It’s the old “chicken or the egg” question. What came first, employers wanting product managers with experience for entry-level roles or experienced product managers applying for entry-level roles?
It can seem overwhelming to try to break into product management, but that’s where we can help! Since starting BeamJobs, we’ve helped thousands of PMs get their start.
These three assistant product manager resume examples and guide, plus our free cover letter generator will help you jumpstart your career.
What Really Matters: Skills & Work Experience
When recruiters are looking at your assistant product manager resume, they’re trying to answer two questions:
- Do you have the right technical skills to do the job?
- Do you have the right mindset, as evidenced by your experience/ projects, to be an effective product manager?
With the first question, they’re looking to exclude applicants. If you don’t meet their “skills” bar, you likely won’t be getting an interview.
How do you make sure you clear this bar? Easy! Read the job description and tease out all the skills that are mentioned. Do you have any of those skills? Then put them on your resume.
9 Top Assistant Product Manager Skills
- Product funnels
- Data analysis
- Data visualization
- Customer segmentation
- LTV, CAC
- Customer retention
- Google Analytics
- Tableau
- Excel/ Google Sheets
Sample Assistant Product Manager Work Experience Bullet Points
Once you clear the “skills” bar set by the recruiter, it’s time to get down to brass tax.
At this stage, your resume has to convince the recruiter that you have the right experience and ability to be an effective product manager.
How do you do this without much relevant experience? Focus on your impact, through metrics, in your non-relevant roles. Product managers have to demonstrate their impact through measuring and improving KPIs.
By showing you’ve had a similar focus in your other roles, you show a recruiter that you know what matters and you know how to measure it.
Here are a few samples:
- Introduced a pricing experiment that improved conversion rate by 7% while also improving customer LTV by 10%
- Reduced the time to close out the store by 45 minutes by identifying tasks that took the longest then improving the speed of those processes
- Created a Twitter account focused on gaming that grew to over 6,000 followers through community engagement and new content creation
- Conducted over 50 user surveys to understand where the product was falling short then prioritized the product roadmap ultimately improving customer conversion rate by 11%
- Created automated product funnels in Tableau that reduced manual reporting time by 25 hours each week
Top 5 Tips for Your Assistant Product Manager Resume
- Any experience can be made relevant
- Look, when you’re looking for an assistant PM role recruiters understand you might not have much relevant experience. That’s okay. What’s important is you make that experience relevant to product management by focusing on your quantifiable impact.
- Focus on your technical skills
- Including soft skills like “teamwork” and “hard-working” don’t mean anything on your resume without context. The same is not true of technical skills (like Google Analytics) you include. So, focus on your technical skills in your “skills” section and provide context for soft skills in your work experience.
- Less text is more
- Keep your work experience bullet points well, to the point. Demonstrate your ability to write concisely while still conveying meaningful information. This, after all, is an absolutely vital skill for assistant product managers to have!
- Ditch the career objective
- 95 percent of career objectives are generic and don’t add anything new to your resume. As a rule of thumb, unless you’re going to customize your career objective for each company you apply to, you should leave it off altogether.
- Focus on your strengths
- Do you have a strong educational background that might convince a recruiter you’d make a good PM? Make that your focus. Have a really strong internship? Focus on that. The key is to focus on, and highlight, what will most likely get you that “we’d like to interview you” email.
Frequently Asked Questions
- How do I format my assistant product manager resume?
- Any resume format can be effective (within reason of course) as long as it’s easy to read for a human. Don’t include fancy graphics and be sure to use large font with plenty of white space. The easier you make your resume to read, the easier you make life for the recruiter.
- Does my resume need to take up a full page?
- No. If you don’t have enough experience or personal projects to take up a full page, that’s okay. Much better for your resume template to be three-fourths of a page than to ramble on just to try to fill up space.
- Should I change my resume for each job I apply to?
- Absolutely. Read the job description. As you read it, note any skills mentioned that you have and add them to your “skills” section. Make note of any projects you’ve worked on that come to mind as you read the JD and be sure to include those as well.
