Product Management Volunteer Opportunities
One question I regularly get is “how can I get started as a product management volunteer?” It’s an excellent question that historically hasn’t been well-answered, and it’s a question that we should be taking more seriously as a profession.
After all, the value of serving as a volunteer in product management is that it enables you to accelerate your career in ways that you might not be able to do on the job. And, the value of having product managers volunteer is that we can make the world a better place to live in.
As a volunteer, you’ll get to flex new skill sets and tackle new situations. Plus, you’ll also get to meet new people and strengthen your network as a product manager.
In my experience, I’ve found that there are three solid ways to volunteer your time as a product manager:
Volunteer at nonprofits as an individual contributor PM
Participate in a hackathon
Volunteer as an organizer
I’ll break down the value of each of these volunteering pathways, and I’ll also share how exactly you can get involved as a volunteer.
Volunteering as an individual contributor PM
The benefit of volunteering as an individual contributor product manager is that you get to practice your PM skill sets and drive impact at other organizations.
This avenue is helpful if you’re trying to break into product for the first time, or if you’re looking to exercise a set of PM skills that you typically won’t get to exercise on the job.
If you’re trying to break into product, one of the key things you need to demonstrate is that you know how to scope and deliver value.
But, it’s quite hard to have experiences like these in non-PM roles, and so volunteering as a product manager can help to expose you to these experiences. Because nonprofits are looking for helping hands wherever they can get them, you don’t have to have a previous track record as a product manager to tackle product management work at a nonprofit.
And, once you’ve started getting some product management experience under your belt as a volunteer, you can then use this experience to strengthen your resume and increase your chances of securing a full-time PM role.
If you’re already a product manager, volunteering could be valuable for you because it enables you to tackle growth in areas that your current organization hasn’t made available to you yet.
Maybe you’re a product manager in charge of scaling the existing product, which means that you don’t get much opportunity to launch new business lines.
Well, volunteering can help you with that! You can work at nonprofits that are looking to launch new digital experiences, and that enables you to gain skills that you can’t access at work.
Or, maybe you’re a product manager in charge of launching new products at your company, but you want to scale existing products.
Similarly, volunteering can help you with that! You can work at nonprofits that are looking to scale their current digital solutions, and that empowers you to round out your inventory of PM skills.
So, volunteering lets you gain access to new skills and new scopes that you otherwise wouldn’t be able to get day-to-day. Here are a few ways to volunteer as an individual contributor product manager at a nonprofit.
US Digital Response
From their website, “USDR is a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization that helps governments and organizations respond quickly and efficiently to support the critical needs of the public.” And, even if you’re not living in the United States, you can still volunteer!
You can learn more about their volunteer program at https://www.usdigitalresponse.org/volunteers/
That said, note that they don’t match every volunteer to opportunities. They have about a 12% placement rate: they have a pool of 7,000 volunteers and have placed 840 of them.
Still, it doesn’t hurt to submit an application, as it only takes 15 minutes to apply.
Code for America
Contrary to what its name implies, Code for America isn’t only looking for engineers - it also seeks product manager volunteers to help them drive inclusion and equity in a variety of social issues.
The Code for America community fellowship is a 9 month program that partners product managers with local governments. You can learn more here: https://codeforamerica.org/programs/network/community-fellowship/
Code for America also has local community Brigades that has their own local projects and openings. You can join a local initiative here: https://brigade.codeforamerica.org/brigades/
Hack for LA
This nonprofit org’s mission is to “bring together civic-minded volunteers to build digital products, programs and services with community partners and local government to address issues in the Los Angeles region and to share these effective processes, practices, and code with the larger civic tech community.”
You can sign up to volunteer with Hack for LA here: https://www.hackforla.org/
Thanks to Ali Kiani for sharing this org with us!
VolunteerMatch
VolunteerMatch is a platform that connects volunteers to open opportunities, and you can search specifically for product manager openings. Most of their open opportunities are virtual, so you don’t need to be in a specific location to volunteer.
Unfortunately, VolunteerMatch doesn’t have an intuitive user interface, and searching for “product manager” roles on its platform gives lots of irrelevant results.
Thankfully, we can use Google Search to work around this problem. In Google Search, use this query:
volunteermatch.org "product manager"
By using Google Search, you’ll get much more relevant results!
As an example, I found PM volunteering opportunities for edtech nonprofits, healthcare nonprofits, govtech nonprofits, environmental nonprofits, and other potential opportunities.
That said, you’ll likely need to look through multiple pages of Google results to find what you’re looking for, as I needed to look at pages 1, 2, and 3 to find non-expired VolunteerMatch listings.
Cold outreach
Many nonprofits are open to cold outreach, as most nonprofits are generally grateful to have more hands on deck. Even if they don’t urgently need a product manager and haven’t publicly posted about a product manager volunteer role, they’ll still likely be receptive to cold outreach and pitches.
That said, you shouldn’t expect a 100% success rate here. Essentially, you should think of this like standard PM recruiting, where you must:
Identify the pain of the organization
Determine your ability to solve that organization’s pain
Demonstrate that you’re the best solution for them
After all, nonprofits have limited bandwidth to train and onboard new volunteers, and so you must make a compelling pitch that your output is a high-leverage investment of their time.
Here’s the condensed process for conducting cold outreach:
Select a nonprofit you’re interested in
Find their contact information
Send a cover letter and resume
Nonprofit volunteer cover letters are a bit different from standard full-time cover letters. Specifically, you’ll want to make sure that you clearly identify upfront how much time you’re willing to dedicate. Be sure to address:
How many hours per week you can commit
Which days of the week you’ll be available
The duration of your volunteering commitment (e.g. 3 months, 6 months, 1 year, etc.)
