yet a product manager. But little by little I learned the language they used and found little ways to start conversations. I remember one of my first successes was when I’d overheard the developers at work complaining about having to change sections of code from one language — Angular, to another, React. I had no idea what that meant, I just knew it was a massive pain in the butt for them. So I casually dropped that into conversation one time at a networking event and suddenly saw the product manager I was talking to’s face light up! ‘Me too!’ He exclaimed. He then proceeded to tell me about all his product management problems around it and we had a really great conversation.
I went on to form a strong network of friends who were trying to break into product or newly minted product managers. Years later we are now all seasoned PM’s who share tactics and support each other as a peer mentor group.
I also took my learnings back to work.
I asked our product manager about the roadmap and his pain points with it and learned about his struggle with investors always wanting to know what he was going to build in 12 months time. It was an impossible task for a small agile team working in a totally new space, who were still trying to find product market fit. But without that 12 month plan, the investors weren’t willing to invest more money — it was a chicken and egg problem.
I then started to hang out with the development team a lot more. I asked if I could join in their ‘daily stand up’ meeting where they all get together for 5 -10 minutes each morning and talk about what they’re planning on doing for the day. I suggested I could tell them which bugs were most urgent at stand up and they could let me know which ones were going to get fixed soon. I started picking up more and more of the dev’s language as well just by interacting with them every day.
One day I suggested, how about instead of just pinging them on slack about these bugs I’m finding with customers, I can write them as user stories and create tickets in your backlog. I worked with them to learn what amount of detail they needed in these tasks in order to work on them. And just like that, I’d added ‘user story and acceptance criteria writing’ to my repertoire.
Another time, my product manager was working on a customer problem that I knew inside out, so I asked if we could work on it together. We drew it all out on a whiteboard, ideating and refining our ideas down. Then when we thought we had a viable solution, I called up some of my regular customers and we ran it past them for feedback together. Soon after, I launched my first feature with the product manager! It was just a single button that was added to the screen but it solved a huge problem that was being experienced by almost every customer we had, and in some cases was losing customers and sales.
Now my role in this was not as the product manager directly, I was learning the process through doing it, but it meant that when it came around to job interviews, even though I didn’t yet have the job title, I could say that I helped deliver the feature from beginning to end. I could demonstrate that I knew how to do it, and had direct experience.
Little by little I had been building these product management skills, and finding ways in my job to take the burden off my team and get experience at the same time.
In my interview I could comfortably say that I could:
- Explain the challenges of creating a roadmap in a funded early stage start up;
- Write user stories for bugs in the backlog;
- Identify customer problems that were having a big impact;
- Collaborate with design and PM to ideate and create a new solution;
- Test solution ideas with customers for feedback;
- Launch new features to market with marketing and supporting documentation.
These were the examples that I actually used in my first ever product management interview which landed me my first real PM job.
I later asked my manager why he hired me over other candidates and he told me it was because I spoke passionately about wanting to solve customer problems, because that’s what’s really at the heart of product management — it’s not about the solution you build, it’s about the problem you solve.
I didn’t have any certifications at the time, to be honest it was because I didn’t have the money to do one, but I did do a course shortly after which luckily was covered by my new employer. If you have a training budget make sure you use it! I’m a big fan of learning inside and outside the workplace, I do any free course that looks relevant if I have the time, and I always use my training budget for courses or books to help up-skill myself.
So, that was my journey, but I promised you two other things, tips for applying for PM roles, and tips for PM interviews.
My top tips for applying
My first tip here is making sure the role you are applying for is a good fit. A lot of people apply for any role with PM in the title just thinking they’ll take whatever they can get. They send the same cover letter, the same CV and just change the company name and expect that to work. Of all the jobs I’ve ever applied for, the ones where I’ve made it to the interview stage were the ones where I could draw some sort of link back to industry experience, my interests or things I’ve studied.
For my first PM role, it was for a large old accounting software company which was the incumbent in the market. The startup I’d been working at was also in the accounting software industry so I figured they’d wanted me because I knew the customer persona’s already. What also worked in my favour was that they were loosing market share to a hot new player in the industry, so getting some from a start up helped them get fresh ideas and perspectives to help them with that battle.
My second PM job was as a Machine Learning/Data product manager for a software company which also had accountants as one of it’s personas. What got me that job was I mentioned that I’d been involved with hackathons where we’d played with Googles ML models to do mini projects, and I’d done some free courses on data visualisation in my own time to up-skill. I had no direct experience but they could see I was passionate about it to learn about it in my spare time, and also accountants were one of their key personas for their product, so there was some domain knowledge there too.
