Andrew Bowker

☀️ Product manager by day ☀️  |  🌙 Dad by night 🌙  | 🔨  DIYer / 'maker' by late night 🔨 

I write about product management, career lessons, side projects, and soft skills. 

A core belief: humans are the backbone of business.  Because of that, I like to spend time developing and nurturing personal relationships. I've found that to be the most useful skill despite the random collection of 'hard skills' I've acquired over the years. I've spent time developing start-ups, diving into the intricacies of digital marketing, managing products, selling, creating successful customer outcomes, and sharpening statistical analysis skills to make better business decisions. 

Strengths:
1. Achiever - I come alive when I can work hard, get many things done, and achieve audacious goals.
2. Belief - I can talk to the hearts of people and see past the surface. High Emotional Intelligence.
3. Self-Assurance - I have the power to persuade and lead passionately. This shines during presentations and in situations where I need to persuade. 
4. Restorative - I love to solve problems and constantly improve things. "It can be done better".
5. Woo - I have a knack for "winning others over". Relationships are important to me.

Owner

Now accepting clients for Career Cheat Codes 2023 - https://careercheatcodes.tech

It took me 3 years and 60+ failed applications to break into Product Management. If I could go back, I'd focus on 3 things from the start:

1. Create products
2. Build relationships
3. Interviewing skills

Now I help a community of 24k+ do the same. So far, I've helped folks land at places like Amazon, Zoom, Pfizer, Pendo, IBM, Bandwidth, & more.

I specialize in helping non-technical professionals land roles in the tech industry. Non-technical roles include product management, program management, project management, customer success, strategy, business operations, marketing, sales, and more. When we work together, you'll be heavily guided on:

· How to craft a resume that gets noticed
· How to craft the perfect linkedin presence w/o the cringe
· How to build important relationships w/o the awkwardness
· How to abolish imposter syndrome and interview confidently
· How to perfect your story and pass any recruiter screen
· How to SHOW your work and beat other candidates
· How to negotiate for 45% more money

Ultimately, there is no such thing as a dream job. As we learn and grow, the "dream job: changes. I coach people to find a "dream fit" based on skills, passions, and what the market values that allows for future optionality and growth.

Nils Davis

I help product managers ramp up their confidence and impact. Start with one free call! | secretsofpm.com/free-call

I’ve reviewed hundreds of resumes, and in just one call I can show you why yours isn’t getting interviews - and how to fix it.
Book *your* review using the “Make your resume amazing!” link in my profile.

If you are having problems getting interviews when you apply to jobs, it's not you. It's your resume and your LinkedIn presence. 

I help amazing people like you *sound* amazing in your resume and your LinkedIn profile. 

Most resumes are terrible - and I've seen a lot of them!

* They're boring.
* They all sound the same.
* They are hard to read.
* And most importantly: They don't show the real impact you've had.

If your resume is boring and doesn't show how amazing you are - you won't get the interview.

WHAT OTHERS SAY:

* "Nils turned my overlooked skills into impactful stories and helped me land my next role." (Brenna B.)
* "He pushed me to tell outcome-driven stories—now my resume finally feels like me." (Summer H.)
* "Nils brought out the business value of my achievements—I got multiple interviews and an offer." (Sifat R.)

ABOUT ME: Nearly 30 years in enterprise software product management, discovering market problems, creating innovative solutions, and helping sales and marketing teams succeed. I thrive on new challenges, cross-disciplinary insights, and finding solutions where others see roadblocks.

Senior Product Manager

Ensuring our customers' first experience with TriNet technology is stellar by curating their onboarding process from signed contract through first payroll.

“You must match your resume to the job description!”

You hear that constantly on LinkedIn. 

But it’s misleading.

I just saw a posting for: “Technical Product Manager – Supply Chain.”

“Supply chain” never appeared again in the JD.
The whole thing was generic PM boilerplate.

Obviously, a PM who has actually transformed a supply chain will be a stronger hire than one who hasn’t.

To be more likely to get an interview, the hiring manager must be able to see you solving their problems - even when the JD doesn’t spell them out.

But here’s the trap.

The recruiter only sees the JD.

So if you write purely for the hiring manager’s hidden problems, you can confuse or even alienate the person who controls whether you ever reach them.

You’re caught between two audiences:

One filtering by keywords

One hiring for outcomes

That tension is where the resumes of strong PMs often quietly fail.

Resume and LinkedIn coach | 25+ yrs of enterprise software product management | perfectpmresume.com | Resume, LinkedIn, and interview coaching for product managers and professionals seeking $150K-$300K+ roles.

Most product managers think their resume is “fine.”

They’ve had recruiters look at it.
Friends skim it.
Maybe even a hiring manager.

“It looks good.”

