• Andrew Yeung landed roles at Google and Meta by perfecting his résumé.
• Yeung submitted a one-page, black and white résumé with clean formatting and bullet points.
• He said job candidates can stand out if they customize, simplify, and quantify their résumé.

I was able to land a six-figure role at Google as a global product lead and Meta as a business planning and operations lead. I also made it to the final rounds at highly competitive tech companies like Amazon, Uber, and Spotify — not because of an Ivy League education or a stellar background, but because I perfected the craft of creating an impactful résumé to sell myself.

While there may come a day when your LinkedIn profile, personal website, or X account is all you need to land a job, your résumé is still the standard document required for the majority of jobs today.

A résumé is often the first point of contact between a job candidate and a company — they'll usually review it (for an average of six to seven seconds) before speaking with you, so it's crucial to have everything in order and avoid common mistakes that most people don't realize they're making.

Here's the résumé template I used.

Master the fundamentals

Remember to nail the essentials: Make your résumé a one-page, black-and-white PDF with a clear name (e.g., "Andrew Yeung's Resume"). Use well-formatted bullet points, proofread for typos, and include your contact info, LinkedIn profile, and personal website (if you have one), and make sure the layout is clean and visually appealing.

Nothing else matters if you don't have the fundamentals in place.

Customize your résumé to the role

During my job search, I created three distinct résumés tailored to the roles I was pursuing: strategy and analytics, product management, and sales. Each résumé included specific verbs, phrases, and concepts that were relevant to the role I was applying for, often pulled directly from job postings.

Most job seekers send out the same résumé everywhere, but recruiters and managers can easily spot the "spray and pray" approach. Even worse, applicant tracking systems may even flag your profile and auto-reject you if your résumé isn't relevant enough.

Lead with impact

Don't just do what everyone else does on their résumé: list their responsibilities. Instead, emphasize the impact of your work by using the following format:

"Achieved [insert impact] by [quantitative metric] by doing [insert activity]."

Example:

• OK: Responsible for reaching out to new distributors for the men's apparel category.
• Good: Increased sales for the men's apparel category by reaching out to closing distributors and onboarding them.
• Great: Increased sales for the men's apparel category by $10M annually by reaching out to 15 new distributors and onboarding them to the platform with a closing rate of 85%.

Generalize and simplify

The hiring manager and recruiter will often have much less context than you do on your previous experiences. They will know far less about your specific projects and initiatives, meaning you will have to simplify concepts, explain technical jargon, and elaborate on acronyms.

When in doubt, start by generalizing a concept to make it widely applicable, then narrow it down as necessary.

Example:

• Too specific: Launched Company X's GBM FY24 CX initiative to 5,000 EG customers and increased our NPS by 15, ICSAT by 15% while reducing regrettable churn by 20%.
• Simplified: Launched Company X's customer experience initiative for our global business marketing function to 5,000 enterprise customers to increase our NPS by 15, internal customer satisfaction metrics by 15%, and reduce our customer churn by 20%

Quantify as much as you can

The easiest way to spot a rookie résumé from an experienced one is by evaluating how many numbers are included.

Rookies leave numbers out. Pros try to quantify the impact of everything because they recognize the value of a P&L and know that is how business decisions are made.

Quantifying your impact not only proves you made a difference but also demonstrates good judgment and critical thinking. For every line item in your résumé, ask yourself: "How does this impact the bottom line of the company?"

Ask yourself: What attributes do you want to demonstrate?

If you're great at working with clients, prove it by including line items on your client management and customer service skills, and your coachability.

If you're a data wizard, include line items about your analytical abilities, excel prowess, and technical coding competence.

If you're a rigorous operator, include line items about your project management, leadership, and communication skills.

Recruiters and hiring managers will form an impression of you based on your résumé. It's your job to shape that impression.

Finally, remember to be creative — think outside your résumé

Though your résumé is an important piece to the puzzle, you can't solely rely on it for a successful job application. You need to build your network, often before you need it (see: career cushioning). Learn to pitch yourself effectively, master the interview process, and find sponsors within the target company.

Take the time to polish your résumé, and you will see a significantly higher response rate from hiring managers and recruiters at your target companies.

Good news: Once you've perfected your résumé, you likely don't have to do it again for a while.

Andrew Yeung is a former Meta and Google employee who now throws tech parties through Andrew's Mixers, runs a tech events company at Fibe, and invests at Next Wave NYC.

Elle took a job in the tech industry about seven years ago, right when product management was "getting hot," she says. While the companies she's since worked for have had vastly different expectations of her, one thing has been consistent: clashes with other teams. Product managers serve as a bridge between engineers, salespeople, customer-service agents, and workers in other departments, and getting them to work together to build products that people actually need can be fractious.

"If you're an engineer and you have an idea, and then you have this outside figure come in and say, 'Why are you doing it this way?' — some can see that as great collaboration," says Elle, who asked that I use only her first name. "Other people are like, 'Whoa, you're slowing me down.'"

The product manager has become a powerful, highly paid, and polarizing figure. At some tech companies their colleagues refer to them, both affectionately and disparagingly, as "mini-CEOs" of the products they manage. Google's Sundar Pichai, Microsoft's Satya Nadella, and YouTube's Neal Mohan climbed their way up from product manager to CEO, and they deploy legions of PMs to help run their companies.