So I encourage you to think about what industry/domain experience or expertise you can bring to the table with the jobs you apply for.
- Are you a consumer of one of their products?
- Do you know the persona of one of their key consumers really well via industry experience?
- Do you have a particular interest in that industry or product that you can show via a side projects or your own research?
All these things not only make you a more desirable candidate, but will also result in you owning a product you love in the long term, as I can tell you now, it’s hard to manage a product you aren’t passionate about.
The other thing I mentioned earlier was tailoring your cover letter and CV. I have helped review CV’s for many friends and acquaintances applying for roles, and I can tell you now, everyone who I’ve helped make changes to their CV, has gone through to the first interview. And everyone who I’ve given interview tips has made it to at least the second interview.
The number one mistake I see is people not answering every bullet point in the job description in their CV. You can think of it like a checkbox list — they are looking for someone who it’s all those points, and if you want to get a call back, you have to do that in your CV, not wait and try and do that in the interview itself.
If you can’t think of examples from your current workplace or experience, pull from personal experience. Perhaps you worked on a uni project or a side project or a social group where you demonstrated some of those qualities. Employers don’t really care where it was that you did it, they just want to know that you can.
Next is language. You want to speak their language. You can read up on it by reading through their website. There are some subtleties that you may not even realise make a difference subconsciously when they are judging you — if you talk like them they are more likely to see you as a good fit. One example, my previous company talked about users as ‘clients’ whilst my current company calls them ‘customers’ it’s subtle but if you say ‘clients’ to them they give you a funny look and correct you! I remember another interview where they got really excited after I’d responded to one of their questions saying ‘you’re using exactly the same language we use to speak about that, that’s fantastic!’. They felt like I was already part of their team, and could imagine working with me.
You should also prioritise showing your responsibilities and achievements on your CV. I see people taking up a lot of space writing lists of tools that they can use, or personal qualities they have, and I always tell them to scrap that part. Unless it’s a hard requirement for the job, spelt out in the job description, people don’t really care that you know how to use Excel or Jira or Outlook. They trust that if you’re smart enough and you don’t have experience in it, you’ll learn it on the job. So save yourself that space and use it for talking about your achievements instead!
My top tips for interviews
If you can, always apply for a few different roles at the same time, and apply for the one you want the least, first. Each interview you do will give you confidence and experience that you can use at the next one, so by the time you get to the one you really want, you’ll be feeling and acting confident. Interviewing at different places also helps if you happen to be successful at more than one, you’ll have bargaining chips when it comes to negotiation, pitting offer against another to make sure you get the best deal.
When preparing for your interview, write yourself a list of all the stories you can tell, and for each one, list out what skills/values each story demonstrates. Think of examples of both hard and soft skills — times when you’ve delivered a project or product and achieved a result. As well as times when you’ve demonstrated interpersonal skills like managed conflict between two people, or an angry customer or received challenging feedback from someone. How did you react? What did you learn? Would you do the same thing if you were in that situation again?
Stories of failure and learning also make great interview stories. Talking about a time when you made a mistake, learned from it and then at a later time when you came across that situation again, demonstrated your learning by doing things differently, makes for a powerful story showing both skill and self awareness.
At Atlassian we also like to use the STAR method of asking and answering interview questions — S ituation, T ask, A ction, R esult. what was the situation, what task did you have to do? What Action did you take? And what was the result? A lot of people forget to talk about the result. Another thing is to mention what your role was in that situation — were you leading the process? Or were you collaborating with someone?
One more thing to do just before the interview is take time out to slow your breathing down.
Calm = Confident
A lot of people talk fast when they’re nervous and that can lead you to ramble in your job interview. Before your interview, take 10 minutes to just sit and be still and quiet, and try and slow your breathing by taking a few long slow deep breaths. This will lower your heart rate, and make you 10X more calm for your interview. If you’re less nervous, hopefully you’ll enjoy it more as well. Looking happy and like you’re having fun in the interview, will make you come across as someone who fits in well with the team, giving you bonus points as well.
One other aspect to PM interviews is getting a task to do, either on the spot as a whiteboard challenge or as a take home task. If you’re doing a take home task I’d encourage you to get feedback on it if you can, from a peer or someone working as a PM. Focus on the process and being able to explain why you made the decisions you did, and what assumptions you made along the way.
If you’re doing an in person white board challenge, don’t be afraid to go through iterations as you go. Draw out what you’re thinking, and talk out loud about your though process as you go, explaining when you pivot or have an idea.
There are many other resources out there for product management interviews, but these are the ones that have worked for me, I hope they help give you confidence as well. Good luck!