If you need any additional help with the cover letter, download our one-page guide to writing effective PM cover letters here: https://www.productteacher.com/guide-to-cover-letters
Participating in hackathons
If you don’t have the time to take on a significant IC PM volunteer role but you’re still interested in volunteering, you can timebox your volunteer efforts by participating in hackathons instead.
In a hackathon, you won’t be working for an existing nonprofit. Rather, you’ll be working with a small team of 2-5 people to spin up a product idea. You’ll then pitch this idea in front of a panel of judges, and this competition can help connect you with product leaders and investors.
Hackathons typically run very quickly - some finish in 24 hours, and others might run for a couple of weeks, but almost none of them run for multiple quarters.
The benefit of a hackathon is that you’ll have the opportunity to exercise your product skills and measure the impact of your work. This experience then serves as powerful evidence that you can include in your PM portfolio, in your resume, and within your interview responses.
Not sure which hackathons to participate in? Here are a couple of suggestions.
Major League Hacking: The MLH compiles an up-to-date list of upcoming hackathons! Some of their featured hackathons are digital and worldwide, whereas others are in-person only. Be sure to check out some of the events - they might spark new product ideas for you!
Hackathon Hackers: This Facebook group is highly active and has lots of upcoming events for people to participate in.
NASA Space Apps: If you’re interested in space and tech, check out the NASA Space Apps challenge! They run an event every year around October.
Product Buds Protothon: The Product Buds Protothon is a great way to meet product managers and designers, and to tackle an interesting problem statement. The team at Product Buds runs a Protothon every 1-2 years.
Volunteering as an organizer
Maybe you’re less interested in practicing your day-to-day PM skills, and you’re much more interested in building a community and strengthening your network.
Well, volunteering for a product management association as an organizer is a great way to do exactly that!
PM associations give you exposure to hundreds of companies and to senior product leaders that you might not otherwise encounter. By organizing events for PM associations, you’ll increase your visibility and personal brand, and you’ll also provide value to the broader profession of product management as a whole.
Below are some product management associations where you can volunteer as an organizer.
There will likely be product management associations in your geographical area. The best way to find them is to run a Google Search query for “<location> product management association” and look for relevant results.
But, if there aren’t any near you, then consider joining a local ProductTank or a local ProductCamp as a volunteer event organizer. Or, consider spinning up your own product management organization!
We’ve now covered three ways that you can volunteer as a product manager. But before we wrap up, I want to cover something that you definitely don’t want to do when it comes to volunteering your time.
Don’t ask for-profit companies for volunteer opportunities
I regularly get inbound requests from people who want to volunteer as an individual contributor product manager, and I’ve seen this at all of the companies that I’ve worked at before (including Blend and Movoto).
I strongly discourage this course of action. Here’s why.
First, for-profit companies have large scopes of work for their full-time product managers, and these large scopes can’t be done part-time.
Volunteers are part-time by nature, so it doesn’t make sense to bring in volunteers for high-priority, time-sensitive work.
In contrast, nonprofit organizations are typically grateful for any extra helping hands they can get, which is why cold outreach to nonprofits is a viable way to secure volunteering opportunities. Even if you take longer than expected to knock out a particular initiative, most nonprofits will still operate just fine.
On the flip side, for-profit companies absolutely cannot afford to have delays for their product initiatives. They have customers and investors who need specific deliverables by specific dates, and unpaid volunteer PMs cannot provide the necessary accountability and incentives alignment required to maintain customer confidence.
Second, the biggest pain that a for-profit company has is that they have limited product management bandwidth, and it’s not a high-ROI use of time to use that precious bandwidth to vet and onboard incoming PMs.
Their product team is already working hard to ship massive value to customers and end users, and they can’t afford to distract them with the low-ROI task of vetting and onboarding volunteers.
To be absolutely clear: companies are not in pain when it comes to compensation. Too many people think that “offering my time for free is a great way to get in the door of a company I’m interested in”, but it’s not a winning play.
Here’s why. When you try to pitch a company to let you join for free, they’ll immediately think that you’re not a credible expert. After all, if you had valuable skills, you’d know how to value yourself, and you wouldn’t be positioning yourself for free.
Instead, they’ll see a red flag that you’ll likely need a ton of time to onboard, and time is the one thing that companies don’t have.
That’s why most companies reject unsolicited volunteer PM pitches, because they simply cannot afford the time cost of onboarding a volunteer.
To ensure that you maintain a solid reputation in the industry, and to ensure that you’re using your time wisely, focus on volunteering at nonprofits, participating in hackathons, or volunteering at PM associations. Don’t ask corporations for volunteer opportunities.
If you really want to work at that company, focus on identifying your value proposition to them and demonstrate that you can solve their pains. Go through the regular recruiting process for paid full-time PM roles.
Remember, if you try to go outside of their standard recruiting process, you’re creating pain for them rather than solving pain for them, and companies don’t want to deal with more pain.
Closing thoughts
Volunteering can be a great way to establish credibility and create narratives about your ability to prioritize, scope, and deliver value to end users.
The great thing about volunteering is that you’ll be able to gain significant new skills, irrespective of your current background and your current role.
We hope to see you give back to the community as a product management volunteer!
Thank you to Pauli Bielewicz, Siamak Khorrami, Goutham Budati, Markus Seebauer, Juliet Chuang, and Kendra Ritterhern for making this guide possible.