Coworkers don't always have fuzzy feelings about product managers. X abounds with snarky memes about their purposelessness, their illiteracy of Python and C++, their penchant for saying "no updates from me" in update meetings. On forums and subreddits, their more-technical colleagues belittle their work as fluff. "Is product manager the most useless role in tech?" an engineer posted on Blind. Another accused product managers of "stealing a living": "As an engineer, I feel I can easily do their job in addition to mine with not much extra effort," they wrote. One person on Reddit argued that product managers "just attend meetings and get paid more than the actual people doing the work."In a LinkedIn post titled "Product is too important. So we got rid of product managers," the founder of a digital banking startup wrote, "Any function that needs a decade to explain what it actually is or isn't doing is at very high risk of somehow being lost."

Several companies, from Airbnb to Snap, are now reconsidering the utility of product managers entirely, while others claim that the product manager's reign will only expand in the age of AI. How did a role that barely existed before the 2000s become one of the most influential and controversial presences in tech?

The seed of product management dates back to at least the 1930s, when Procter & Gamble created a position called the "brand man" whose job it was to understand customer problems. Inspired by this, Hewlett-Packard pioneered the tech product manager role in the 1960s. Microsoft began hiring what it called "program managers" in the 1980s. In the 2000s, as companies like Apple, Google, and Amazon expanded to create ever more products, product managers proliferated. Hardware and software also became more complicated, and the engineers and developers building it had less time to figure out what was actually useful — companies realized they needed someone dedicated to translating customer needs.

Product became a path into tech for people with backgrounds in consulting or MBAs. A "golden era" of product management emerged in the run of zero interest rates in the 2010s. Companies gobbled up talent, sometimes hiring beyond their needs just to keep smart workers from going to competitors. Big Tech companies became bloated, paying middle managers high salaries to optimize products and development. Carnegie Mellon University began offering what it calls a first-of-its-kind master's degree in product management in 2018. The next year, U.S. News and World Report named product manager a top-five job for MBA grads.

"The shift in power moved from engineering to product managers," says Hubert Palan, the CEO of Productboard, a company that provides software for product managers. That's part of the friction: Those on the tech side often think the product manager doesn't understand how things work, but the product manager may think the engineers are building tools that people don't actually want or need, even if they're feats in coding.

"The product manager is at the center of everything," says Avi Siegel, a former product manager who's working on his own startup, Momentum. "If sales wants one thing and marketing wants one thing and customer success wants one thing, they disagree, and you can only choose one of the groups to side with — you're only going to keep one of those people happy."

"Product management is mostly necessary, but it can be done very badly," says Aaron, a software engineer who asked me to use only his first name. He says he's worked with both excellent and terrible product managers. At best, they bear the burden of understanding the tech a market needs. At worst, they don't acknowledge how technically difficult a solution they demand might be, which leads to ire, fatigue, and failure. "We would be asked for the moon with no collaboration," Aaron says.

Whether their coworkers are happy about it or not, product managers are gaining recognition. A 2007 study found that as the product-management role became more formalized at companies, projects were finished closer to deadlines and with more predictability. A 2020 report from McKinsey said that "creating a comprehensive product-management function" was one of the four most important things a company could do to grow its software business faster. According to ZipRecruiter, the average product manager in the US makes about $160,000. Software engineers, meanwhile, average about $147,000, and tech marketing specialists average about $87,000.

Product managers described the role to me as more intuitive and right-brained than left-brained (though there are plenty of technical PMs, many of them former engineers). The career site Zippia says the proportion of women working in product management rose to nearly 35% in 2021 from about 19% in 2010. That's compared to just 22% of all tech workers. Some women in product management I spoke to say part of the suspicion of their role's utility could be rooted in sexism. In 2022, two women who worked as product managers posted a TikTok explaining what they did for work, while they worked from a pool. The video drew hundreds of harsh comments. "Dealing with most product managers is a headache and a half and we usually hate talking to you," one person responded.

"Every woman that I've met with, if they're interested in a company, their first question is: Am I technical enough?" Elle says. "Every guy I've met, that question doesn't cross their mind." It makes her wonder if it's easier for men in product management to push back and say no to some ideas without looking like naysayers.

Empathy came up in every conversation I had for this story. Like a deft diplomat, a good product manager can empathize with the needs and concerns of every stakeholder, Palan says. Meg Watson, a product manager who has worked for Spotify and Stitch Fix, says product managers who try to rule with an iron fist "quickly learn that doesn't work." She describes working as a product manager as emotional and intense and says many of them experience the tension of their role daily. When she asks people looking for advice on getting into product management why they want to, they say they want power. "You will have power," Watson says. "You will also have accountability and pressure and stress."

And now some companies are ditching them. The Airbnb cofounder Brian Chesky said last year that the company had combined the product-management function with product marketing. The rising call for executives to go "founder mode" — a concept touted by Chesky and coined by the Y Combinator founding partner Paul Graham — has some questioning whether they should be delegating product decisions to product managers. A spokesperson for Snap told The Information last fall that it laid off 20 product managers to help speed up the company's decision-making. Smaller firms ponder the utility of bringing on product managers at all.

But others say the scope of product managers, though it may draw engineers' ire, is more likely to expand across the industry. "The future really does belong to product managers," says Frank Fusco, a product manager turned CEO of a software company called Silicon Society. As artificial intelligence gets more adept at coding, he says, some engineering tasks could become redundant — and that could be a boon for product managers. (Pichai, a former product manager, said last month that more than a quarter of Google's new code was created by AI.) Fusco says the AI boom is a classic product-manager problem: What do customers actually want the tech to do? As investors and executives are hungry for AI and many consumers are skeptical, Fusco predicts a rising demand for product managers to help bridge that gap.

"The revenge of the PMs is coming," he says. "I would expect to see PMs becoming more prestigious and empowered."

Amanda Hoover is a senior correspondent at Business Insider covering the tech industry. She writes about the biggest tech companies and trends.