5 Questions MBA Students Ask Me About Product Management, Answered

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Every year around this time, I get a few emails from first year MBA students asking me for advice about being a product manager, or mentorship, or to “pick my brain” about my current role. This post summarizes the top 5 FAQs from those conversations, so anyone can access the answers without relying on me to email them back or find a time for a call. Just about all of this applies to non-MBA students too.

The FAQs I’ll answer in this post are:

1. How did you get into product management?
2. Which courses from your MBA program are most useful to you now?
3. Is software product management technical? How technical do I have to be?
4. What skills should I emphasize when applying for a my first product management job or internship?
5. Should I work for a start-up or a big company, or something in between?

About me

Before I begin, a little bit about me to give the FAQ some context. Right now, I’m a Group Product Manager in a mid-sized public tech company in San Francisco, which means I manage and hire other product managers and run large projects that cut across multiple scrum teams. Over the last 7-ish years I’ve held product roles in tech companies ranging from 10 to 100,000+ people in size, public and private. My other titles have ranged from Principal PM Manager to VP, Product. I have an MBA from MIT Sloan and a BA from the University of Toronto.

Here we go!

FAQ #1 — How did you get into product management?

By accident, but it turned out really well.

It was a pretty popular target job, after management consulting, with my business school class. I didn’t really think it was something I could do because most of my classmates who got the internships and jobs had been engineers before business school whereas my degree was in Political Science and jobs to date had been in research, policy and account management.

After graduation, I fell into tech via consulting and account management type roles: first I worked for a digital marketing software and consulting company (Compete, which has been absorbed by ComScore), then moved to California and joined an ad tech start-up called TubeMogul (which as of 2016 has been part of Adobe’s Advertising Cloud).

TubeMogul didn’t have any product managers for a while and I became the one of the first ones because I had a LOT of suggestions about how to improve our software based on my work with clients. I’d also decided I didn’t want to do account management any more and was looking for something where I could participate more actively in company strategy.

So, I got into product management because of my market and client knowledge, and by making it clear I could translate that into product ideas and recommendations.

FAQ #2 — Which courses from your MBA program are most useful to you now?

The question behind this question is probably “what classes should I take/pay attention to”. Keep in mind, I finished my MBA 10 years ago and only know about the curriculum, so I’m not sure what the latest catalogs look like, so I’ve included Open Courseware links where possible below to give you an idea.

Overall, my answer is “all of the classes most people thought weren’t fun and turned out to be much harder than they expected”. Specifically:

• Communication for Managers
• Data, Models and Decisions
• Negotiation
• Management accounting (seriously)
• Economics of Information

Notice two of these are about communication — being a strong communicator is about 70% of being a good product manager in my opinion. The data and accounting courses are heavy on analysis, which is critical for decision making, and the final one provided some pretty invaluable theoretical underpinnings to working in technology.

FAQ #3 — Is software product management technical? How technical do I have to be?

Yes, it’s technical.

Product managers should be working at the intersection of tech, business and design. You can lean towards one or more of those more than another one, but if you aren’t able to do a bit of all three, communicate with the specialists and anchor your strategy in each, your options will be very limited.

When I first moved into product management, my boss told me that learning to code wasn’t a good use of time. I would dispute that (and might write a future post about it), but what I’ve discovered he was getting at, was that it’s not so much being able to code but about being interested in how things work and able to grasp the high level concepts. In other words, you don’t need to be able to create or update a production database, but you should know what’s involved to get that done, why it can be complicated, what type of database your company uses, why it was selected and the pros and cons of the current set up.

Engineers are there to figure out how to implement specs, and product managers probably won’t be the ones who come up with a great technical approach, regardless of their background. But product managers have to be able to join the conversation, at a minimum to ask a lot of questions about the approach being taken (that might be a future post too). PMs, designers and engineers should be equal partners in building things, which means no throwing things over walls, especially by the product person.

FAQ #4 — What skills should I emphasize when applying for a my first product management job or internship?

Product management is a tough area to enter because the #1 indicator that someone will be a successful as a PM is having shipped a product that had a positive business impact.

However, there are some transferrable skills you should definitely emphasize:

• Deep understanding of a company’s industry and/or customer base
• Experience leading a strategy that had customer and business impact
• Examples of where you to identified a qualitative or quantitative data set and analyzed it to answer a business question (Steve Jobs is a major outlier in setting product strategy with few inputs)
• Client interaction experience, especially where you got a deep understanding of a customer or prospect’s needs and identified a path forward to meet them with a product or service
• Examples of how you worked across departments and levels within an organization to achieve a business outcome

Also, don’t underestimate the power of side projects to build your portfolio. Even a series of mockups for an app and a physical product with a market analysis to back it up can be a compelling demonstration of your potential as a product manager, especially for an internship or more junior PM role.

FAQ #5 — Should I work for a start-up or a big company, or something in between?

I’ll give the MBA Answer©️ to this one: it depends. And it depends on a lot of things: the company, your goals, your requirements for salary, opportunities in your area, etc.

Here’s my extremely general advice about product management jobs by company size:

• Start-ups and small companies are great for trying on a lot of different hats with PM, that could include development, project management, client services, support, marketing and operations. You’ll probably get a lot more responsibility than you originally expected if you’re good at the job. The big cons are the same things, plus if you have a very type-A CEO, you might become more of a product strategy executor than a product strategy decider.
• Mid-sized companies are a great opportunity to deepen your product experience and hone your craft with a lot more support on the different hats I mentioned above because you’ll have coworkers who are specialists in those areas. If still in growth mode, they are also a good place to grow as they usually have defined career tracks and ladders and levels than start-ups, and they have more brand recognition than a lot of start-ups. The main con is that there’s usually a lot more organizational complexity to deal with in terms of stakeholders and process, usually resulting in a lot of meetings.
• Large companies can put you in demand for years if you get a strong brand name on your resume, and often have training, career growth, and design and engineering support that you just can’t get at smaller places. However, these organizations tend to define product jobs very narrowly and, unless you’re working on a very technical product, you’ll spend a lot more time than you do at smaller companies writing out PowerPoint decks and tracking down who knows the location of specific PowerPoint decks. The volume of resources can also obscure your contribution to the final product and keep your impact bounded to a very small component of the whole, so you need to keep a close eye on what that is and how you’ll measure it.

That’s it for the top 5! I hope you found this helpful — especially if it saved you weeks of waiting for me to figure out when I can spare time for a phone call. If you have any additional general questions, please ask in the comments so we can share the answers broadly.

Best of luck on your product management journey! It’s a tough job, but I love it and hope you will too.