This product manager shares how you can sell yourself in the job market like a great product

This week in Tech in Asia Jobs shares insights into how successful companies operate, hire, and more.

Photo credit: Pixabay.

Early this year, I suddenly found myself hunting for jobs. After a comfortable stay of more than three years in an organization, I decided to go for a change.

I was out in the job market and all that I had learned in the past three years was about being validated, judged, and scored. I was interviewing for product manager roles and that’s when I realized how I had completely ignored the most important product—myself, the product Taruna.

Sure, the product worked great. But what about its marketing, pricing, and sales? The job hunt gave me a good opportunity to work on all of these and create a platform to continue working on them from there on. I realized I was a product to the job market and decided that this product must be the sexiest one out there in its domain.

This post aims to share some lessons I realized during this terrible yet amazing phase. (In case you’re interested in knowing how and why I resigned from my previous job, here’s the story.) Here are some questions to ask yourself when finding your next dream stint.

What does your product do?

Does your product have a story? Is it bloated with features that are hard to understand and explain?

In the job market, either you build products or you are the product. I have no shame in acknowledging that I am the latter. It is as simple as saying that either you’re an entrepreneur or you’re everybody else, and one position is no better than the other. You can make a meaningful difference in your life and in the lives of others by playing either of the roles well.

When I started job hunting, I was super proud of myself. Why not? In three years, I had virtually done everything—sales, customer support, digital marketing, user and market research, and product management. I had done those stuff in the B2B SaaS domain. But my resume and marketing website didn’t follow the one rule great product managers swear by —no feature creep!

In my first interview, after a lot of back and forth, I was finally given feedback when they said, “We love you! You seem to have done amazing work! You’re going to kick asses in the near future.” But my happy story ended with a but. “But we are not sure where to put you.”

It took me days to realize why such smart people were unsure where to put this smart lady in their organization chart. And that was because the smart lady wasn’t smart enough to tell them where she fits in.

And have you heard about customers not knowing what they want? This was one classic example of that. I was bad at telling the customer what product Taruna did and where in their need cycle I fit beautifully. I left it to the customer to figure it out. It’s wrong. It’s a bad move.

I learned from it and went on to craft a complete story around my past work experiences. I stopped saying, “Taruna can do this, that, that, and even that.” I started saying:

How well does your marketing website (or resume) perform?

What’s your sales pitch?

How do you price yourself?

Are you catching up with the industry?

How much do you know about the competition?

Do you have testimonials?