Breaking into product management can seem daunting. You have the right skillset; you’re able to communicate with technical colleagues and know just what your users want.
How can you translate this ability into a professional resume that will convince recruiters to give you an interview?
That’s what we can help with. Since the start of BeamJobs, we’ve helped thousands of PMs land their first jobs. These three associate product management resume templates have worked to accomplish that goal, so they’re a great place for you to get started building a resume.
What Matters: Your Work Experience & Skills
For any given associate product manager role, there are usually hundreds of applicants you’re competing with.
That can seem overwhelming but the upside is that most of your competition doesn’t have experience crafting product manager resumes.
So, to stand out, you need to focus primarily on your skills and your work experience.
Recruiters use the skills section to disqualify potential product managers. They are looking that you have the bare minimum technical requirements they know you’ll need for the role.
That’s why it’s vitally important you update your skills for each associate PM job you apply to.
With that said, here are the most popular skills recruiters are looking for in associate product managers.
9 Most Popular Associate
Product Manager Skills
- Data analysis
- Tableau
- Microsoft Excel
- Statistics
- SQL
- Customer segmentation
- CAC, LTV
- A/B testing
- Google Analytics
Sample Associate Product Manager Work Experience Bullet Points
As a product manager, your performance is usually easy to measure. Did you have a measurable impact on important business outcomes with your work?
This means your associate PM resume needs to convince a recruiter that you can have such an impact.
How do you do this?
Through the use of quantifiable metrics. Even if your only work experience isn’t directly relevant to product management, you want to showcase that you know numbers matter.
So, whether it’s on your personal projects or your non-relevant work experience, try to focus on the impact of your work.
Here are a few examples:
- Partnered with the sales team to test multiple pricing strategies which ultimately led to an increase in average order size of 17%.
- Standardized product funnel reporting in Google Analytics which reduced errors in reports by 11%.
- Implemented A/B testing strategy using Google Optimize to test various calls to action, improving customer conversion rate by 22%.
- Identified users most at risk of cancellation through product usage and proactively offered discounts, improving monthly retention rate by 3 basis points.
Top 5 Tips For Your Associate Product Manager Resume
- Focus on your technical skills
- Soft skills don’t really mean much without context. “Analytical” means nothing. That’s why your skills section should focus on your technical skills. Only include those skills you’d be comfortable being interviewed on.
- Make any experience relevant
- If you don’t have relevant product management experience yet, don’t worry! Just show you know what product managers focus on and that is metrics. Did you improve the speed of a process? Improve customer satisfaction? Any success can be roughly quantified.
- Include personal projects
- If you don’t have much experience yet, you should aim to include a “projects” section on your resume. What are the skills you’ve developed that will make you an effective PM? How did you learn them?
- Don’t overload your skills
- It’s a big, giant red flag to recruiters if you overload your “skills” section. No-one expects you to be familiar with 10 programming languages and know every AWS product. You’ll want to show a strong competency in a few, focused skills.
- Customize your career objective
- Look, everyone wants recognition. And that goes for companies too. It’s silly but if you include a customized sentence in your resume objective for each company you apply to, you’ll likely get more interviews.
Frequently Asked Questions
- Should I talk about my certifications and education?
- I know, I’m leading the witness here. Yes, you should include all relevant certifications and education you have. These should have their own dedicated sections. Within your education section, talk about relevant classes you took as well (like statistics, computer science, etc.).
- What’s the best associate PM resume format?
- Universally, any resume that is easy to read is a well formatted. You shouldn’t go overboard with pictures and icons, but use plenty of white space, large fonts, and write as concise as you can.
- Does my cover letter just rehash my resume?
- It should give more context for the accomplishments on your resume. Remember, your resume should focus on your impact. Generate a cover letter that fleshes out the details of those accomplishments that are relevant to the job description.
