Having reviewed hundreds of resumes, I’ve noticed that generally there are three elements that are missing or should be improved. I’m going to show that with an example using a specific bullet point that, of course, I’m making up now, but it reflects what I see in many resumes.
Consider this: “Owned roadmap and end-to-end development of the company’s main mobile app”.
Here are some things to improve:
- Showing impact: You have to thing that there’s limited valuable space on your resume to showcase what you can do and that if you have “Product Manager” in your title, or something to that effect, all of the table stakes skills are assumed. In this case, owning a roadmap and end-to-end development of an app is something I would assume you can do as a PM, so I would replace this with an accomplishment instead. For example, if this is an app you launched, it could be as simple as saying “Launched mobile app…” (owning is not an accomplishment, launching is). If it’s not, then you can leave this bullet point (we’ll modify it later) and talk about a feature you launched and what impact it had. For example, you could add another item that says: “Launched referral feature for existing users”.
- Quantifying results: Is there some way for you to show the scale of what you did? If you had direct impact on metrics (revenue, profit, active users, etc), you should include that! If not, like in the case of performing an analysis, you can talk about the size of the dataset or other similar scale measures.
So for our two bullet points above, we can say:
– Owned roadmap and end-to-end development of the company’s main mobile app, with 1M+ downloads in 2019– Launched referral feature for existing users, increasing referrals by 30%
- Being specific: While you absolutely should highlight skills that you have and that match the job posting you’re applying to, you should be specific about what you did and avoid buzzwords. Our two bullet points would then look something like this:
– Led end-to-end development, including roadmap, customer research and engineering backlog management of a sales management mobile app, with 1M+ downloads in 2019– Launched referral feature allowing existing users to share progress and invite friends on social media, increasing referrals by 30%
These are just a few examples but those are the main offenders for resumes that go straight to the garbage can. If you have more questions or want a detailed review, here’s how my process works.