I’m a Senior Product Manager (L6 PM-T for those who know Amazon) with ~5 years industry experience at two relatively trendy companies. I have 4 major new product launches under my belt and countless smaller launches. I played major roles or was the lead in those launches. I have a good track record of success and marketable skills in the usual areas like product strategy, complex data analysis, ML, huge web services, UX, agile etc. I have a polished LinkedIn profile and have ~1,300 connections most who I’ve actually met in person. I turned the “Open to Recruiters” thing on at the end of last year just because I was curious to see the response I’d get. ~1-3 recruiter requests or contacts a month. Pretty tepid interest. I get that it’s not peak hiring season. I get that in Product most new opportunities will be through networking and connections. I was still surprised how little traction I got on LinkedIn/how cold the market was when I tested. It’s making me less interested in spending any time at all cultivating my LinkedIn profile. Is this in line with your recent experience or am I just an unattractive candidate on LinkedIn? Does LinkedIn suck for Product or do I just suck? Any SDE at a comparable company with a pulse and the ability to reverse a 32 bit unsigned integer is getting hit up 10+ times a week by recruiters... 😭
In general there are fewer PM roles than technical roles (sde, scientists, researchers). There are also more PM supply. They’re a dime a dozen because any joe schmoe can claim to be a pm. Because of this demand:supply is a lot lower for PM than tech roles. What you’re observing is normal. I had an old boss (ceo of a startup; vp of some large companies) who had trouble landing a pm position. Took him a long time.
Big difference between claiming to be a PM and being one, if someone can't hire a true PM then they should probably change recruitment tactics. There is nothing valid about this statement.
Dime a dozen. Someone once told me that about engineers. :eyeroll:
I’ve had direct experience with this. PMs from Amazon are just not that desirable compared to google PMs.
My ex boss who currently works as VP of Product told me the same thing. Even for him it takes a while to land a job and it comes through networking.
Weird. I get reached out to every 1.5 days for similar roles...and my company is relatively unknown. ~7yrs exp as PM.
I recently shifted a job as PM. Ensure your linked in profile has the right terms so it gets picked up in searches. Happy to help review yours and give suggestions if you are interested. PM me. Networking usually works best though in my experience.
Actually I disagree with that.. owners, data driven and relentless.. that’s how I would define most PM’s at amazon.. a lot of amazon PM’s work on defining the business roadmap.. TPM’s are different
This is definitely not true. I set the strategy for my product, do tons of research/data analysis to back it up and decide what we will build/why/when. The TPM on my team is more focused on execution (project management). What you describe could be true at Microsoft but I don’t know.
Step 1- are you located near competitor companies? No? Might want to change that setting of where you’d be willing to relocate to. Step 2- are you networked to employees at companies you’d like to be courted by? No? Start stretching those wings. Step 3- is your profile robust with skills, descriptions of the projects you’ve worked on and how they’ve impacted the business? Do you have recommendations from bosses, stakeholders, coworkers, and clients? No? Time to put a little work into that profile to make your professional profile of record globally pop.
Real talk. In the tech world, PMs at Amazon just aren't that coveted. A PM friend at Google had to turn off his open to recruiter option because he was getting an average of 5 messages daily from recruiters.
Why aren’t they coveted? I’ve seen lots of strong PMs at Amazon who should be interesting to other employers and who have a great track record/resume/background. Amazon is attractive place for strong PMs because you have a lot of influence to actually create and test product, the business moves quickly and the customer problems are interesting. Seen weak PMs just barely cutting it too, though, and Amazon hires a lot. What do you think?
Weird. The worst PM on my team got managed out and landed a job at Google somehow. She was truly awful. Not passing judgment on G overall obviously. Know plenty of other great PMs there. But weird that recruiters just assume everyone there is gold