You know what users want, and you know how to turn that into a concrete product feature. You have a mix of technical ability, data analysis skills, and project management experience.
How do you highlight all these skills on your principal product manager resume?
That’s where we can help. To date, we’ve helped thousands of product managers level up their resumes and move forward in their careers. These three principal product manager resume examples and guide are the culmination of what we’ve learned.
What Matters Most: Your Skills & Work Experience
There is no way around it. Your skills and your work experience resume sections will determine whether you get an interview for a given principal product manager role you applied to.
Recruiters look at your skills section with the intention of disqualifying candidates. If you don’t meet the bare minimum technical requirements they’re looking for, they’re going to put your resume in the “no” pile.
How do you avoid this? First and foremost read the job description. As you read it, do they mention skills you have that aren’t on your resume? Well, time to change that!
Here are the most common skills for principal PMs.
9 Top Principal Product Manager Skills
- Product funnels
- Customer segmentation
- Google Analytics
- SQL
- Tableau/ Looker
- Excel
- A/B testing
- Regression
- Customer interviews
Sample Principal Product Manager Work Experience Bullet Points
Now that you passed the “do you have the skills?” test, it’s time for the main event.
Now, you need to wow the recruiter with what you’ve accomplished in your past product manager roles. The best way to do that is through the use of quantifiable metrics.
Luckily, as a product manager, you’re usually optimizing for some KPI. Now is the time to showcase how you’ve focused on, and improved, those KPIs in your past roles!
When possible, reinforce your technical skills by showcasing the tools/ methodologies you used to achieve those outcomes.
Here are a few samples:
- Through extensive customer interviews identified and oversaw creation of a new product feature, improving customer LTV by 15%.
- Segmented customers based on activity within the app and educated a segment of these users on an underutilized feature, improving conversion rate by 8%.
- Created real-time reports in Google Analytics to identify likely errors in the product which reduced downtime by over 20%.
- Iteratively experimented and A/B tested on the funnel from visitor through trial signup which ultimately increased trial signup rate by 33%.
- Improved monthly customer retention by 8 basis points through automated email sequences based on activity within the product.
Top 5 Tips for Your Principal Product Manager Resume
- Focus on your impact, not your responsibilities
- Let’s make this concrete with an example. Don’t say “monitored product funnels for improvement”. Say “improved product funnels iteratively by 11%”. The latter is convincing because it shows that you, as a PM, focus on what matters most and that is measurable impact.
- Showcase your technical skills
- As a principal PM you’re going to be interacting with technical co-workers to actually deliver the product features you want to build. So, you need to demonstrate your technical know-how. Be clear about how you’ve worked with developers in the past to remove that potential doubt from the recruiter’s mind.
- Customize your resume for each job you apply to
- Yes, it’s more work. But our data suggests this has a drastic impact on your likelihood of getting an interview. You can keep it simple. Read the job description and as you do note any projects you’ve done that come to mind and skills that are mentioned that you have. Then add those to your resume!
- When it comes to text, less is more
- Keep your work experience bullet points concise and informative. You want to showcase your ability to communicate effectively. This is not the place for elaborate prose or to get into the nitty-gritty details of all the projects you’ve worked on. You can talk in detail about one or two projects when it comes time to generate a cover letter, though.
- Format your resume for a human, not a machine
- You may have heard of the big scary ATS that will automatically reject your resume. In reality, a human is more likely than not going to read your resume. So your goal is to make their job easy. Use large font, ample white space, and make your resume easy to read.
Frequently Asked Questions
- How long do I make my principal PM resume?
- Try to keep it to one page. If you have 10+ years of experience you can go to two pages as long as your resume is well formatted and easy to read.
- Which sections should I include?
- As a principal product manager, you need your work experience to be front and center. Any extra sections (like projects or hobbies) take up valuable real estate and distract from what you want the recruiter to be focused on.
- Do I include a career summary?
- In 95% of cases, no. Usually these summaries just take up space and don’t tell the recruiter anything not already in your resume. The exception is if you’re going to take the time to customize it for each company you apply to. What can I say? Companies love reading about themselves.
