How to pitch your value across roles
A guide to master the art of career transitions.
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Transitioning across roles, industries, or titles—how can you manage this transition to set yourself up for success?
This week’s guest post is from Yue Zhao, former Chief Product Officer turned Career Coach. Yue writes a weekly newsletter on career growth and offers 1:1 coaching to high-potential women and minority leaders. She is also a venture partner with LifeX Ventures, formerly CPO & CTO at Fuzzy Pet Health, PM lead at Instagram and Meta, and 1st PM at Thumbtack. Her personal mission is to support more women and minorities in ascending to the C-suite.
For more on Yue, check out her website and weekly newsletter on career growth.
Throughout a career, most of us face a time when we need to or want to transition to a different role, a new industry, or both. The goal is to get into a place with higher growth potential, more aligned work, or better work-life balance. However, we often worry that we’ll “lose out” on the influence we’ve built, that manager role, or get down-leveled unfairly in interviews.
After a wide-ranging career, from Chief Product Officer to Venture Partner to funded startup founder, I’ve found that there are a few important factors to focus on and play up as you make the transition. In this post, I share how I was able to accelerate my career through leveraging transitions and ensure my experiences are an asset rather than a handicap with each step up the career ladder.
Phase I: A Fresh Perspective
At the beginning of your career, as an entry-level worker, your biggest asset to companies is your fresh perspective and willingness to work hard. It’s mostly not your hard-earned (and expensive) college or graduate school degree (gasp). Employers are looking for you to learn quickly, bring new ideas, and get things done.
My first job was as a receptionist at a Prosthodontist office in high school. From there until my first full-time job, I worked as a sales associate at a high-end men’s clothing store, analyst at an equity compensation startup, intern at a global pharmaceutical company, admin for the School of Public Policy at UC Berkeley, and intern at a financial services company. The main value I brought to all these jobs was a strong work ethic, friendly demeanor, and true curiosity about the job. In these more transaction jobs, the hiring manager just wants to know that you’ll show up on time, get the work done, and be a friendly addition to the culture. The value at this stage is more skewed towards me than the company. Not only did I learn about processing healthcare claims or how CEOs get paid, I learned how to interact and adapt to working with many different types of people in very different company cultures. This served me well in landing my next job at McKinsey and Company after graduation.
Landing a Business Analyst role at McKinsey and Company in the mid 2000’s was notoriously competitive. Management consulting and investment banking were the prestigious top jobs for new grads and compensated well. I was able to stand out among the applicants with creativity and demonstration of a strong work ethic. Here’s what was most valued:
Show your ability to learn and add value quickly: Hiring managers look for people who are ambitious, curious, and driven. What you lack in experience, you need to make up for in willingness to do more than the job description, and the ability to learn quickly, particularly early in your career.
When talking about your past experiences, weave in stories around how you delivered value quickly: Insert concrete timelines (e.g. in six weeks I did X, over the course of a few months I did Y), and include measurable outcomes (e.g. I drove project X which led to x% increase in revenue or y% decrease in operating costs, our project led to a follow on project for another 3 months, we delivered over xx% of savings to the client).
Be curious in your interviews and conversations about the job and the industry: what are traits of people who do well? what are common pitfalls new hires face? what are some things that surprised you about the company or job you took?
Give examples of your willingness to go above and beyond, even when that is not the behavioral question asked.
Demonstrate that you can “fit in”: At the beginning stages of your career, you are a sponge for culture and ways of working. When switching roles and work cultures, get to know the people you’ll be working with, and alleviate their concern that you will clash with their culture.
Grab coffee with your peers or others you’ll be working with. Help them get to know you, and be curious about what they love / dislike about their jobs.
Notice and adapt your style to the culture of the workplace. Is it more traditional? Is it more nerdy? Are they more data-oriented or value design aesthetics? Speak to these nuances in your interviews to show that you are aware of the differences and that you are willing to work with them.
