Navigating the MBA to Product Manager Journey (1): Dispelling Common Myths about Pursuing an MBA for Product Management
The years 2022–2023 might be the harshest winter in the tech industry in the past decade. Over the past year, there have been massive layoffs in the tech industry, hiring freezes, delays in starting times for new graduates, and even revocation of job offers. Despite this market situation, I was fortunate enough to secure a PM internship, and I will be serving as a Product Manager Technical Intern at Amazon AWS in Seattle this summer. I am very grateful to everyone who has helped me along the way (there are too many to name!).
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As an international student coming to the U.S. for the first time to build a career, I hope to share my experience searching for a PM internship in my first year of MBA. This could help those considering pursuing an MBA in the U.S. better understand the recruitment status of PM for MBA students in the American tech industry, and to more easily find product management internships.
This will probably be a series of articles. In this first one, I want to share some common myths about MBA PM and my personal views and experiences:
1. Are MBA courses helpful for finding PM internships?
The short answer is they offer limited help. There are many courses, lectures, and practical opportunities in an MBA program that can enhance your abilities to become an excellent product manager. However, by the time you start taking these electives, you usually have completed the compulsory courses for the first and second semesters of the MBA, and the best time for seeking summer internships may have passed. Moreover, based on my personal experience, compared to your technical background or product management experience, the experiences from these courses may seem a bit weak on your resume. These are excellent resources for your growth, but they might not significantly increase your chances of getting an interview, which is typically the biggest challenge in finding an internship.
2. Do many MBA graduates become PMs?
PM has indeed been a popular choice among students wishing to enter the tech industry after their MBA in recent years. However, looking at Kellogg’s employment report, only 8–10% of students become PMs after graduation, compared to the 30%+ students who choose consulting. The ratio is not high.
Even in tech-centric schools like UCB and MIT Sloan, the proportion of graduates who become PMs is only about 15% and 13% respectively. The proportion of students choosing consulting in these two schools is around 30%. So, even though we see the popularity of PM among MBA students increasing year by year, PM is not the mainstream when considering the overall MBA student body.
Another interesting observation is that the proportion of Asian students choosing tech and PM positions is significantly higher than that of local U.S. students. This could very likely be due to U.S. work visa considerations (tech industries have historically been more willing to provide visas to foreign students).
3. I don’t have PM experience, nor am I a STEM graduate, but I want to transition to PM through an MBA. Is this possible?
Transitioning to PM through an MBA without a technical background or PM experience is absolutely possible, but the actual difficulty may be higher than expected. Why is that? I believe this is mainly because many people overlook the individual differences among the student body. Employment reports usually only disclose how many students become product managers after graduation, how many have done product management internships during the summer, and what the average salary is. However, these reports often suffer from selection bias — what were these students doing before they pursued their MBAs?
To illustrate with two examples from my classmates: Classmate A had already worked at the largest internet company in his country for 7–8 years before his MBA, has rich product manager experience, and is now a PM manager, leading his own team and junior product managers. Another classmate, B, graduated from a top-tier CS course in the United States, worked as a software engineer at a well-known large tech company in the United States for a few years after graduation, and then transitioned to be a product manager for a few years.
If you don’t have a technical background or any product management experience, you’re not starting from the same starting line as these two classmates when looking for PM opportunities.
We can roughly categorize MBA students who are looking for PM internships/jobs into the following four groups:
(1) Beginner Ben has neither product experience nor technical background and is the most difficult to find a PM job among all categories. I think it might be quite difficult to rapidly improve your technical ability in the short term. Still, the most direct method is to try to find short-term product management internships or project opportunities in related fields or by using your transferable skills. Usually, the easiest path for this type of MBA student to become a PM is within their current field, using specialized knowledge to transition to PM or finding companies that have been willing to accept product manager interns without product experience in the past.
(2) Product Phoebe and (3) Technical Tony each have unique strengths and weaknesses. In general terms, Product Phoebe may find it slightly easier to land an interview, particularly for product manager roles that align with her industry experience. I identify myself as a Product Phoebe. My main weakness lies in technical skills, and to address this, I took some introductory computer science courses before starting my MBA. Despite the efforts, I don’t believe the lack of these skills makes or breaks my chances of securing an interview greatly. As for Technical Tony, the best course of action is similar to what’s recommended for Beginner Ben: to seek opportunities that provide hands-on product management experience and internalize those lessons!
If you identify with (4) Master Molly, I believe you already hold several advantages over most MBA students. Your next steps might involve determining the specific field in which you’d like to work as a product manager and focusing on enhancing any skills that might still need development.
Regardless of which of these four types you identify with, I hold a firm belief that everyone has the capacity to unearth their unique strengths, paving the way to becoming an exceptional product manager. What we’re discussing here is just the difficulties you may face during your MBA studies when looking for product manager internships or jobs.
At its core, everyone’s embarkation point before diving into an MBA course is distinctly personal and varied. After realizing these differences, what we can do is to actively enhance our own experiences and abilities, and seize all opportunities. Every year, many people successfully transition to PM positions through an MBA. I’ve seen many examples around me this year, so there’s no need to be overly nervous or feel pressured, the opportunity that belongs to you will still be there.
4. Does the need for a work visa greatly affect the job hunt for a PM role?
The answer is YES. Besides PM experience and technical background, I believe that the need for a work visa, or VISA Sponsorship, is the third major factor in securing a product management position in the US. In my experience, international students have at least 50% fewer job opportunities than local students.
Let me briefly explain the two types of work visas you will encounter while studying for an MBA:
- CPT (Curricular Practical Training) is needed for a summer internship, and this requires the approval of the school.
