I’m data scientist with project manager experience that comes from (involuntary) managing up. This experience includes interviews and recruiting, mentorship of junior devs and senior data scientists, organizing devs to ship and deliver to meet deadlines, planning said deadlines, teaching my senior manager about basic functions of the team and science, moving peers and seniors away from really bad teams, helping green light and terminate projects and otherwise influence at director (50 headcount)/founders level. All that and no formal title with reports. Basically I’ve found myself having to do I’m having to do all of this managing to get things done. Is it reasonable to tune my resume for PM role and hack/hustle into a PM role or is as this ridiculous and improbable as the experiences I’ve written above?
What you described is program/project management. You definitely need to showcase your ability to identify key customer problems and/or market opportunities, and how you built/launched new features/functionalities to address those needs. Again that’s just one dimension; In PM (Product Management) role you do much more. I would recommend you shadow PMs in your org, see what they do and then look at your experience/exposure to refine your resume/story.
Feel free to DM me and chat - I'm a product manager with a heavy emphasis on data science
The key thing missing is customer, sales and marketing interaction. PMs should be able to interact with external stakeholders just as effectively as internal ones, but you could use some of your existing experience into a beginning PM role. Also, what industry do you work in? Domain expertise in a hot field could also be another avenue
This was at a FANG. Our team worked on a petabyte level data set involving user data. To speak to “customer” “sales”-I’ve been working on my own project and making cold calls with success to customers as part of getting to the MVP stage. But just like the other experience, this story seems sort of thin and hard to spin into a CV.
I would ask the PM for your product (or a PM on another product) if you can help with any aspect of his/her day job. PMs need to constantly prioritize during their day, so there are probably things that are not getting done that you could help with. They will appreciate that ( and remember if a position comes up that they can refer you to)