With McKinsey, while my fellow Business Analysts (BAs) quickly honed in on a specific industry, function, or even partner to work with, my projects spanned a dizzying array of industries — pharmaceuticals, retail, financial services, manufacturing, and technology, and the functions — sales, marketing, operations, strategy, M&A. My staffing manager who was responsible for making sure I was staffed to projects didn’t know what to do with me: she couldn’t use her tried and true method of building up expertise to staff me on new projects. Each one was uniquely different from the previous. And yet, I had little issue getting onto projects I wanted, including a stint in Shanghai and Beijing for a Multi-National Corporation (MNC). Here’s what I learned from pitching many partners and teams on taking in someone who “doesn’t have past experience” in the industry or function:
Your reputation is your ticket: Whether you are switching projects within a company or going from a healthcare company to a financial services company, your reputation can and will follow you. What enabled me to take a variety of projects at McKinsey was my reputation for stellar performance on past projects. Partners were willing to vouch for my work to their colleagues. My various internships and part time roles wanted references, and it didn’t matter it was not in the same industry. Even if you are making drastic shifts in career (e.g. from sales rep to lab scientist), your reputation and work ethic will hold. While past references cannot vouch for your ability to use a pipet, they will be able to speak to your persistence, attention to detail, and ability to sell a story to get research funding. This will be a consistently theme ongoing.
Lean in to your potential biggest weakness of “lack of relevant experience”.Rather than feeling like you’re at a disadvantage because you “haven’t done the work before”, showcase the unique, fresh perspective you can bring to the table. While experience can be important in roles, most early career workers are valued for their diligence, ability to get things done, and creativity.
Phase II: Narrative and Reputation
During Harvard Business School, I used the time to double down on my transition into technology. Without any background in “tech”, I decided to get involved in entrepreneurship, working with a fellow HBS classmate on a wine e-commerce startup. We used our classmates as alpha customers and went through an accelerator program with DreamIt Ventures. My co-founder came from venture capital and was a much better salesperson and CEO, while I focused on the operations and product development. When you’re bootstrapping, cash is queen. I managed to “sell” our engineers to work for us on equity and get wine retailers and wineries to partner on a commission basis —drastically lowering our upfront costs.
From there, I parlayed my “product experience” into a first Product Manager role at Thumbtack. Thumbtack was post series-A at the time and ~20 people. I grew with them as the company grew, from 20 to 600. I transitioned to PM management there, leading a team of 5 PMs as the head of product, professionals. It was in this transition that I learned about the value of a clean narrative.
Build a clear narrative: Many people make the mistake of trying to include EVERYTHING they’ve done in their resume or narrative, just “in case” something stands out they didn’t expect. This simply confuses the hiring manager or recruiter. Instead, tell a story with your resume that connects where you were and where you want to go (this new role), and how your past roles makes you the best candidate for this future job. Coming out of business school, I had offers for venture firms, tech startups, and healthcare companies. For each, I had a different narrative and resume that highlighted a different set of relevant experiences.
Understand what skillset and accomplishments are most valued and need to be highlighted, and which ones should be scrapped in favor of a clear story arc. If you’re not sure how to do this, seek out a mentor or career coach to help!
From Thumbtack I joined Instagram’s consumer team, which recently moved to San Francisco from Menlo Park, making my new commute 20 minutes instead of more than an hour. After a brief stint as an Individual Contributor, I managed to convince a leader and team to “hire” me as a manager, and from there eventually led a team of 6 PMs and 100+ XFN. While managers are considered the same “level” as individual contributors, in practice and perception, management roles are much more difficult to come by and hold more powerful and influence.
During this phase of my career, success was defined as an upward trajectory of title, team size, and compensation. Here’s what I found resonated with hiring managers, investors, and sponsors across this wide range of company sizes:
Develop your reputation as a high performer: hiring managers want superstars on their team. The best ones want to hire someone who can do a better job than them at the role. Therefore, above all else, make sure you are viewed as a high performer in your current role. That is the foundation upon which people will consider you for lateral or stretch jobs. This involves more than just working hard and doing a good job. In Western business culture, it’s important to also advocate for your work and make your impact known.
