How does an MBA fit into your product management journey?

Are you an aspiring product manager and have any of the below questions?

• Do I need an MBA to get a Product manager job?
• Will an MBA make me a better product manager?
• What if I have already done development/design, do I still need an MBA to be a PM? And what if I’ve never coded, will an MBA help to land a PM job?
• I’m already an Associate Product Manager, will an MBA still help me with my product management career?

As a recent computer engineer -> MBA grad -> Product Manager, I’d like to share my perspective on the above questions.

Since MBA is often referred to as a long term investment, let me take you through each stage of the product management career ladder to evaluate the value of an MBA:

Career Phase — MBA Value Map 1

Stage 1: Landing a Product Manager Job

The value of an MBA in this stage largely depends on your past experience. For someone who already has product experience — as a manager, developer, analyst, designer, or even marketer — transition to a product manager can usually be made without an MBA. While some companies use MBA as a filter to screen PM job applications, this still shouldn't stop you from getting a PM job without an MBA. The best place to start is your current company. Volunteer to take up product management related work over and above your existing role. This does 2 things —

1. Gives you a realistic picture of what it’s like to be a product manager (“CEO of a product” is a highly glorified and mostly fictional job description) and whether you would actually want to pursue product management
2. Helps you get your foot in the door — you can now claim to have practical product management experience. There are some wonderful resources on medium and other websites(some links mentioned in the post) that can help you polish your skills along the way. Also, you must find a mentor within or outside your company to guide you. This will cover all the knowledge you really need to get the ball rolling.

If you do not have prior product experience of any kind, then the value of an MBA is significantly higher in landing a PM job:

1. An MBA will put you into the consideration set for the job, and companies will look at your resume/call you for an interview.
2. A lot of B-schools now have alumni-driven Product Management workshops and academic electives that can help you understand the role better, and guide you through interview preparation.
3. Your b-school cohort is highly likely to consist of developers, product managers, designers etc — learning from a diverse cohort under one roof will offer practical and valuable insights for the role. Getting dedicated interview prep partners is a lot easier in a b-school, and this helps much more than any other factor in landing the job.
4. If you really want the job, then spending time on some interesting PM-related side projects will increase your chances of getting an interview call. Again, b-schools offer opportunities on this front through internships, professor-led projects etc.

Stage 2: Doing the job well

PMs make lots of decisions everyday, when does an MBA help?

To evaluate the value of an MBA in the day to day life of a PM, I’ll use Shreyas Doshi’s “3 senses of a PM” framework. It is an elegant framework and I believe that it captures the essence of a PM role very well.

1. Product Sense: Shreyas defines this as “the ability to usually make correct product decisions, even in the presence of ambiguity”. This ability needs a combination of knowledge, skills, and experience.

Here are a few areas that the MBA will help with while developing a Product Sense:

• Customer: Courses on Design thinking, Market research, and Marketing Strategy provide interesting tools to understand customer needs and pain points. Behavioral Economics courses are a gold mine in terms of understanding cognitive biases and how they impact decision making.
• Business: What is the problem? Is it worth solving given the resources? What is the impact on key business metrics? Does this approach align with the companies’ capabilities? How is the competitor’s product performing? — Knowledge of how a business works, helps keep the business goals in mind while making product decisions.
• Strategy: Case studies in B-school focus a lot on what went wrong with a business/strategic decision and why. From critically evaluating an existing growth strategy to being aware of unforeseen disruption, the b-school experience will remind you to constantly keep the bigger strategic picture in mind while making product decisions.

Here are some product sense skills that an MBA might NOT equip you with:

• Heuristics: Rules of thumb help PMs make complex decisions faster. These are usually picked up on the job as you go. More experience, helps you develop nuanced heuristics and your own mental models.
• Creativity: PMs work with multiple stakeholders and operate under multiple constraints. Creativity is more valuable than it seems in order to get things done. While b-schools do offer courses on creativity, I believe it cannot be taught.
• Intuition: The gut feeling that makes you want to take a bet on something uncertain, is very personal. Despite multiple initial rejections, Airbnb founders had a strong sense of perseverance and intuition that their idea will work, and today about 2 million people sleep in a strangers’ home every day.
• Domain Expertise: MBA courses do a great job of covering how any business works, but usually do not delve too deep into a specific domain. Knowledge of your business area, as well as of technology helps you do the job better. Reading, learning, and asking questions is the best way to get a strong grasp.

