What Makes You Unique?

I’ve been getting a lot of questions from fellow PMs on how to interview for roles. I’m admittedly not an expert on this. I am not a great interviewer myself and I’ve gotten lucky on in all the roles I’ve had to this point. But there is one piece of advice that I was given that has stuck with me. And I have found myself sharing it over and over again.

What’s that advice? Your main job during an interview process is to show why you are uniquely qualified for a role. This is even more true now when the market is flooded with qualified applicants.

This advice was given to me by a hiring manager after I made it to the final round of an interview process and did not get the role. She told me that the committee has no doubt that I could do the job, but that one of the other finalists had some unique perspectives that won them the role. While I was hurt to not get that role, I was so grateful for this feedback and how it changed the way I approach interviewing.

To better illustrate the need to be unique, let’s walk through an example of what a hiring process could look like (full-disclosure: I mostly did this so I could make a sankey diagram). Say there is an open position and a hundred people apply. It is likely that 70% or more will not make it past the recruiter screen, either due to their qualifications or the volume of applicants. For those that do get passed onto the hiring manager, maybe a third will actually make it into the interview loop. During the loop another 70% will fall off at some point in the loop. That leaves you with 3 really qualified candidates. Any one of them could likely do the job. They all have the skills and experience. So what makes the difference? What is the hiring committee looking for? The person who is unique. Someone who leaves an impression and shows that they are different from everyone else.

So what do you do about this? How do you give yourself the chance to be the one person that makes it all the way through? The good news is that there isn’t one right answer. The thing about uniqueness is that you can be unique in your own way. A few ways to think about how to make yourself unique:

Skills

There is a set of skills that every PM needs to have, that is not what I am talking about here. In fact, I once had a hiring manager tell me to not waste my time putting skills like “user stories” or “roadmap planning” or “ stakeholder management” on your resume. They said if you are applying to a job, they assume that you have those skills. Instead they want to see what you can do that others can’t.

Something relevant for the current day in terms of skills, is AI. I’m not talking about being able to use ChatGPT, but rather the types of tools and skills that really matter in AI. This could be things like knowing how to write evals and use eval tools. Or knowing how to compile a dataset for fine tuning. Or knowing how to use AutoML to prototype models. If you want to show your skills in AI, go beyond the basics that everyone is doing.

Experience

A classic example here, is being a former engineer, someone who can dive into the technical details. But there are a lot of ways your experience could make you unique. One would be having experience as a user of the product. Or having worked in the same domain as the company. One that I have seen work really well is knowing how to translate your experience in one industry into the needs for another. For example, say you are interviewing for a finance company and don’t have finance experience. But maybe you have experience in healthcare. Lean into your experience in working in regulated industries to show you bring things to the table that others might not.

Network

Your network can be a unique asset in two ways. Referrals are the best way to get a job. Having people already inside a company who can speak to your qualifications can be a big boost. If you have target companies in mind, and don’t have contacts there, it’s time to start reaching out and building relationships.

The other way having a strong network can make you unique in the interview process is the talent pipeline you can bring with you. Often when you interview, the manager will be thinking not just about what you can bring to the company, but who else you can bring with you. If you have talented friends and colleagues that will follow you to the company, that is a positive signal to potential employers.

These are just a few examples, there are tons of other ways to show your uniqueness, probably infinite ways. The key is to figure out what your thing is, refine it, and learn how to show it and talk about it. I’ll leave you with some advice from Nan Yu, Linear’s Head of Product on the job of a job interviewee:

So, it's your job when you're in the interview process to figure out what that burning problem is. So, put on your discovery hat and go figure out what is the actual job to be done of the hiring manager when they're bringing on a new PM onto their team?

And if you can do that and then make a good case that you are the person to solve that problem, then hiring you becomes a binary choice between do I hire the solution to my problem or do I hire someone else?

And I think what ends up happening a lot is when you're in a interview process, you're just trying to put your best foot forward, trying to say that you're great at everything. You have very few weaknesses. Maybe you tried too hard, like whatever, but everyone's going to say that.

So, you're just one of n people, and you want to make yourself a little bit of just you versus the field. You're the solution to a problem and then everyone else is like a roll of the dice.