PM 101 — Process Improvement: What Is It? And Why is It Important for PMs?

If you don’t have any PM experience, but are looking for a PM position, read below to find out a skill you need to qualify for the job!

Process Improvement is a term commonly used by PMs (product and project managers) to describe improving a current workflow. For someone new to the role, this term may seem vague. Let’s clear it up.

To demonstrate process improvement, say you have a lemonade stand and three workers. Two of them make the lemonade, and one of them sells the lemonade. Right now, the stand works well but a long line forms around lunch and people will leave because of it.

A PM would come in, make this analysis and suggest a process improvement. One Process Improvement could be prepping extra lemonade and switching one of the makers to sellers right before lunch. The PM would recommend this and give the best way to do it.

Instead of a lemonade stand though, say you have a machine learning engineering team, where 2 people build the models and 1 person meets with stakeholders. During a particularly important release, a PM would analyze the situation and maybe discover that another engineer needs to join an important meeting with stakeholders. So they may schedule to have all work completed more in advance and pull one engineer off the project temporarily to communicate with stakeholders.

This type of planning and coordination is a key part of being a PM and a skill that many employers look for in hiring.

So if you’re looking to apply for a PM role, look for ways in which at school or at work you have improved an existing process. Did you notice that a team project was moving slowly in class and you found a way to streamline it? Did you notice the same lemonade stand situation while you were working at the local coffee shop and fix it? Identify situations in your past experience and note them on your resume and in your cover letter.