- Role landed
- Senior Product Manager
Ashish wanted out of the railroad industry and into something faster paced. The complication was translating his experience: he was working as a CTO at a startup, which sounds senior but does not map cleanly onto the roles he wanted.
We narrowed his expertise to the thing that travelled best, taking tech products into new markets, which pointed at product management. That is a harder target than it sounds, because product management is one of the most saturated spaces in the market. He landed a Senior Product Manager role.
Fewer, better applications
His account of the strategy is the opposite of what most people do when a market is saturated, which is to apply more.
“We already knew, hey, we can try making 100 applications and nothing will come out of that. Let's focus on the ones where we can make that thing work.”
In a saturated function, volume actively hurts: you are competing on identical signals with hundreds of people. Selecting for the roles where his unusual background was an advantage rather than a translation problem is what made the difference.
His verdict, including the caveat
He is measured rather than effusive, and he makes a point of noting the resume itself was not transformed.
“Even though I was using the same resume and everything, my experience of going through the program, I would say it was well worth it.”
“Overall, I would say it was well worth it and I got the value that anyone would look to get from a program like this.”
The search in numbers
- Moved out of the railroad industry into product management, one of the most saturated functions
- Repositioned from startup CTO to Senior Product Manager
- Level: Manager and Principal. Function: Product
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