You can lead a team to build exceptional products to solve users’ problems. You’re analytical, a great project manager, and can communicate with technical co-workers and management alike.
How do you translate all these skills into a director of product management resume that will land you that interview?
That’s what we can help with. We’ve helped thousands of PM directors land jobs. These five director of product management resume examples and write my cover letter guide distill what we’ve learned in the process.
What Really Matters: Your Experience & Your Skills
Not all of your resume sections are created equally. At this point in your product management career, recruiters are focusing on answering two questions:
- Do you have the right technical skills to navigate their tech stack?
- Do you have a track record of delivering measurable, meaningful results?
The first question is answered largely through your skills section. The key here is not to have a laundry list of every technology and tool you’ve ever heard of.
When it comes to your skills section, it is better to be a master of a few skills than a jack of all trades. Read the job description and any skills that are mentioned that you have should be on your resume.
9 top director of
product management skills
- Product roadmaps
- Google Analytics
- Budgeting
- KPI creation
- Hiring
- A/B testing
- SQL
- Software development
- User interviews
Sample director of product management work experience bullet points
If your skills section is the multiple choice test, your work experience section is the essay section.
For your skills, recruiters are looking to check a box (do you have the bare minimum requirements?). Conversely, your work experience needs to definitively convey that you will have an impact in the PM director role they’re looking to fill.
How do you do that? The same way you decide if a new product feature is working: through the use of metrics!
When it comes to your resume, numbers speak louder than words. Provide context for your skills, then talk about how you used those skills to drive business impact.
Here are a few examples:
- Identified areas of the product that led to higher customer retention and created automated triggers to alert users to these features, improving annual retention by 7 basis points.
- Oversaw the expansion of the product team to 5 PMs and engineers to over 20
- Led the expansion of the product into the virtual ticketing space which over the course of 3 years grew from $0 to $3M in annual revenue
- Collaborated with Chief Product Officer and CEO to define and execute product roadmap for 2022, improving customer conversion rate by 17%
- Implemented a robust A/B testing and reporting infrastructure that reduced time to implement A/B tests by 11%
Top 5 Tips for Your Director of Product Management Resume
- It’s all about project ownership
- At this point in your career, you’re being hired to take projects from idea inception all the way through to getting your new product or feature into the hands of users. Focus on this overall process instead of getting lost in one aspect of it. So, for example, don’t focus only on your experience with user interviews but how you turned those interviews into something tangible.
- Talk about your experience hiring
- Hiring is one the most important responsibilities of a product management director. You wouldn’t hand the keys to your car to someone who has never driven before. Similarly, companies want to allocate budget to leaders who have experience deploying that budget to drive their targeted business outcomes.
- Your career summary needs to focus on your overall impact
- If you include a career summary, make sure it highlights something not already in your resume. For example, you might want to talk about the total revenue you’ve helped drive throughout your career or the total number of users your products have reached.
- Focus less on individual contributor work
- At the start of your PM career, your individual contributor work mattered above all. Now, though, as a leader, you want to focus on the impact of your team as a whole. What questions and processes did you establish, and how did you direct your team to establish them?
- Hit your career highlights, not every project
- Don’t lose sight of the forest for the trees. As a director, you need to focus on the big picture. Including irrelevant or hyper-specific details in your work experience bullet points might signal to the recruiter that you don’t have that high-level focus.
Make it readable. The easier you make the job of the recruiter reviewing your resume, the more likely you are to get an interview. Don’t stuff as much text as possible; instead, include ample spacing and white space to make your resume more of a pleasure to read.
As a PM director, stick to the basics: education, contact info, skills, work experience. Work experience should be the focus, so anything beyond that can pull focus, which you want to avoid.
Absolutely. This can have a dramatic impact on your likelihood of getting an interview if done right. Incorporate any relevant projects and skills that come to mind as you read the job description.