What they really mean is:
“It looks like a resume. The bullets have numbers. The format is right. You followed the rules.”

And that’s the trap.

The resume rules are very good at one thing: flattening your work until it looks just like everyone else’s.

Especially when you use AI to follow them.

That’s how strong PMs become indistinguishable on paper.

And indistinguishable PMs don’t just get fewer interviews.

They get none.

Your wins 𝘢𝘳𝘦 on your resume - they just look small, boring, and generic.

I see this constantly when reviewing resumes: 

– A turnaround that reads like “maintenance”
– A political fight reduced to a vague bullet
– A risk you caught early that looks like luck
– A launch you saved that sounds routine

The market isn’t judging your ability. It’s reacting to how clearly it can see your impact, the difference you made. 

What’s one thing on your resume that mattered a lot - but probably looks ordinary to someone outside your company?

The reality of getting interviews in the current PM job market - it takes a lot of applying. 

• The competition is huge and well-qualified. 
• There's a lot of bad behavior on the hiring side. 
• You must have a thick skin. 

Of course, if your resume, LinkedIn, interview readiness, networking, etc. aren't on point, it's going to be even harder to get the interviews and the offer. 

• Make sure your resume shows your impact, not just that you did your job. Most resumes are terrible - if yours doesn't make a hiring manager say "I think this person can make a difference for me," you won't get an interview. (Check out my posts for ideas on how to do this.)

• When someone comes to your LinkedIn, can they tell immediately what you do? Can they see the impact you've had? Can they get a sense of what you might be like to work with?

• Do the people you've worked with in the past - the ones who loved working with you - know you're looking? Have you given them recommendations and gotten recommendations back? 

• Do you have the stories of your signature achievements and successes down cold, in rehearsed 2-minute form, so you're ready when you get an interview? 

You got this - but you have to do the prep - and it has to be the right prep. 

(What did I miss?)

---
If you want my help with your resume, send me a DM or click the "Make your resume amazing!" link on my profile. "Working with Nils on my resume was one of the best decisions I made during my job hunt," said one product manager I worked with.

I've reviewed literally 1,000s of product manager resumes. And I see the same thing over and over again...

✅ Talented professionals who’ve led game-changing projects.
✅ Brilliant product managers with years of experience.
✅ Exceptional candidates with results that 𝘴𝘩𝘰𝘶𝘭𝘥 make hiring managers excited.

Yet, they're not getting interviews!

Why?

👉 Their resumes simply parrot the job descriptions, with tons of fuzzy, meaningless words. 
👉 Their resumes completely fail to differentiate this amazing person from every other qualified candidate.
👉 Their resumes totally don't show their track record of solving problems like the hiring manager's. 
👉 And their resumes are so badly formatted that no one could figure out if they were qualified!

Your experience might be amazing, but if your resume doesn't position you as a unique solution to the hiring manager's problems, it’s working against you.

---
Your resume is your sales page. It must persuade the hiring manager that, among dozens of qualified candidates, you are most worth interviewing. If it's failing to do that (and most do), you need to fix it.

(I can help. Check my profile page for a link to set up a free resume review with me.)

Most candidates treat the job description like a sacred text.
Hiring managers don’t.

If matching the JD hasn’t been getting you interviews, here’s what to focus on instead.

👇

Matching the JD

"You must match your resume to the job description!" 

This is the cry of (most) resume people here on LInkedIn. 

But it's wrong. Here's why:

The job posting was "Technical Product Manager - Supply Chain." 

But the title was the last time "supply chain" or any related concepts showed up in the job description. Everything else in the JD was product management boilerplate.

Now, you could interpret that as "we really don't care if you know anything about supply chain." 

But is that true? No.

All else being equal, a PM with excellent experience working on supply chains and transforming them will have a better chance at getting an interview for that job. 

Don't match your resume to the job description. 

Match it to what the hiring manager really needs - in this case, someone who can transform supply chains. 

This is a specific example of a general problem. The hiring manager 𝘯𝘦𝘷𝘦𝘳 puts their 𝘳𝘦𝘢𝘭 problems in the job description. 

Whether it's

• An old legacy supply chain that can't keep up to modern requirements
• Or a product that's losing market share to a competitor
• Or an onboarding process that's causing customer churn

Or any of 20+ other common problems that product managers are hired to impact.

If 𝘺𝘰𝘶 aren't amazed by yourself when you read your resume, why do you think anyone else would be? 

Don't worry about the ATS. Focus on making your impact clear to people with little context about you or your roles.

"Proven track record of XYZ," does not show impact.

"XYZ was broken, I fixed it. Now XYZ is our biggest revenue source," shows impact.

When someone reads it, they should say, "I need this person on my team."

“I don’t have metrics for my biggest achievement.”

