Sophia Philippou's CV advice for Product Management, Design and Marketing: replace responsibilities with $ and % outcomes, and pass the 'So what?' test.
Timeless CV advice for Product Management, Product Design and Product Marketing.
Sophia Philippou, Perpetuate
If you work in Product Management, Product Design, Product Growth or Product Marketing, two of the most valuable symbols you can put on your CV are:
$ and %.
Why? Because they demonstrate impact.
These are highly commercial roles. Yet so many CVs still read like a list of responsibilities:
Owned the roadmap.
Led customer discovery.
Launched a new feature.
Redesigned the onboarding experience.
Developed the go-to-market strategy.
That's useful context, but it doesn't tell me what changed because you were there.
The strongest CVs connect the work to an outcome.
Wherever possible, quantify it.
Instead of telling me you "launched a new onboarding experience", tell me that the new experience increased activation by 22%.
Instead of saying you "led the launch into a new market", tell me that market generated $2m in ARR within 18 months.
The second version tells me far more about the level at which you operate.
Product Management is inherently commercial.
The bets and decisions you make influence growth, retention, expansion, efficiency and competitive advantage.
Don't just tell me what you shipped. Tell me why it mattered.
What happened to adoption after launch? Did it improve retention? Did it unlock an Enterprise customer? Did it create expansion revenue? Did it reduce support costs? Did it help the company enter a new market?
The feature itself is rarely the most interesting part of the story.
The outcome is.
This is particularly important for Product Designers.
Beautiful portfolios can show me the craft. Your CV should also show me the impact.
Have you quantified the ROI of improving the user experience?
Did a redesigned workflow increase usage, engagement, conversion or activation? Did reducing friction improve retention? Did a new experience increase usage of a strategically important feature? Did better usability reduce support tickets or speed up time-to-value?
And sometimes the commercial impact is bigger than an individual metric.
Is UX one of the company's competitive advantages?
If it is, show how your work contributed to that advantage.
The strongest Product Designers don't operate adjacent to Product thinking. They understand the customer problem, the business model and the commercial consequence of the experience they're designing.
The same principle applies to Product Marketing.
Don't stop at "developed positioning and messaging" or "led GTM for a new product".
What happened next?
Did win rates improve? Did the business successfully move upmarket? Did you improve sales conversion? Increase pipeline? Launch into a new vertical? Improve adoption? Change the competitive narrative? Support expansion into a new geography?
Product Marketing sits at the intersection of Product, Marketing, Sales and the customer. Your CV should demonstrate the commercial impact of that position.
One important distinction: don't claim causation where it doesn't exist.
Commercial outcomes are usually created by teams.
But you can still explain the outcome your work contributed to.
There is a big difference between claiming "I generated $5m in ARR" and explaining that "I led the product initiative that enabled the Enterprise offering, contributing to $5m in new ARR."
That's credible, commercially minded and gives an employer much more context.
Go through every major role or achievement on your CV and ask: So what?
The "So what?" test
What changed for the customer or the business as a result?
If you can answer that question with a $ or a %, even better.
Because the best Product, Design, and Marketing CVs don't just document what someone has done, they provide evidence of the impact they can create.
Sophia Philippou leads Perpetuate's Product and Marketing practices.
Related: Hiring a Head of Product who isn't on the market →