What to focus on, what to focus on? When you have software engineering experience and product management experience, it’s not an easy call.
Since we started BeamJobs, we have helped thousands of technical product managers land new roles, helping them generate a cover letter and build stellar resumes. We learned what worked, and what didn’t, and distilled it into these three technical product manager resume templates and guide.
Getting started is the hardest part. So congrats, the hard part is over!
What Really Matters: Skills & Work Experience
When recruiters are deciding whether to give a technical product manager an interview (in the seconds they’re reviewing your resume), they’re trying to answer two questions:
- Does this person have to requisite technical skillset to communicate with software engineers and code?
- Does their past work experience convince me they’ll have a real impact?
Your skills section is where recruiters first jump. It’s the first test.
They’re just looking to check a box at this stage. Do you know a certain programming language or front-end framework for example?
To pass this part of the review, you should include skills that you have that are mentioned in the job description for the technical product manager role.
9 Top Technical Product Manager Skills
- Funnel analysis
- Customer segmentation
- Experimentation
- Statistics
- Python (Django)
- SQL
- HTML/ CSS
- Google Tag Manager
- Product analytics
Sample Technical Product Manager Work Experience Bullet Points
You’re a product manager so you know the deal. The way to indisputably show progress is by looking at the metrics. Think of a professional resume the same way.
Quantify the impact of your work. Ask a question of your work and answer with a number.
How much did improving the page speed improve conversion rate? What was the effect of a pricing change on customer LTV? How did your interventions improve customer churn?
Here are a few samples:
- Implemented an automatic caching system that improved page speed by 11 %, resulting in an incremental $375K in annual revenue.
- Created a model to identify customers at high risk of churn based on product interactions and implemented interventions to reduce churn by 7%
- A/B tested user flows for a new B2C product and incrementally improved the conversion rate by 28%
- Conducted customer surveys with 100 biggest companies and added new products to the road-map with an estimated revenue lift of $2M
- Segmented users by interactions and identified the top 10% most active customers cost 87% of bandwidth so prices were raised on that segment with no increase in churn
Top 5 Tips for Your Technical Product Manager Resume
- Your skills will pay the bills (or at least please the bill collector)
- When it comes to your skills, don’t go for the “overwhelm them with force” approach. That is, keep it to five to seven skills tops. Too many skills listed are a red flag. Focus on technical skills you’d be comfortable being interviewed on.
- Talk about your technical background
- As a technical product manager, you need to be, well technical. What is your programming experience? Were you a developer? Did you closely interact with developers? Make the extent of your technical experience clear.
- Customize each application
- Not the best news, I know. But it’s not that bad. Just look for technical skills mentioned in the job description that you have and add them to your resume. Five minutes tops.
- Choose relevant projects
- Do us a favor and re-read the job description of the job you’re looking at one more time. As you read it, do any projects you worked on come to mind? If they do, add them to your resume.
- Let your work experience do the talking
- When you’re at the point in your career where you’re looking for technical product manager roles, you likely have some experience. This should be the focus of your resume at the expense of the size of your other sections. Your education should not take up half a page.
Frequently Asked Questions
- What tone should I strike for my work experience?
- You want to be direct. You should be focusing on your impact, not your responsibilities. So not “managed product funnel” but “improved product funnel by X%.”
- How do I format my technical product manager resume?
- Make it a pleasure to read. That’s your north star. Remember, a human is on the other side here and they want an eye-pleasing resume with big font and ample white space.
- Career summary; yay or nay?
- Nay, we say, nay. Unless you’re going to customize it for each role you apply to, then it’s just not worth the real estate that could be given to more work experience.
