How to Get On the Career Path to Product Manager and Beyond | Michelle Yang ’17, Senior Technical Product Manager, Amazon

Michelle discussed what a product manager role entails within the “Try before you Buy” feature in its retail business, the skills and attributes that make someone successful in this role, and provided an abundance of tips for students about the interview process and how to prepare. Michelle describes the product manager as the “quarterback’ of a team focused on delivering value to the stakeholders of its product(s). She used an example of an A/B experiment the team conducted with a feature of the product designing, developing, and implementing new features for her product. The team consists of the Product Manager (PM), UX Designer, User Researchers, Software Engineers, and Data Scientists, delivering value to external stakeholders – customers, and internal stakeholders – other functional areas within the organization. She goes on to outline the types of skills and attributes that make someone successful in the PM role, including:

• Intellectual curiosity to understand customer needs and how best to deliver a product exceeding customer expectations;
• Comfort with using SQL to extract data to support both qualitative and quantitative analyses and insights to drive decision-making about product offerings;
• The ability to translate these findings into a compelling vision of what the product team should do to deliver desirable outcomes;
• Powers of influence and persuasion to get others on the team to implement the vision;
• A collaborative leadership mindset to elicit input and effort from others; and
• Project management skills to move the team along a path to implement the desired product features in a timely, cost-effective manner.

Lastly, Michelle shared a number of tips about the interview process and how to prepare including:

• Given the skill and attribute points mentioned earlier, you may want to get experiences through your classes and extra-curriculars with data analytics, leading project teams in your coursework, and fundamentals of project management.
• You will likely face a multiple stage interview process that will begin with a “resume screen” which is typically done by a recruiter for the organization who is validating “facts” included in your application materials and getting an initial sense of your motivation for applying to the role;
• This initial step is typically followed by a number of behavioral interviews which probe your skills and attributes for the role, understanding of your motivation to work with the organization and your “fit” with the organization’s culture;
• In preparing for these interviews you should:
  • Write out your experiences that map to the requirement points included within the role’s position description (PD);
  • Draft the logic flow of how you would talk about your experiences within the context of the PD, using the STAR method (Situation, Task, Action, Result); and
  • Be able to explain why you wan the job and why with that particular organization – the interviewers want to get a sense of your commitment, what you will contribute to the team, and if they would enjoy working with you.
• Michelle believes for those students that are interested in a PM role which is similar to a general management (GM) role, they should investigate rotational program roles offered by many employers. She provides the following examples:
  • Product Management | Linkedin: https://careers.linkedin.com/apm?selectedFilter=all
  • Product Management | Meta: https://www.metacareers.com/careerprograms/pathways/rpm
  • Product Management |Google: https://www.google.com/about/careers/applications/programs/apm/
  • Business, Operations, Accounting Finance | Amazon: https://www.amazon.jobs/en/landing_pages/afrp [This is the program Michelle joined out of Midd, and can provide referrals into this program]