Your ability to pass a PM interview is directly tied to your ability to tell a good story. It doesn’t matter how many things you’ve achieved as a PM — if you can’t thread those accomplishments into a story that has a compelling beginning, middle, and end, you’ll be seen as either forgettable, having poor communication skills, or you just as an incompetent product manager. I’m not just talking about the STAR method; make the narrative compelling. Explain what the stakes were and the challenges you had to overcome to succeed. Make it sound like you went to frickin’ Mordor and back. (Obviously you should keep it believable and grounded in reality, but you get the idea).
If you’re not getting making headway in your job hunt, you might just be applying to the wrong PM jobs. Two completely different job descriptions can both be called “Product Manager”. You can apply for as many positions as you want, but recognize that most of them will be a terrible fit. It might be because they want someone with more industry-specific experience, someone more technical, someone or more customer focused. Maybe they only want people who are former scuba diving instructors and just don’t say that in the job description. If you’re applying using job boards, filter on jobs that as closely match your skillset and experience as possible.
Some product managers are hired to babysit a product and focus on incremental changes and bug fixes with no real ability to influence the major strategic roadmap. Some job-seekers like these types of Product Management roles and that’s okay. These types of PMs are incredibly valuable, especially for products in maintenance mode.
If you think you’re being lowballed on salary, you probably are. Compensation varies wildly between companies for the same role, even in the same industry. I get contacted by recruiters pretty often for PM roles, and within fintech alone I’ve seen salary ranges listed from 90k–120k anywhere to 150–190k for roles with similar experience requirements. Both were Chicago-based roles. Just because you only see lower salaries for PM positions doesn’t mean higher ones don’t exist.
Some hiring managers will completely misrepresent how much control you have over the product development roadmap, and it isn’t deliberate. They really believe that you should control the roadmap… and executive management won’t let them delegate that responsibility. Another possibility is that the hiring manager is hopeful that once they hire a group of product managers, the C-suite will actually give ownership of the Roadmap to the Product organization instead of micromanaging everything.
— Oleg