Latest / The Comeback Career Podcast with Fexingo: Returning After a Gap, Stay-at-Home Re-Entry / How One Parent Returned as a Product Manager After a Career Gap
Transcript
- Lucas: Priya Sharma spent eight years at home raising twins before she started looking for a product management role. She sent out about twenty applications, got two interviews, and landed one offer — at a mid-size fintech company in Chicago, salary 15 percent above the listed range. Luna: Fifteen percent above range — that is not typical for someone re-entering after eight years. What was her background before the gap? Lucas: She had been an associate product manager at a B2B software firm for about three years before she left. So she wasn't starting from zero, but by the time she started applying, product management had changed significantly — more emphasis on data, on analytics, on agile frameworks. Her old tools and processes were basically obsolete. Luna: So she had domain knowledge but not current practice. That's a very common situation for returners. How did she bridge it? Lucas: She took a three-month online certificate in product analytics from a well-known university extension program. Cost about thirteen hundred dollars. It covered SQL, A-B testing, funnel analysis — the kind of quant skills hiring managers told her were non-negotiable now. She also did a part-time consulting gig for a local nonprofit, basically helping them prioritize their website redesign. That gave her a current reference and a recent project she could talk about in interviews. Luna: The consulting piece is smart because it shows she can apply the skills in a real setting, not just a coursework environment. Did she get that gig through networking? Lucas: Exactly. She reactivated her network — she sent personal emails to about fifteen former colleagues and industry contacts, just asking to catch up. One of them knew the nonprofit was looking for someone to help with a short-term project. That turned into three months of part-time work, maybe ten hours a week. It wasn't a huge commitment, but it gave her a concrete story for her resume. Luna: I think a lot of people underestimate how much a small project like that can reframe your narrative. Instead of 'I've been out of the workforce for eight years,' it becomes 'I've been consulting and upskilling, and now I'm ready for a full-time role.' Lucas: Right. And she was very intentional about how she framed the gap itself. She didn't apologize for it or try to hide it. In interviews, when asked about the eight-year gap, she said something like: 'I took time to manage our household and raise our children, which gave me a lot of practice in stakeholder management, prioritization, and data-driven decision-making — the same skills I'll use as a product manager.' She gave a specific example: coordinating schedules, budgets, and competing priorities for a family of four. Luna: That's a strong reframe. Hiring managers I've spoken to say they actually appreciate when candidates can draw a direct line between non-work experience and job requirements. It shows self-awareness. Lucas: She also prepared for the technical questions. The fintech company gave her a case study — design a feature to reduce customer churn. She walked them through her process: pull the data, segment users, hypothesize, propose an A-B test. She didn't nail every detail, but she showed she could think structurally. Luna: And she negotiated salary on top of that. What did she say? Lucas: She told me she did research on levels dot fyi and Glassdoor, saw the range for product manager at that company was about one hundred ten to one hundred thirty thousand. They offered one ten. She said: 'I'm excited about the role, and based on my experience and the certificate I just completed, I'd like one twenty-five.' They came back at one twenty-six with a slightly smaller signing bonus. She accepted. Luna: That is a textbook negotiation. She didn't make it personal, she used data, and she anchored high. And she got above the midpoint. Lucas: One detail I found interesting: she told me the certificate was less about learning completely new things and more about building confidence. She said she had been out of a work environment long enough that she questioned whether she could still do the job. The structured coursework gave her a way to prove to herself that she could still learn, still problem-solve, still deliver. Luna: That confidence angle is real. I've heard from other returners that the biggest hurdle isn't skills — it's the internal voice saying you don't belong anymore. A certificate can quiet that voice. Lucas: And the consulting gig helped too. She had a deliverable she could point to, and a manager who could vouch for her. That made the leap from 'former APM' to 'current PM candidate' a lot shorter. Luna: If we've helped you think through a career move or decision, listener support is what keeps this show ad-free. If you find our episodes useful, you can buy us a coffee at buy me a coffee dot com slash fexingo. It genuinely helps us keep producing deep dives like this one. Lucas: And to circle back to Priya's story — she's now been in the role for about nine months. She told me she feels more confident than she did in her first job out of college. She also mentioned that her team didn't care about the gap at all after she proved herself in the first few weeks. Luna: That's the dream outcome. Any final takeaway from her experience? Lucas: I think the biggest lesson is that a career gap doesn't erase your skills — it just means you need to find a way to demonstrate them again in a current context. Priya did it with a cheap certificate, a small consulting project, and a honest reframe of her time away. It's a playbook anyone can follow.