When It's Time to Find a New Product Job
As a Product Management professional, I want to optimize the best moment to job hop, so as to maximize my take home.
Product Management is not for the faint of heart. You are the most visible face of the product you own.
This is wonderful when things are going well at the company.
This can be miserable in tough times.
PMs are expected to pick up more slack for the team when resources are slim. Because the role is not defined, this can easily lead to PMs being overworked, under-resourced, and on the precipice of burnout.
Sometimes the right move is to power through tough times to glory.
When the company is going down, talent sprints towards the exit doors. If such moments, it’s time for you as a PM to follow suit.
Knowing when to pull the trigger can mean the difference of hundreds of thousands of dollars, if not millions throughout your career.
Jump Ship When Layoffs are on the Horizon
The most sacred rule of job hopping:
It’s better to find a job when you have a job.
Even when you are the top candidate in the pipeline, if the company is aware you are not currently employed, they will make a smaller offer. It’s a point of leverage against you in the negotiation.
Knowing the golden rule, you as a PM need to intuit when your head might be on the layoff chopping block. If you are worried or have been PiP’d1, it’s time to brush up on the resume and get out of there.
Struggling to land interviews?
Not sure even where to start advertising your skills for that next Product role?
Save yourself time and heartache by having an active Product Management hiring manager review your resume.
They’ll give you notes, and tell you exactly how you should pursue your job search in a 30-minute consult call.
When layoffs are looming, it’s important to audit where you stand in the org. Is your product a moneymaker, and a company focus? Does leadership come to you to solve problems? Are you part of identifying where cuts can be made?
These are all indicators of whether you are a must-have or a nice-to-have Produxfct Manager. Nice-to-haves get laid off. Must-haves are retained and promoted.
A good barometer to test:
How hard would my boss fight for me to stay if I were to give notice?
By fight, I mean with a substantive counter-offer.
If job cuts are coming and you fear you're at risk - begin plotting your exit immediately. The second that meeting with HR to let you know your position has been terminated, your earning potential decreases.
It’s even a big disadvantage when given a long period of severance that enables you to tell recruiters you are technically employed. Smart operators can just smell the desperation of you needing their money. Not needing this job is a prospect’s weapon to be more discerning and to take greater risks in the interview process. When you have no job, you lose psychological strength. No longer will you want to play hardball for fear of not having money. Job hinting when employed innoculates you.
Recruiters can smell the desperation of a candidate. Someone who needs a job is less attractive and of less value than someone who is employed and in demand.
Make Sure Your Resume Fundamentals Are In Order
It’s clear as day. In our modern tech economy, you have to job-hop to maximize your career earnings.
What does not get talked about nearly enough is how to time one’s job hop to keep your resume attractive to the following job.
The first thing a recruiter or hiring manager does to evaluate you is scan your Resume and LinkedIn work history. They are attempting to form a quick narrative of who you are in the tech world.
The goal is to time your job hops to optimize this quick glance. You want the recruiters to think this guy/gal is a stud.
How?
First is the understanding of the Software Development Lifecycle.
For most companies, to go from an idea to an established Product with a user base takes roughly 1 to 2 years. (Yes, this can vary for a whole slew of reasons. We’re speaking generally.)
To believe you have accomplished anything of merit in a Product, I will have expected you to have worked on that product for at least 2 years. Short of that I will be skeptical of your claims to glory. There are obvious exceptions, but the 2-year mark is when someone is considered tenured in for product roles.
Once you’ve achieved tenure in your current role, the next question asked is this person any good at this role?
Showing You’re a Top Performer
Product managers can be thought of as the cool kids at tech companies. This is a result of there simply being fewer of them than their engineering counterparts. Additionally, they act as the external face of their product, representing the tech org to all the other business units.
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