Build your allies: Invest early in your relationships with other smart, ambitious individuals you work with or go to school with. Those people will go on in five to ten years to become people who can open doors for you. The are the people who, in the future, will help you out with industry or function transitions, hire the best people, make introductions to potential customers, partners, or investors. I’ve personally benefited greatly from my peer networks at McKinsey SF, Thumbtack early days, HBS, and Instagram. In a way, your success begets success in others, and vice versa. If social connection isn’t your strength, there are ways to build shared professional interests and goals that can be equally powerful.
Part III: Sales & Mission
After 4 years at Meta, I was done with big corporate life. I was lucky to have been a part of amazing teams and had brilliant mentors However, I was approaching diminishing returns on learning the art of product management at scale, and complex politics wasn’t how I wanted to grow in my career. I yearned for the fast-moving build-the-plane-as-you-fly-it startup life again.
From Meta, I landed a role as Chief Product Officer at Fuzzy Pet Health, a series-C pet health startup of ~150 backed by reputable investors like Greycroft, Matrix, and more. Shortly after joining, I also took over the Chief Technology Officer role. I loved being back in startup decision-making and execution speed. We pivoted the product and business twice and turned it from losing $20 per consult to earning $20 per consult in 9 months. I was so proud of the team we hired and our progress.
From Fuzzy I decided to take a short sabbatical, which eventually led me full circle back to entrepreneurship building my own career coaching business aimed at helping women and minorities ascend to the C-suite. The jury is out on whether it will be successful, and startup paths are never linear, but by all metrics, I’m off to a good start. Here’s what mattered to the executive recruiters, board of directors, and CEOs when considering an executive hire:
It’s all about sales: At a certain point, everything becomes sales. Whether you’re selling a product vision, a role on a team to a high caliber candidate, a business pitch, or coaching services, it is about getting others to buy in to your proposals. Getting good at the key components of sales — an attractive value proposition, a clear narrative, facts and data to increase trust — is a critical skillset for any executive or founder.
Understand motivation and incentives: Every person, every company, and every system has its own set of motivations and incentives. When you are leading a company, or founding your own, it’s important to track down how the systems surrounding that business works. What are the incentives for each party in the supply chain? How are venture funds incentivized and structured? What motivates that individual engineer on your team? When you look carefully, you can attribute any illogical scenario or failure to some underlying incentive link you were missing.
Stay true to your values and your mission: As a senior leader, there are a lot of complex decisions that trade off core values: Speed vs Autonomy (short term), short term profitability vs long term gains. You also are likely to have a lot of options in terms how you might want to spend your time: do you want to continue to accumulate wealth? spend more time with family? make a bigger lasting impact on the world? Taking the time to align time and again with your north star and what brings you meaning is critical to staying energized and avoiding burnout and future regrets.
That’s the one MOST IMPORTANT thing? Relationships. When it comes to making successful lateral moves into new industries or companies, referrals open more doors than applying online. If you’re looking to raise money for your company, or find clients for your business, you start with your network.
Relationships underlies how success can often beget success. Similar to the idea the “the rich get richer”, or why VC ecosystem develop in specific geographies where there have been big VC “exits”, when you build a powerful network of people who are in places where they can open doors and who support each other, you get more chances to find success. And once successful, you can then in turn open doors for others in the network.
So, invest in your network early and smartly. Go for quality over quantity. Find ways to break into circles of talent. When people ask me if they should go to business school, I ask whether they need the network and whether the school they can get into will give them that network. When people ask me if they should go to a tier I tech company, I ask them about the strength of their current network. Volunteering and mentoring can also be great ways to expand your network. People often underestimate this as a consideration factor in their career decisions — don’t make that mistake!
Thank you for guest contributing this, Yue Zhao!
Thank you for reading. Have more things to add? Tweet me! Have a fulfilling and productive week ahead! 🙏
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