Product Management Careers

The safest route to a first product role is from the inside — moving roles at the company you already work for. Moti Peretz, VP Product at Orca Security, points out that the company has a strong interest in your success too, but warns it takes patience. Arbel Zinger of Melio reaches the same conclusion from another angle: product manager is usually a second job, not a first, so the best way in is through an adjacent role such as engineer, analyst or customer support, staying close to the product from there.

When there is no internal path, you need an X-factor — the thing that makes a recruiter read your resume to the end. According to Moti, that can be product work in your current role (a PRD, customer calls, working with a designer), a side project you brought users to, or a seemingly irrelevant background that fits the product's domain exactly. He says Orca's product team is roughly half cyber people and half people from outside.

Ela Hatzav is a case in point: from psychology and tourism, through a decade at Taglit, to Product Manager at Wix. She argues that excelling at anything, not necessarily academics, is a strong predictor of success in product, and that her own barrier was psychological rather than technical — the fear of not excelling.

A product interview is a micro-cosmos of the job itself, and every question in it is there to reduce risk about the candidate. Tal Kailler, who manages the web products group at Evinced, treats a resume as a product with 30 seconds: explain what the company does, highlight achievements and business metrics, and keep it short. In the interview she looks for a story with a beginning, middle and end, and expects you to make a decision and justify it without apologizing.

Moti Peretz adds that if you are moving to a new company, wanting to be in product should be on the table from the first interview. Some companies won't like it, others will read it as strong motivation — you have to read the room.

What opens doors in the first place is networking. Itai Horn of Groupon moved from investment management at U-Bank into product at Retalix, and breaks networking into three pillars: LinkedIn, relationships at every level, and conferences — with consistency as the key. Avigail Levin, who built the brands of aleph and Samsung NEXT, puts it in one line: a salaried employee needs to think like a freelancer, because you are the product.

Product management is a lonely role, and it helps to know that going in. Maayan Gotlib, Product Mentor and PM in Residence at Symbol, explains that engineering, marketing and founders each have one another while the product manager does not — and that loneliness amplifies impostor syndrome. Her answer is to make sure you have support: a peer, a mentor or a group of peers.

The definition of success changes too. Yael Shamir Zalmanov, a Product Group Manager at Fiverr who came from engineering, says it took her a while to see that a PM's productivity is different from a developer's — less producing alone, more influencing others. Arbel Zinger of Melio measures product managers by impact: which company metric you moved and by how much, not how many features you shipped.

Lior Frenkel, founder of Adaptation, suggests treating your career like a startup: who your customers are, what your KPIs are, what your features and bugs are — and running a premortem on it before the market surprises you. To pick the next skill to learn, he says to follow your frustration: what made you walk out of a meeting annoyed.