- OPT (Optional Practical Training) is required if you want to work in the United States after graduation. In addition to approval from the immigration bureau, applying for OPT also requires sponsorship from the hiring company. For more specific details, you can look it up online.
Even though a summer internship only requires CPT and doesn’t necessitate much action on the company’s part, many companies view MBA interns as future full-time recruitment reserves. If they do not have a quota for future sponsorship, they often explicitly state in their recruitment ads that they do not provide sponsorship.
The sponsorship of international students by tech companies, including the specific roles for which they offer sponsorship, can vary from year to year, so I recommend thorough research. However, based on my experience, larger companies tend to have more sponsorship opportunities. While some small companies and startups may be more open to taking international students as interns due to higher demand, they might not always be able to provide full-time return offers. On the other hand, securing positions in medium-sized companies often proves to be the most challenging from my personal experience.
In the tech industry, generally speaking, the more technically-oriented the position, the higher the proportion of international students sponsored, like software engineers or data scientists. In many companies, product managers are also considered technical positions, so they have more sponsorship slots. I have seen some companies only offer sponsorship to product manager interns during campus recruitment, excluding product marketing manager interns or strategy interns.
Even so, the number of companies in the tech industry willing to recruit MBA PM interns is already low. Taking into account the visa issue for international students, the remaining choice of companies is actually much less than you might think. This might explain why many international MBA graduates tend to concentrate in a few specific companies for product manager roles, with the visa factor being one consideration.
5. Is the ranking of the MBA important for finding a PM job in the US?
The tech industry generally doesn’t pay much attention to the ranking of an MBA. In my experience, they value personal experience and skills more. However, this year, due to the recruitment cuts in many large companies, there indeed have been cases where some large tech companies have canceled recruitment from certain schools, focusing instead on a select few. This situation usually involves a comprehensive consideration of several factors, including geographical location, school ranking, performance of alumni in the company, and the relationship between the school’s career counseling center and the company.
Of these, geographical factors and alumni networks may significantly outweigh rankings in importance. Many companies often primarily recruit MBA students from nearby institutions. This might be because they believe this strategy yields a higher acceptance rate or perhaps because they already receive an abundance of applications from highly qualified candidates. Additionally, the presence of an alumni network within a company can attract more students from the same school, potentially due to a cultural fit. Therefore, MBA students aspiring to join a particular company should consider more than just the school’s ranking when making their choice. It’s equally crucial to explore the typical career paths of their prospective school’s alumni.
6. Is industry-relevant experience important?
Incredibly crucial! Companies recruit MBA students to find immediately employable talent. Many interviews I received came from e-commerce, marketplace, or B2C type companies that aligned with my experience.
Apart from a few large tech companies that have a so-called “General Pool Application”, most tech companies hire based on specific needs. Each team writes a job description (JD) according to its needs to find the most suitable candidate. Attractive positions may draw hundreds or even thousands of applications. If in the top 20 MBA schools in the US, 15% of the students are seeking PM internships, there are already more than 1500 people in the MBA application pool alone competing with you. Typically, a PM internship posting on LinkedIn receives hundreds of applications within a day of being posted in the peak recruiting season.
Having relevant experience generally brings a competitive edge. For instance, people with consulting and marketing backgrounds often start with Growth PM roles, students with a data science background have stronger fit in AI/Algo PM roles, and those from financial backgrounds are favored by FinTech companies.
7. Can MBA experience accelerate promotions and high-income opportunities in PM roles?
This largely depends on the company culture. Indeed, some companies like Amazon, Adobe, and ServiceNow specifically hire MBA students and have dedicated recruitment plans. In these companies, you may start off with positions like Senior Manager or Senior Product Manager. However, apart from these special cases, many tech companies do not particularly favor Product Managers with MBA degrees. In fact, some tech companies don’t even offer PM internships specifically for MBA students. For example, this year, Wayfair only offered summer internships in areas such as Marketing, Finance, etc., without opening up Product Manager positions.
In many tech companies, two years of MBA experience might not be as helpful as two years of full-time PM experience. I’ve seen MBA graduates start as Associate Product Managers (APM) at Facebook. I’ve also talked to an MBA senior who had no PM experience and previously worked in consulting. He started his product career as a Product Specialist at Google after graduation. Overall, prior work experience seems more important for the tech industry than having an MBA.
If your goal is to work in product management at a large tech company after completing your MBA and advance within the company, you might want to conduct a deeper investigation into the companies you’re interested in. Understand how the career prospects for Product Managers with MBA degrees look like within that company.
Conclusion:
The intention of writing this article is not to discourage those who hope to become Product Managers through an MBA program but to share the trends I’ve observed in the US, providing future students with more insights. Different opinions and discussions are always welcome.
Overall, I believe that coming to the US for an MBA and seeking opportunities as a Product Manager is still a realistic and excellent choice for international students. For instance, at Kellogg School of Management, where I studied, a lot of product management-related courses were added recently, forming a series called Technology Pathway, which prepared you to be a stronger producer manager after graduation. Simultaneously, Kellogg alumni have vast networks within major big tech companies. According to a Fortune article, the most students who entered FAANG companies in 2022 were MBA graduates from Kellogg. Also, the alumni have established a rapidly growing Kellogg PM Community, where they are happy to share job opportunities as well as their experiences and insights into the PM career, both online and offline. My nine months at Kellogg so far have been wonderful, and I believe other top MBAs in the US have similar resources!
If you still have a passion for transitioning from an MBA to a Product Management role, or you have been admitted to an MBA and are preparing to go to the United States, feel free to follow this series of articles.
