How to Transition From Management Consulting to Product Management

Photo by Roland Samuel on Unsplash

Dear Management Consultant: I want you to bring your best skills and excel as a product manager. We need more product managers in this world who carry the strategic thinking, critical thinking and communication skills you have built up in your years as a consultant.

I want the journey to be fruitful for you. I wish that, because I have seen some great PMs emerge from consulting roles.

But I have also seen management consultants trip up in various parts of their transition to product management.

Here’s my story:

“I have five years of engineering, two years of sales engineering, MBA from a top school, two years at McKinsey working in tech-related areas, and now I am ready to rock your world as a product manager. When would you like me to start?”

That was me. Ready to move into product management. Brash, slightly overconfident, very optimistic. To get into product management, I gave McKinsey my notice and started working with recruiters. All the time, I thought the journey would be smooth: the “getting the interview,” interviewing, transitioning, doing well in the first few years. I was wrong.

I ran into a lack of understanding of what consultants do, a strong bias toward hiring product managers who had at least some PM experience, and a fear of what bringing in “consultant types” would do to the company’s culture.

The turning point came when I realized I could leverage the very skills I had fine-tuned during my consulting time to move my career forward and to ultimately start teaching and coaching other product managers in these skills.

When that happened, my approach to product management changed. Rather than trying to fit in with what other PMs were doing, I intentionally re-designed my job around my strengths and skills.

There are several likely commonalities between my experience and what many of you might face. So in a series of posts, I will share how to:

1. Analyze your skills: How to analyze your skill set as a consultant, and how it does (and does not) suit a product management role.
2. Position yourself better to make the switch from consulting to product management.
3. Interview better: Avoid the common mistakes consultants make in product management interviews.
4. Start strong in your first product management role.

Let’s start with the first thing: analyzing your skills.

Product management skills

What do consultants love — more than their families, their country and everything else?

Frameworks.

Let’s ignore my weak attempts at humor, and try to put a framework around product management skills.

Fundamentally, as a product manager, your role can be broken down into three categories*:

1. Orchestrator
2. Voice of the customer
3. Manage the product as a business

* Credit to Professor Mohanbir Sawhney from Kellogg for introducing this framework. I love his product strategy course, where I am a program leader.

This is how I break down the skills required for product managers:

Once you become a manager of PMs, additional skills around leadership and management come in, which I will address in subsequent posts.

How do consultants compare to this profile?

The following is my general analysis of how consultants do in these skills. This analysis is HIGHLY subjective; after all, you are more than a consultant. It is based on my general observations of seeing and interviewing management consultants for PM roles.

So there you have it folks! Those are the core skills and my assessment of how consultants do here.

In the next post, I will start to break down how you can position yourself better to make the transition.

If you liked the blog post, you would love my free workshop, “5 Steps our Product Manager Clients Take to Land Their Dream Job, Increase Their Salary by 200%+, and Accelerate Their Career.” Go ahead, enroll now!