Getting Started in Product is run by me, Robert Drury.  I'm a product professional with experience across retail, recruitment, fundraising, ecommerce and financial services.  I started Getting Started in Product to share my experience of both performing product roles and recruiting for the roles, in order to help others make the leap into the world of product management.

Some estimates put the number of applications that you need to make before you get an interview at around 10, and then you have potentially 10 interviews before you get one job offer.

In my career, I've had 12 jobs where I've  worked for someone else, which at the above rates means I would have undertaken approximately 120 interviews and made about 1,200 job applications.

That's a lot of CVs sent in and a lot of walking into rooms trying to convince people to hire me.  And that's just as a candidate.

My last job before moving into software was as a recruitment consultant, where my day was spent finding candidates for businesses to hire, reviewing thousands of CVs and conducting hundreds of telephone interviews.

When he decided to change roles, I moved across the organization to work on the software side, where I spent my days figuring out how to create technology that made recruiting great people easier for some of the largest employers in the world.

As I've progressed through my product career I continued recruiting, whether it be for product managers, business analysts, marketing managers, even engineers, which means I've read a lot of CVs, asked a lot of questions, and hired a lot of people.

With Getting Started in Product, I'm looking to pass on all this knowledge I've built up in order to give people the best chance they have of making the transition into a role they want to do. 

And I can understand why they want to do it.  Being involved in product is an exciting and interesting career, where every day throws up new challenges, and your skills grow with every new feature you develop.