How did I change careers in the machinery industry and become a product manager?

Many friends have recently added me on WeChat and asked me about my transition to product manager. In fact, changing career as a product manager is neither difficult nor difficult.

There are many friends who look for jobs with the attitude that "everyone is a product manager", and naturally it is difficult to get satisfactory results.

Some friends carefully polished their works, learned the relevant knowledge of product managers, and made a summary every time they looked for a job, and easily found a product-related job.

It has been more than three years since I changed careers. Now I will look back and talk about my career change experience to encourage friends who are changing careers or preparing to change careers.

1. Wasted college time

Xiaoyu graduated in 2015 and majored in mechanical design. If I were to say what impressed me most in college, it would probably be League of Legends.

In the first two years of college, I was considered one of the students who studied hard. In the second semester of my sophomore year, I came into contact with the game LOL. At that time, many friends were playing it, and I followed suit.

I gradually became obsessed with this game, so I would run away from unimportant classes whenever I could and stay in the dormitory to play games.

How obsessed were you with this game at that time? I did the math and found that the average is 7.2 games per day. The picture below is only the data of one of the accounts.

2. The first job after graduation

In this way, I spent two years after college, and after several make-up exams, I just had enough credits to get my degree certificate and graduation certificate. Just like that, I graduated in a hazy way.

Looking back now, I really regret it. Unlike many friends who knew what they wanted to do in college, I still didn’t know what I wanted to do after I graduated from college.

In this way, with my father using his connections, I went to an equipment company affiliated with a chemical company in Binzhou. After entering the company, whether you have a master's degree or a bachelor's degree, you must first work in the workshop for a period of time.

Many people may not know what it is like to work in a workshop. Let me tell you what it is like to work in a workshop.

Friends who are not interested in this experience can scroll down directly. Friends who are interested can read it as a story.

Since it is a subsidiary of a chemical company, this company mainly produces pressure vessel equipment. The largest number of welders in the entire workshop are submerged arc welding, argon arc welding, hand welding and other types of welding. In addition, It is also necessary to use a plasma cutting machine to cut steel plates to make the walls and heads of the containers.

The picture below shows the environment in the workshop.

The ventilation conditions in the workshop are limited, so there will be a lot of metal smoke floating in the air. Inhaling too much may cause pneumoconiosis. Therefore, everyone must wear 3M dust masks to work every day.

The picture below shows the smoke produced by a plasma cutting machine.

Welding will produce high-temperature sparks, which is dangerous, so you must wear pure cotton long-sleeved labor protection clothing at work. In summer, clothes can become wet at the end of the day.

My clothes and work status at that time were similar to the picture below.

At that time, I was new to society. I had never seen a better world, and naturally I had no aspirations for it. What I saw a lot was that the leaders in the company had really high incomes locally, and the company had a very good promotion system at that time.

I just thought that I would also be a company leader in the future. At the same time, I also feel that I don’t want to be left behind by my college classmates after graduation.

There was no pressure at that time. I usually lived and ate at the company, so apart from my girlfriend (yes, I have a girlfriend), I focused on my work. Some achievements have also been made at work.

Let’s give a few examples.

Since the smoke and dust from the plasma cutting machine in the workshop is relatively heavy, we designed a dust removal device for the workshop. It costs about 500,000 yuan to make a set from outside, but we designed it ourselves for 30,000 yuan.

The plate statistics in the material yard have always been done manually. I proposed and contacted the group information department to conduct electronic statistics. It was much more convenient to search and use, and it also saved a lot of plates.

The company wanted to measure workload, but there was no unified standard for workload. I led a team of college students in our workshop to conduct statistics on working hours for two months to find the workload measurement standard.

Because of my hard work, I was the first among the college students in our batch to receive a salary increase.

Logically speaking, I am doing better than many people around me, so I should feel relatively satisfied.

This was indeed the case at the beginning, but the blame was due to the installation of Zhihu. This is indeed the case. I saw many possibilities of many people on Zhihu. When I looked back at my own environment and looked at my boss who worked hard for 10 years to become a middle-level leader of the company (often losing his temper and worrying a lot), I felt that this was not me at all. Wanted job.

Moreover, I was in a long-distance relationship with my girlfriend at the time. She was in Qingdao and I was in Binzhou. I could only take 4 days off a month. If I saved up enough time off, we could only see each other once every two weeks. At that time, I also wanted to end the long-distance relationship and live a life of being together every day.

I thought about taking the civil service exam, and bought a lot of materials and courses for civil servants, but in the end I still didn’t stick with it. To put it bluntly, I just wasn’t interested in it, and it was difficult to persevere if I forced myself to do so.

Or Zhihu, search changed careers, many people switched to the Internet industry. During this period, I learned that the Internet industry generally includes product managers, engineers, and operations, and frantically searched for information about these three positions.

In the end, I found that product manager is my favorite profession, and I also have the abilities that I think this profession requires. Now that I think about it, I really don’t know how high the sky is and how high it is. But with the courage of a newborn calf who is not afraid of tigers, I still submitted my resume online - a resume with no Internet work experience.

As you can imagine, apart from some financial institutions and sales calling me, no real product positions called me. So, I realized that I needed some experience before I could change careers. So I searched online for relevant information on product manager career change training.

I want to take time out every day to learn about product management. But the intensity of work every day makes me just want to collapse in bed when I get home. After much deliberation, I had no choice but to resign naked. Here, Xiaoyu would like to remind everyone that it is strongly not recommended that you resign naked unless there is really no other way.

