- Can you become a PM without an MBA? What are the real-life examples?
- What are the ways to become a PM if you don’t have an MBA?
- Why does it work?
- What is the key message? One takeaway
It’s the winter of 2020 and I received an invite to share some thoughts on my journey of being a PM from Viet UX-PM. After a brief hesitation, I decided to accept the opportunity to help aspiring PMs. I’m not an expert in career development, but I want to see more PMs with diverse backgrounds joining tech. Having an MBA or tech degree is great, but if you don’t, you should not stop.
You can be a unique and perfect PM to develop our next generation of products and technology that serve the people.
Can you become a PM without an MBA? What are the real-life examples?
I have an opportunity to work alongside many bright PMs at all levels and backgrounds, many of whom do not have an MBA degree.
- Matt Bleifer was my teammate on Twitter. He is now the first PM hire in the startup called Tecton. Matt started his PM career as a founder and later an APM. I’ve never stopped being amazed by Matt’s critical thinking, honest discourse, and creativity.
- Jeff Wang was a Senior PM on Twitter Search. He is now with Facebook. Jeff is a very good listener and his support in some of the ML ideas in Search made my first year at Twitter a great experience.
- Jutta Williams has recently joined Twitter as a Staff PM, leading Twitter’s Responsible Machine Learning strategy. Jutta came from a unique background in security and compliance, and if you talked to Jutta, you would be carried away by her soothing voice and her deep and inspiring thinking.
- Sara Haider is a Director of PM at Twitter. Sara joined Twitter from Periscope and she has never ceased to be the vocal advocate for females in product management.
These five examples are just five among many successful PMs without an MBA. They bring their unique talents, insights, and experience to serve their customers and facilitate their product team. You can also be one of them.
On a side note, I recently listened to Elon Musk’s interview on the WSJ CEO council 2020. Musk said (with a sense of humor): “I think that there might be too many MBAs running companies.” (Scipioni, 2020)
What are the ways to become a PM if you don’t have an MBA?
There are at least five ways.
- Associate Program Manager: If you are a new graduate, consider this route. Companies that offer top APM programs in the Bay Area include Google, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Uber, Salesforce, and Workday.
- Program Manager: Program Managers concern with ‘How?’ and ‘When?’ They identify and coordinate interdependencies among teams for execution. An internal transition from Program Manager to Product Manager can happen. Many companies offer both program and product manager opportunities such as Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Apple, and Twitter.
- Get your hand dirty and launch a product in a product team: Engineering, UX, Designers, Data scientist, etc. are all product team members. Do the work and earn the experience and credibility. If you go with this route, leverage the industry you are in to gain an advantage. If you are not part of any product team, can you do something to gain a similar experience? Maybe a part-time project (build something) or a series of case studies (to learn what works and what doesn’t work). I find this post interesting.
- Domain Experts: If you are a Ph.D. in a niche area or someone with 10+ years of experience in the industry, leverage your assets and complement your skillset with product skills via online courses or part-time projects.
- Founders: The experience of finding product-market fit from founders is an asset. If you have found something, you may have some experience that allows you to be a successful product manager. Note that being a founder and being a product manager are totally different things, so you need to be ready for the challenges.
What are the broad strategies here?
There should be more than five ways that I have identified above, so I want to discuss two strategies you can use to find more unique ways for yourself.
One, you need to get your foot in the door. Being an APM, a program manager, or a product team member are ways for you to gain product experience. If you can get your foot in the door, you can pivot until you are successful. The career path is not about planning, but about pivoting and enjoy the experience. You might find something even more interesting than being a product manager along the way. So, keep looking.
Two, you want to be as unique as a blue diamond. Being a domain expert or a founder makes you stand out from the crowd. It’s a noisy world and you are not going to make a difference by being similar to the rest. Leverage your unique skill set and past experience to get you to the next step. Your past failure, depression, and overcoming are what make you YOU.
What is the key message?
This essay is not only about how to enter product management without an MBA, but it is also about how to leverage what you currently have and find a way to achieve your goal.
In life, you will always encounter this phrasing:
Navigating __A__ without __B___
It’s important to never let what you can’t do stop you.
The systematic approach is to list down all the skills that you need to get job A done. Then, find out what the experience or certification B can provide and what the other skillsets that B experience cannot provide. You should establish your foothold by gaining as many experiences as possible in real-life and make your stand-out from the rest by building up more experiences that are uniquely about you.
I gave you a short-cut by composing the list of five ways to enter product management without an MBA. However, you will find another five ways or 50 ways to get to your goal.
This quote from Reagan will remind you of this entire post.
‘Never let what you can’t do stop you from doing what you can’ — Ronald Reagan
