Jon Clemons is a Product Manager at Indeed Tokyo. He walks us through his ideation process for the Indeed Resume Maker app (履歴書作成-インディード), his challenges and life #insideindeed Tokyo.

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Jon is part of the Product team at Indeed and has extensive experience in product and growth throughout his career. He moved to Tokyo in his third year of college and has been there ever since. He has a passion for coding and enjoys having conversations and discussions about design.

“Having come to Japan, when I was in college, I worked part-time jobs and I knew the resume format was different from the US. I saw that gap in the market in terms of the competing offerings out there, and there were some things I thought would be useful as well.” Jon shares his own experience on resume writing, and breaks down his ideation process of the Indeed Resume Maker in the Culture Matters podcast.

Author with family

“One of the shared points that most people bring up is that you have to be a good collaborator. Kind of like with the gratitude journal… when my wife handed the pen to me, I thought she was writing in her journal, and she suggested I write and we had a shared thing. You have to be open to similar feedback and suggestions from your team as a Product Manager. It’s a lot of collaboration and ideation together; and the great thing about that is that you get new ideas.” Jon shares in a podcast conversation with Inside Indeed.

Jon gives us insights into the working culture and what it takes to be successful in the Product team at Indeed.

In the interview, Jon also shares about failure, how to overcome it and advice on becoming a successful product manager

“If you ever wanted to start an idea or build something, but you’re not an engineer or a designer, I don’t think that it’s a hurdle to becoming a product manager. The most important thing is that you understand the discipline of product management, you do projects on the side and you make it known to people who would be potential mentors. The combination of all those things, the advice, the things you learn, the failures and your side projects will prepare you to be a really good product manager.” Jon shares.

Jon highlights the diversity of being a product manager, and the advantages of being able to connect and touch on different aspects of products and teams across the business.

“In meetings with Engineers, we’re talking about features and how to implement things. It’s a lot about breaking down big problems into really small tasks, and really small chunks and attacking it one by one. I can also jump into meetings with our UX Designers and we can do virtual whiteboarding.” Jon shared.

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