After my naked resignation, I came to live with my girlfriend and lived a life of being together every day. To be honest, as a grown man, I feel very sorry to have to rely on my girlfriend to support me, but my girlfriend does not dislike me at all.

So here I say to my wife, ‘Thank you, wife! ’. After that, I entered a six-month period of study and job hunting.

3. Experience in changing careers

Now let’s talk about some of my experiences in changing careers.

Let’s talk seriously about job hunting first. For social recruitment, most companies hope that we can get started immediately and use your experience to do something to help the product grow, or help product leaders reduce work pressure, rather than saying that the company needs to train you for a period of time first. , and also pay you wages, this understanding must be clear.

Relatively speaking, fresh graduates are much better off. They can be recruited by Internet companies on campus. Having product experience is a big plus for campus recruitment.

I was no longer considered a fresh graduate at the time, and I didn’t have the resources for school recruitment. So I can only bite the bullet and increase my product experience. I have only one purpose. If you really give me a product, I will know where to start the work.

After the purpose is clear, the only thing left is to use practical methods to make a product and increase your product experience. Then we encountered the second problem, which was how to systematically build a product, that is, to master the product methodology.

During this period, I searched for various information on the Internet to learn. First, I established a knowledge framework of the product, and then filled in various details and methods. Here I would like to say that Teacher Liu Wenzhi’s step-by-step course was very helpful to me. It was of great help. Now it seems that even though it is a 13-year course, the product methodology in it is still applicable.

In this way, I created the first knowledge framework for product managers. At the same time, I also mastered the use of mind mapping software in the process.

Now that the knowledge framework is in place, the next step is to practice. In the profession of product manager, it is not enough to just know the theory. What is more important is practice. Only when you have works can you find a job, right?

So I thought about it myself and prepared to make an e-commerce product. There are two reasons. The first is that my former company has e-commerce products, which I can use when writing my resume later, so that there will be no Internet work experience on my resume; the second is that there are many e-commerce products and there are Very mature cases can be referred to.

So, I started making products according to the steps and methods of the knowledge framework. From the very beginning, I did user research and competitive product analysis as if it were a formal product. I used the methods I learned to truly research users and really look at many competing products.

For prototypes, I also copied various mature products at the beginning and learned the ideas and techniques of prototype design. Later, I was able to draw the functional modules I thought of and produce a product requirements document. Since I first started learning about products, I have never done any word requirements documents. They are all written in Axure. This also allowed me to master the prototyping software Axure.

The flow chart is drawn using Visio, which is an easy-to-use software. In this way, after grinding for several months, I finally produced a decent work.

This work includes:

User research data and reports

Competitive product analysis report

Functional structure chart

Prototype and requirements document

Functional requirements list

Buried requirements list

Project schedule< /p>

In addition to this work, I also made a public account to post some summaries of the knowledge I have learned. I also attached the link to this public account to my resume, just to make the interviewer leave a good impression on me.

Submitting a resume went relatively smoothly. Since the work was actually done by myself, I revised and beautified the resume, reviewed the products of my original company, and used them as my work experience. , I received the interview notice smoothly.

Then, I took advantage of the preparation time two days before the interview to frantically review the interview questions. I asked myself several basic questions that the interviewer could ask, and tried to answer them myself. I also took the time to look at the products of the company I was applying for and conducted a product analysis on this product.

On the day of the interview, I went to this company with my printed portfolio and product analysis report on the other party’s products. This is a travel products company. The boss of the company interviewed me directly. After reading my product analysis report on their products, he said that you seemed to be working in our company and were so familiar with our products. When I heard this sentence, I felt that the interview was stable.

But there were some challenges during the interview process. The interviewer turned on the computer and asked me to look at a detail page of their product, and made suggestions for optimizing the detail page on the spot. Fortunately, I summarized my product knowledge. A lot has been learned and several optimization suggestions have been put forward from the user perspective.

In this way, I changed my career to an Internet company and served as a product manager.

Afterwards, I concluded that I was relatively lucky.

First of all, this company had a product manager before, but the documentation was not as professional as mine;

Second, when I went for the interview, this company had no product manager and the product manager resigned. , the company is anxious to recruit a product manager;

Third, the company boss is not a professional product manager, so I was not asked too professional questions;

Fourth, I I was quite well prepared. I had practiced 80% of the questions during the interview;

Fifth, there were many people who went to interview product managers, but their works were not as carefully prepared as mine. .

When I submitted my resignation report when I joined the company, HR asked me why I had not worked for half a year. I concealed it by saying that I had changed my workplace and was getting married. However, the boss has decided to hire me, so HR probably won’t really stop me from joining.

The next step is to work, learn while working, regard the problems encountered at work as learning opportunities, and enter the rapid growth stage of combining theory and practice.

Some people may say that the experience on your resume is false. I don't deny this, but this is really my career change experience, and I used this resume to get the stepping stone.

After I started working, I was able to do the job competently and did not stretch my hips at work. Overall, the results were good. In fact, the company recruits you to help the company. As long as you are capable and qualified for the job, they are not very interested in knowing about your previous experience. What they pay more attention to is your ability to handle the existing work well.

Of course, my first job was not in a big company, and small companies may not have such strict procedures, but so far, I have entered the industry. The next step is to work hard in your position, increase your work experience, and accumulate experience for your future career.

The above is my real experience as a mechanical graduate who found a product manager job through social recruitment.

In fact, there are still many things that have not been elaborated on, such as how to accumulate your own product knowledge? How to write a resume? How to prepare for an interview? I will talk to you in detail about these in future articles.

At the end of the article, pay attention to Xiaoyu. More high-quality articles for product managers will be updated in the future.