UWPM Newsletter: Landing your first Product Role
Edition 3
In this edition of the UWaterloo Product Management Club Newsletter we will be sharing tips for getting experience to build your resume to land your first product role.
🗓 Upcoming Events:
Blueprint x UWPM Product Night- Tuesday July 11th from 7-9pm at E7
An evening filled with networking, panel discussions, and free food. Panelists include industry PM’s with experience at enterprise companies and start-ups.
📰 Tech news:
Meta launches Twitter rival, Threads
📙 Resource of the Week:
This edition’s Product Management Book: Decode and Conquer
This book will help you understand and prepare for PM interviews
🔍Product Opportunities:
Check out UWPM’s exclusive job opportunities page, where our team collects all PM-related internship postings we see in a consolidated view!
Fall Opportunities on our radar:
Product Manager Intern at Zeitro
Product Operations Intern at Blackberry
Technical Program Manager Intern at Oracle
Product Partnerships Intern at Skydio
🚨 Building your “Product” Experience
What experience should you have to get your first product role?
Many times it’s challenging to land a Product role as your first internship. One of the best ways to gain relevant experience that is transferrable to product roles is to find tasks in your current role that are similar to the work PM’s do. If you work at any sort of tech company where there are PM’s- ask to shadow them, set up coffee chats and even let your manager know you are interested in Product- they can advocate for you and help you gain visibility into what PM’s do.
Every role can be a valuable asset to have as PM’s wear many hats, they can come from many different backgrounds. There’s a few different common routes to product, which include SWE → PM, Design → PM and Business Roles/Consulting → PM. All of these roles work closely with PMs and have different insight from their own roles that they can leverage as a PM (we will share more in-depth guides later on transitioning from each of these roles to being a PM).
Volunteer. One of the best ways to get product experience is through student organizations (such as UWPM, Blueprint, Tech+, Hack the North, UWUX, and many more). Keep your eyes peeled as many of these organizations release applications a term in advance. These are excellent ways to get first hand Product experience to test the waters and see if you like Product and build your resume.
Remember, Product internships can always seem scarce and harder to find than other roles. Don’t let that discourage you from immersing yourself in other roles that you have as all your experiences will shape you to becoming a better PM.
Immerse yourself in a product world:
Start living and breathing product (we don’t mean that literally). These are a set of smaller things you can do in your life on a day-to-day basis that can help change the way you think about products.
As ironic as it will sound, by signing up for this newsletter and reading this you have already taken a step to become more product-oriented. There are a ton of really good product newsletters and podcasts out there (we can have a whole separate post on that). Even spending 30 minutes every week reading these newsletters can be a game changer in how you think about various products. I was signed up for multiple product newsletters for around a whole year before I landed my first product role and can definitely credit some of the newsletters for shaping my product thinking.
Get comfortable cold-messaging people on LinkedIn who you think have interesting product roles and set up coffee chats with them. You will quickly be able to see that every PM operates differently and has their own unique journey, this is one of the best ways to learn about the dynamic nature of the role.
Finally, take courses that can help you become a better PM. Whether it is higher level Software Architecture courses to improve your technical skills to be able to converse to your engineering counterparts once you’re a PM or courses that are much more design focused. Identify those gaps that you think your profile has to being a well rounded PM and work to fill them.
PM Side Projects:
PM Side Projects aren’t as black and white as they are for Engineering Roles- for PM’s it is valuable to do Product Case Studies. This will help you become a better product thinker, build a product portfolio and even write about your experiences going through the case studies. You can Google Product Case Studies and find examples of what other PMs have done in the past or even think or your own. Ideate on a business problem that you have seen or experienced and go through the process of how you would solve that problem as a PM. Sometimes you can even decide to attend a Hackathon as a PM or more product focused contributor to the Hackathon team and take a different outlook at contributing to your team.
📌Join our Discord Community
Want to connect with other students such as yourself interested in Product? Join our Discord Community, Invite Link Here. Use our Discord Community to connect with other students and alumni to learn more about different opportunities in Product, practice mock interviews + resume critiques and more!
👋Feel free to reach out
Thanks for following us along this journey! We hope you learned something from this edition of the newsletter. Feel free to drop a line to introduce yourself and reach out if you have any questions.
Until next time,
- UWPM Team