Please Review my Application: Exceptional Talent Product Manager

Stage 1
1

Hi all,

I would love your help in reviewing my application! I’m a Product Manager from Nigeria and I’m a bit confused on how to structure my evidence. Here’s the setup I have so far:

Mandatory Criteria

  • Significant Contribution as an Employee Led a Product Led Company or Initiative - Launched a new product within a product led company evidenced by worksheets, PRDs and press

  • Contribution to the advancement of the sector - Led an Industry Initiative- Led a team working with the Central Bank to publish Open Banking Protocols for the country

  • Recognition outside my Occupation - Received awards from a National Organization and was cited in the press as one of top 10 product managers in the country

  • Recognition outside my Occupation - Speaking at High Profile Events : Evidence speaking at a Silicon Valley Product Group Product Management Conference as a Leader, Keynote speaker at a Fintech event, A list of 9 speaking engagements over the last 5 years

Optional Criteria

OC2: Proof of Contribution to the Sector Mentoring and Knowlege Sharing

  • Evidence of being a Mentor for a 3 month PM BootCamp, Evidence of being a Guest Facilitator for a program to train 300 youths, Masterclass run for a Venture Fund, Co-Founder of a Product Community and articles written on Medium via my Blog
  • Evidence of being a panelist: PM Assessor for a Product School final evaluation of their candidates, Hackathon judge

OC3 - Evidence of Commercial Contribution

  • Letter of Recommendation from CEO from first Mandatory Criteria
  • Evidence of Salary benchmarked using Glassdoor, stock options and bonus cash + stock options from acquisition of company 1
  • Letter of recommendation from a startup CEO I worked with in the past
  • Letter of recommendation from a startup CEO I provided advisory

Would love to hear your thoughts, on how to best structure my application. My biggest question is that since I have merged multiple pieces of evidence for some of my criteria, I’m uncertain how best to split them up to meet the requirements.

1 Like
2

Are you applying for talent or promise.?

Mandatory criteria:
1 What do you mean by work sheet and PRD? Does the news clipping mention your name. Are you adding a reference confirming you led product?

  1. What evidence are you using to show you led publication of open banking protocol. Is there any external mention of your name and letter confirming this? Is the actual evidence?

  2. What is the award about and is this a tech related award?

  3. If you have up to 9 speaking engagement. I would suggest you use some in optional criteria 2. Prioritise the speaking event based on the size, popularity of event. If the event is an annual conference with wide publicity that could be verified online with hundreds of attendees then use it. Avoid using random speaking events with no internet footprint, as we have noticed assessors now scrutinize speaking engagement.

OC2

  1. What exactly is your evidence. For the mentorship, how do you show it is a structured programme with selection criteria. Do you have evidence to show how you were selected? Product community is unrelated to the mentorship in a structured programme, don’t put unrelated evidence together.
  2. What evidence are you submitting as a panel list. I will suggest you had speaking engagement as a third evidence.

OC3

  1. You can’t use the recommendation letter as an evidence, all your evidence must be unique.
    2 I will merger the 2 letter in 2 and three as a single evidence.
  2. What is the actual evidence of impact like product documents, metrics to show that the product you built was successful, do you have evidence of revenue to back your product impact?

Your OC3 is weak, it is often the easiest to prove but reference letters alone are not sufficient.