2. Analytical Sense: Shreyas defines this as “the ability to frame the right questions, evaluate multiple facets of a problem, derive solutions, and simulate possible outcomes based on available data (and anecdotes)”. MBA imbibes structured thinking that helps in breaking down a problem. It exposes you to multiple analytical techniques and tools and educates you about the limitations of those tools. Here are some courses I did at b-school, that I find valuable for strengthening my analytical sense :

• Statistics for Managerial Decisions: While any stats course will teach you the basics of descriptive and inferential statistics, management courses usually focus on the right way to apply statistics to decision making. example: Statistical tools will provide you with a p-value, but determining the acceptable level of α and β will be a business decision depending on how costly Type 1 and Type 2 errors are for your use case.
• Marketing Analytics: Marketing courses help expose PMs to various tools and techniques that can be used to understand the customer better, and design the product better. It is possible that the marketing team will conduct most of these activities, but as PMs you will be expected to participate — define market research objectives, understand and interpret results, compare and choose the right model, draw product-related conclusion.

Some marketing tools and techniques that help in product management

• Financial Accounting and Decision Making: Understanding income statements, balance sheets, and cash flow statements can be very valuable specially at an early stage startup. It will help improve any RoI analysis or decision making that you do.

3. Execution Sense: Once you have determined what problem you’re solving, and whether it is worth solving, the third sense of execution guides you through actually getting stuff done. There are some skills that an MBA can help refine here, but I believe there’s only so much you can learn theoretically about getting stuff done on the ground.

Story-telling: Communicating your vision in an appealing way to align all stakeholders is extremely important for PMs to get things done. Storytelling and communication courses in b-school, along with a lot of presentation practice and peer feedback proves helpful. But without an MBA too, clubs such as toastmasters prove useful in building this skill. The Success Framework elaborated in Made to Stick is a great method recommended by most B-schools to hone this skill.

Stakeholder management: This forms a large chunk of an early PM’s role. A fair share of the day will be spent in meetings dealing with people, understanding their problems, brainstorming, and solving last mile execution problems. Each organization/team has a different culture, working style, and preferred conflict resolution mechanisms. I believe an MBA doesnt directly help much here. Even after knowing all the theory of personality types, one still has to practically figure out the best way to work with people around.

Project management: Being organized, attention to detail, and great planning are acquirable skills — with or without an MBA.

If the above text made sense, hopefully, you’d realize what the orange-green colors in the thought bubbles indicate :)

Stage 3: Climbing up the ladder

Everyone will agree that progressing in your career largely depends on your performance, hard work, and accomplishments. Since this article is about the value of an MBA, I will focus my content towards that only.

Career Phase — MBA Value Map 2

A lot of MBA grads will agree that the true value of an MBA lies in the network it gives you access to. Many doors open simply by being part of the network. Most schools have a strong culture of alumni helping each other out in terms of career guidance, job referrals, understanding domains, and more. This is directly helpful for individuals who want to try working in another domain/company.

An MBA degree from a premier school serves as a strong signaling mechanism. MBA isn't necessary to be a CPO, but a simple LinkedIn search will show that a lot of CPOs tend to have an MBA.

The last point is also fairly important in the career ladder. What if you don't want to be CPO? What if you realize after some years of being PM, that you don't want to be in Product any more and try something else altogether. Among post-graduate degrees, MBA is the most generalist in nature and often serves as a pre-requisite for any leadership/managerial role.

Conclusion

Assess the value of an MBA across your entire career journey:

1. Landing a PM Job: For individuals with prior product/tech/design experience, the MBA might not necessarily help in landing a PM job. For individuals without product background, or the ones targeting the big tech firms, an MBA is valuable.
2. Doing the PM job better: An MBA helps with getting a broad understanding of how a business works, however might not help with all skills necessary to become a better PM
3. Climbing up the ladder: An MBA is highly beneficial here, specially to switch companies, roles, and bag leadership roles.

Product Management is one of the most multi-functional roles in the tech industry. People with varying backgrounds(designers, coders, marketers, consultants, sales, entrepreneurs, and more) with or without an MBA, land up in the amazing world of Product. An MBA primarily helps in building a strong network and learning some useful management skills along the way. With the steep tuition fee and opportunity cost involved, the decision to pursue MBA is not trivial at all and depends on your career goals and needs. Hope this post gives some clarity and helps you with your decision!

The value is in what gets used, not in what gets built. — Kris Gale