How I found my product management (PM) internship

Over the course of 3 months after I graduated with my BS in Informatics, I applied to over 151 positions ranging from UX researcher to frontend developer.

I received 3 interviews.

Out of those 3, I was rejected for two and ended up accepting an internship position for a role I was only vaguely familiar with. However, after learning from my mentor and working as a product manager for a four months, I’m fairly confident this career path is something I want to pursue.

So, how do you get a product management internship?

Finding the job

When I look for new roles, I usually rely on popular job boards such as LinkedIn and Indeed. However, product management internships are significantly harder to find than other roles like software engineer or business analyst.

The key is to cast your net wide.

I found that using similar words helped expand my pool of choices. I used keywords such as “product” or “internship”, since postings often have different titles with similar responsibilities. Sometimes our role is mistakenly equated to product owner, product analyst, project manager, etc.

Funnily enough, I found my current internship through Google by typing in “new grad internship”.

It took me directly to the company’s job page on Lever, and I doubt I would have found the posting if I only used LinkedIn and Indeed. Be scrappy and try whatever (some people found great success in networking)!

Refining your resume

When I sent in my resume, I used the one I created for career fairs when I was an undergrad. It’s a fairly colorful resume that wouldn’t pass ATS (applicant tracking system) checks, but it does stand out if human eyes ever get to it.

(Fun fact: my manager had to read through over 300 resumes before choosing mine which is a .0033% chance so make it stand out!)

I had four projects because I did not have any prior internships. However, my projects showed my experience in user research, design, and programming.

I have everything posted in my online portfolio even though, to this day, not all of them have their write-ups complete. I programmed mine using HTML and CSS, but it’s not necessary if you’re going into product management (originally, I was looking for product design roles where having a portfolio is a must).

Have another set of eyes look into what you write. (Shoutout to my friend Brandon!) They help catch typos and give constructive feedback on the content.

Reach out to family members, friends, your college career center. You can even try to find online communities (PM Slack channels, Discord groups, Reddit threads) or people in the field. They’ll know what content grabs a recruiter’s eyes, and this is perfect practice for initiative.

Interviewing for the role

There were two interview rounds.

The first round was a 1:1 chat with the manager of the team that was hiring the intern. This is largely behavioral so stay engaged and loosen up. Answer their questions, but remember, conversations are a two-way street so ask questions back. Show genuine interest at what the company does, their mission, and the path your interviewer took to get the role they have now.

In this part of the interview process, people like to use the STAR technique:

• Situation: give enough background information to establish context for your example
• Task: describe your responsibility for the example
• Action: explain what steps you took to address it, maybe even a conflict you overcame
• Result: share the outcome of your actions that improved the situation. If you didn’t improve anything, at least share the lesson you learned.

Remember, keep it simple.

The only technical question I recall receiving is choosing my favorite product and a feature that would improve it. Other websites have a more extensive list you can practice from.

(Here’s one from Product School: https://productschool.com/blog/product-management-2/the-ultimate-list-product-manager-interview-questions/)

The second round was split between 3 interviewers: another product manager, a business intelligence analyst, and a software engineer. These are partly behavioral (how well do you work in a team), but they also asked domain specific questions.

For example, the product manager portion focused on product discovery and how you would measure your product’s success.

Admittedly, I struggled with the business value since I come from a UX background, so if you aren’t familiar with business, definitely learn OKRs and popular metrics to track.

The BI portion was largely the same, but it really drives home the idea that PMs are responsible for the success of a product and you, as the PM, should know how to define “success”.

The last part, the technical interview, ran over basic concepts such as tech debt and sprint backlog, which I was familiar with since my projects exposed me to Agile methodologies.

Closing notes

Every company will be different. Some require more interviews, some require less. Some will require on-site visits to meet the entire team while others will be entirely virtual through video/phone call.

Looking for an internship is a tedious process, but it does teach you tenacity and patience which are important qualities for PMs. Unfortunately, with today’s digitalization of hiring, you will experience a lot of ghosting and rejections, but you only need one “yes” to get started.