We all know that finding a new role as a product manager or leader has gotten a lot more competitive over the past few years. The supply of product people looking for a new opportunity exceeds market demand. I know of many talented and experienced PMs struggling to find a new role, feeling dejected by a constant stream of rejections or unanswered applications. Whether you’re actively looking for a new role or thinking about starting your search, “Never Search Alone: The Job Seeker’s Playbook” by Phyl Terry offers readers the tools to take more control over their job search — even in a challenging job market.
I first met Terry in London a good few years ago and then read his first book “Customers Included”. In “Never Search Alone”, Terry sets out to help job seekers, by introducing these three concepts:
- Never search alone — Searching for a new job is an emotionally taxing process, and a support group of fellow job seekers can help you with the insecurities and confidence that you’re likely to experience during the process.
- Candidate — market fit — Thinking about yourself as a ‘product’ and doing the market research to identifying the intersection between what you want and what the market wants.
- Play to win, not to lose — The idea of using your version of the job description — a “Job Mission with OKRS” — to play an active role in interviewing and negotiating, instead of just going through the motions of the interview process and accepting an offer.
Setup a Job Search Council (JSC) — To start, simply ask people you know: “Who else do you know — at any level, more or less — who is looking for a job?” You can ask friends and family, your network or post on LinkedIn. The idea is to form a diverse group of people who can support each other during the job search. The only thing that Terry advises against is mixing people in a job and people out of a job in your JSC. Reason is that people searching whilst in a job operate at a different speed compared to people not in a job.
Conduct a listening tour — Terry compares conducting a listening tour to discovering your Candidate — Market Fit, learning from people about whether your description of you and your job needs resonates. Drafting your “Mnookin Two-Pager”, named after Alison Mnookin, a professor at Harvard Business School. The document outlines your initial thoughts on what you want, what you love doing and your career goals:
- What you love and hate doing
- Your “must-haves”
- Your “must-nots”
- Your strengths and weaknesses
- Your career goals (short-term and long-term)
Once you’ve created your two-pager, you can reach out to people in your network (e.g. ex colleagues, peers and recruiters) to learn whether your two-pager is a good description of you, anything that is missing or suggestions of other people worth talking to. You then finish off each listening exercise by asking the “Golden Question”: “If you were in my shoes, how would you approach this job search?”
Listening Tour, you can create your Candidate — Market Fit statement to outline the next role and type of company that you’re looking for. In the book, Terry shares some good examples of Candidate — Market Fit statements:
- Find a VP of Communications role in an artificial intelligence startup with a social mission.
- Find a VP of Marketing role in a medium-sized, privately held company not backed by venture capital or private equity.
- Find a product manager role in Big Tech, work there for a few years, and then go back out with that new addition to the resume and find a senior-level product role at another tech company.
Having drafted your Candidate — Market Fit statement you can then update your LinkedIn profile and your CV to include the attributes of the role that you’re looking for.
Networking and Interviewing — Creating a “Job Mission with OKRs” is a concept in Never Search Alone that I can see as being very useful throughout the interview process. When you create a Job Mission with OKRs, you’re effectively drafting your own version of the job spec. Thinking more deeply about what the role is looking to achieve and how success will be measured will help you ask the right interview questions and develop a better understanding of the role.
Negotiating — In the book, Terry makes a point about “negotiating what you need to succeed.” He talks about fear holding us back when negotiating about money and other job needs. It ties in with Terry’s concept of ‘playing to win, not to lose’, making sure that you negotiate from a position of strength. He suggests some helpful starter questions for a valuable conversation with your hiring manager:
- How much budget do I need to accomplish these OKRs? (using the Job Mission with OKRs)
- What kind of team do I need?
- Are there technology investments that need to be made? If so, what’s a ballpark budget?
- Do I need an internal recruiter dedicated to my team so I can hire the people I need?
- What mentoring from my boss’ or boss’ boss do I need to come up to speed quickly on this new industry, function, business?
- What training or professional development do I or my team need?
Asking about these things, Terry argues, shows that you’re already thinking about your new role and how you and your team can be best set up for success. There’s one more question which I love and that’s worth asking during the interview process: “how can I fail at this job?” Similar to running a pre-mortem, you’ll get a better feel for what success looks like in the role and how to mitigate certain risks.
Main learning point: “Never Search Alone” (and the accompanying resources on Phyl Terry’s website) is a must read for anyone looking for a new job, as it offers valuable concepts and practical tools that will help you throughout your job search.
Related links for further learning:
