How to break into any career path: product, venture, startups, and beyond.

Getting your dream job is not much more complicated than you being the Head of Sales and Marketing for your career. Once you figure out where you want to go, the important part is how you get there. A clear career roadmap requires execution and discipline. The individual steps are the important part. Let’s demystify how to break into any career path.

To preface, there are exceptions to this: some career paths have structured, traditional paths. Even then, there are always exceptions. For startup roles, product management roles, venture roles, and beyond — these principles below can be helpful.

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• There are two ways to approach breaking into your dream career

  • Proactive: you reach out actively to those in the industry you are in, you provide value to people, you build your brand, you build relationships, etc.

  • Reactive: you wait on LinkedIn recruiters, headhunters, etc to reach out to you. You rely on your experiences and resume to get you roles.

• Think of your career as a sales funnel
  
  Your “background” + your “pitch” + your “conversion rate” = rate of success
  

• Your background

  • Your background consists of your core set of experiences, the side projects you have worked on, projects/businesses you’ve built, and more. Your background can be developed in two ways: through your job and through your free time.

• Your pitch

  • Your pitch consists of two factors: 1) how you sell and 2) how you market yourself. The marketing speaks for your background when you are not actively pitching. The selling is what you do when you are actively pitching your background by talking to people.

  • Your marketing can be built up over time: it can be the content you create, the communities you build, and the overall brand you create for yourself. Two examples of this are this newsletter and the book for The Startup Product Manager.

  • Your sales is the amount of touch points you have and how well you are selling your background. The more quality touch points you have over time with those in your industry, the more you can improve your pitch over time.

• Your conversion rate

  • Your conversion rate is how many people you can get to take a bet on you, based on your background and your pitch. How do you increase your conversion rate? You improve your background and your pitch.

  • Your background is something that slowly grows and compounds over time. Your pitch, from a marketing standpoint, can have slow growth that compounds over time. Your pitch, from a sales standpoint, can be theoretically infinite.

  • You can work on improving your background over time, and the quality of pitches can improve as well. The number of pitches you make can be infinite. The longest player in the game will eventually have one success.

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