That thought stops a lot of product managers cold.

Here’s the contrarian truth:

You probably do have metrics — you just don’t think of them as metrics.

A few examples:

Was something trending the wrong way (retention, churn, adoption) and your work reversed it?

That trend change is a metric.

Did customers go from frustrated to satisfied?

That’s a metric - qualitative, hard to measure, but absolutely meaningful. One strong customer anecdote can support it.

Did leadership say, “Great job”?

That’s social proof. It’s evidence that what you did mattered to the business.

The reality is this:

The most important PM impacts are often trailing, indirect, and hard to isolate.

That doesn’t mean they’re weak — it means we have to be smarter about how we describe them.

Another example.

Imagine your work gave leadership better visibility into what was happening in the business — and better inputs for decision-making.

What’s the metric for that?

“Decisions were 17% faster”?
“28% more correct”?

Those numbers are fake precision.

Better visibility is intrinsically valuable. Leaders know it.

Same with risk reduction.

If you fixed a broken process that exposed the company to audit failures, legal risk, or financial penalties, your impact might have been a 10x reduction in risk — even if there’s no clean dashboard for it.

That “10x” carries more weight than most tidy percentage changes. 

Finally, even when we do have metrics, they’re meaningless without context.

Is 10% revenue growth good or bad?

You can’t answer that without knowing:

• Last year’s growth
• Market growth
• Market share vs competitors

10% revenue growth is good if it's faster than last year's growth - it's bad if it's slower. It's good if it's faster than the market's growth. Bad if it's slower.

In other words, did you help the business succeed? Revenue growth, market share growth, growing in step or faster than the market are all more important, as signals, than the actual revenue. 

So if you’re stuck saying, “I don’t have metrics,” the real issue usually isn’t data.

It’s framing.

Let me make this concrete.

What’s the achievement on your resume or in your work history that you know mattered - but you're struggling because you “don’t have metrics” for it?

Drop a sentence or two in the comments:

• What you did
• Why you think it mattered
• What you’re struggling to quantify

I’ll respond to a few and show you how I’d frame the impact - in-thread so others can learn from it too. 

(And if you want to think it through privately, DM me.)

"𝗦𝗵𝗼𝘄 𝗺𝗲 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗻𝘂𝗺𝗯𝗲𝗿𝘀!"
But the reality is that most often the data we have is partial, incomplete, and doesn’t represent the full picture of the situation.

The real world is considerably messier than anything we can measure - even any combination of things we can measure.

And that’s where executive intuition and product sense come in.

Being able to perceive the bigger, richer signal that the data is 𝘴𝘶𝘨𝘨𝘦𝘴𝘵𝘪𝘯𝘨 is where real business transformation lives.

Take revenue. We can usually measure it pretty accurately, especially in hindsight.

But was it 𝘨𝘰𝘰𝘥 revenue - from ideal customers who pull the company forward?
Or 𝘣𝘢𝘥 revenue - from customers who quietly drag you into the wrong future?

If it was bad revenue, was it still worth taking it to get through a hard quarter?
What happens when that customer later demands something that cuts directly against your long-term strategy?

Every one of those questions is a judgment call. Even the “good vs bad revenue” question - and that’s probably our 𝘣𝘦𝘴𝘵 metric.

𝗦𝗼 𝗜’𝗺 𝗰𝘂𝗿𝗶𝗼𝘂𝘀:
What’s a decision you made that looked wrong in the spreadsheet… but turned out to be exactly right?

A lot of PMs are doing metrics cosplay on their resumes.

Numbers that they 𝘩𝘰𝘱𝘦 look impressive.

But with little connection to real impact. And often made up. 

So you see “double-digit improvements” that everyone knows are:

• loosely attributed
• context-free
• and not actually persuasive

The problem isn’t dishonesty.
It’s misunderstanding what counts as evidence.

There's a better way. If your work had impact, you have 𝘳𝘦𝘢𝘭 metrics - you just don’t think of them as metrics.

If something was trending the wrong way - retention, churn, adoption -
and your work reversed that trend…

That trend change is a metric.

It’s measurable.
It shows intervention and outcome.
And it tells a real business story:

• Things were getting worse
• I did something to change it
• Things got better

That’s impact — even without a tidy percentage.

Compare that to:
“Improved retention by 12%”

Without context, it’s just decoration.

Executives don’t evaluate success by isolated numbers.
They look for direction, causality, and consequence.

If your best work feels hard to quantify, the issue usually isn’t lack of impact.

It’s using the wrong definition of “metric.”

Where do you see metrics cosplay most often?
A) Resumes
B) OKRs
C) Roadmaps
D) Exec decks

Comment with a letter — or disagree.

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The Battle

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Engagements

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