Is an MBA required to become a ‘good’ product manager?
Is the MBA required?
I deliberately included the qualifier ‘good’, in the title as the MBA is obviously not required to get into product management. Note that I am looking at this issue from the perspective of someone who has a software engineering background (If you do not, then an MBA may be your only path into a PM role). For those with a technology background, is it worth the investment of time, energy, and money? Every PM has an opinion on this, but these opinions usually suffer from confirmation bias i.e. they take what worked for them and try to extrapolate it into advice that is applicable to everyone. Hence, PM’s who have done an MBA are adamant that an MBA is the way to go and vice versa. See here and here for some interesting debates on this topic on Quora.
In the presentation that I linked to in the previous post, Shreyas thinks that the answer is “No” (He does not have an MBA), but he does include some excellent advice about using LinkedIn to check if the PM’s at the company that you are interested in have an MBA. The Cranky PM believes that it depends on whether the higher ups in the company have MBA’s. I think he may be onto something, as the PM role varies from company to company. Companies such as Google are run by engineers and an MBA has less value there whereas Amazon is run by MBA’s and hence an MBA is highly prized. There are some companies (primarily startups) where an MBA may actually disqualify you from the role.
So what do I believe?
Well given that I paid just over 44000 pounds for my MBA, I obviously think that the knowledge acquired was worth the time and money. However this could all just be another case of confirmation bias. Hence, Rather than get into the pros and cons of an MBA, I think it might be better to describe what I learned from the MBA and let you decide whether it was worth it or not. Here I echo what Christopher Cummings says on his blog. In particular I think the following passage “My MBA experience deepened my understanding of how business works, expanded my managerial toolkit, and gave me a welcome +20 in self-confidence” is spot on. In my role as a software engineer, I was constantly looking at the minor details. The PM role is about looking at the larger picture as well and I believe that the MBA helps you in this transition.
Innovation and the MBA
One really important thing I learned during the MBA was in an elective course called “Strategy & Innovation (S&I)” which changed my thinking on how innovation works. To appreciate the full nature of this change, I need to talk a little bit about my background. In 2006, I earned a Masters in Computer Science and one of the electives that I took was on managing software engineers. The required reading for that course was a book called Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams. One of the themes that the book tried to push was that cubicles and open office layouts were highly distracting for engineers and hence it strongly advocated giving software engineers their own offices so that they could work quietly and efficiently.
My first job out of grad school was at a company that followed the advice from Peopleware almost down to the letter. Later on when I noticed the open office layouts adopted by companies such as Google and FaceBook, I often wondered how anyone got any work done in these environments. They seemed noisy, chaotic, and full of distractions. I remember reading an article in which an employee recommended wearing headphones if you wanted to work in silence.
However, in the aforementioned S&I course, I learned that contrary to popular wisdom, innovation occurs in exactly this sort of environment. Steven Johnson has an excellent TED talk on this topic that I highly recommend. Innovation does not occur when people work in silos, it occurs when people from different teams constantly bump into each other and are able to offer fresh perspectives on each other’s problems. Steven Johnson calls this phenomenon ‘the adjacent possible’. Steve Jobs is rumored to have spent a lot of time on the design of Apple’s offices to ensure that people constantly bumped into each other. I realise that this may be common knowledge to many readers, but for me it was a real eye opener and I personally believe that understanding and managing innovation is critical if you want to be a ‘good’ PM in a software company. Time will tell if this actually is an important as I think it is.
