The Career Safety Net Most Product Managers Forget to Build

You don’t need it, until you really do.

One of my clients went from celebrating a promotion… to getting laid off… in under 48 hours. 😩

No warnings. No signs. Just one surprise meeting with HR, and boom - they were locked out.

When a take home assignment landed in their inbox later that month, they had nothing to show for their years in that previous role. No metrics. No visuals. No work samples. No polished stories.

Grateful as they were for kind coworkers who helped grab screenshots and data, the whole experience was a wake-up call.

Let’s make sure this doesn’t happen to you.

The Problem: No Receipts, No Story

Product work often lives behind a firewall.

Your decks, screenshots, and strategy docs? Tucked away on internal drives you can’t access after you leave the company.

So when a new opportunity shows up (or worse, when your job ends unexpectedly) you’re scrambling to reconstruct a career’s worth of wins.

Not ideal.

And in this market, more and more case interviews and take home assignments are asking candidates to present on real projects.

When your best work is locked away, you lose your best talking points.

What to Do Before You Need It

You can be ready with a few small, proactive steps.

🗂️ Create a personal “Wins” folder. Keep versions of your most impactful decks, visuals, work samples, and, most importantly, results. No proprietary data, just the pieces you’d want to reference in a future interview.

📓 Track your results quarterly. Jot down what changed in your product, for who, and why it mattered/how you measured success.

🎙️ Rehearse your greatest hits. Practice talking through your projects like you would in an interview: what was the situation, what action did you take, and what was the outcome?

This is your career archive, and future you will be glad it exists.

Why It Matters More Than Ever

Hiring managers don’t just want to hear that you’ve done the work. They want to see it.

Being prepared means you won’t miss a chance to shine because of missing data points or a fuzzy memories. You’ll be able to confidently walk into that case interview with stories that impress.

And when you’ve got your stories down? You move from reactive to ready.

Set Yourself Up for the Win

This doesn’t need to take all day.

Set a 30-minute timer this week and start your archive. It’s one of those career hygiene moves that pays off big time later.

And if you want support building your interview stories, take home assignments, or prepping for interviews?

That’s what we do inside SPRINT.

Let’s make your next move feel strategic, not rushed and reactive.

→ Learn more about the SPRINT job search coaching program for Product Managers