How Does a MBA Fit Into a PM Career Path?
Tips from a Harvard MBA and current VP of product
I connected with a good friend and mentor, Adam Christensen, about the role his MBA from Harvard Business School has played in his personal growth and career trajectory. Adam is currently a VP of product at Marqeta. The following questions and answers are paraphrased from our recent conversation on the topic.
What was your initial motivation to go to business school?
I started out writing code, and found the experience of seeing a binary outcome from my work very satisfying. By binary, I mean that if there was a bug I could fix it and see the tangible results of my work. I loved it — and may go back to it in retirement.
However, early on in my career I had the experience of being a software engineer for a company that hadn’t yet found product-market fit. Then it hit me: I could write beautiful code for the rest of my life, but if it wasn’t powering a product that was in the “sweet spot,” where someone had done the work of understanding what to build and why, then the work was being wasted. So I decided going to business school would be a good way of pivoting into learning how to define the WHAT and WHY of a product.
I could write beautiful code for the rest of my life, but if it wasn’t powering a product with a well defined WHAT and WHY, then the work was being wasted.
For those focused on a career in product, where does the main value of an MBA come from?
Adam shared five ways in which his MBA has propelled his product career:
Broad Perspective. PMs need to be able to understand different types of needs and demands, and doing work that broadens your perspective and capacity to respond to these needs is very valuable.
Getting comfortable without binary outcomes. In product, you are often looking at trade-offs. Rarely do you face easy binary yes/no decisions. Instead, you try to find the optimal decision path given the circumstances, and B-school helped me to learn how to find those paths.
The Case Method. Classes at HBS often involved debating the pros and cons of an important business decision and selling one’s ideas — a skillset much needed in product in order to facilitate dialogue and sell engineers, execs, and customers on your idea.
Post-grad Opportunities. Simply put, this is a stamp of approval that will open even more doors.
The Network. You get to build relationships with people who will go on to leadership roles in tech, consulting, venture capital, etc. This network will pay dividends years down the road, especially at the executive level. For example, one of my classmates is the founder and CEO of Peloton, John Foley.
Adam also made sure to include that the life experience of graduate school has been enriching and valuable on its own, which should be considered alongside its career value:
“Had I only looked at career value, it was 50/50 when it came to deciding to go or not, because I was already making good money in engineering and leading a team. It’s the life experience that I value even more than the career value in the long run. People work in different companies for decades but being at a place like HBS was a truly different life experience altogether.”
I’ve heard some people say before that a more valuable experience would be to take the $150k or so that an MBA would cost and start a company instead. What do you think about that idea?
Some who decide to start a company without business school can certainly find their way to success given they are determined enough.
However, this plan definitely has a different risk profile. I was in school during the dot-com boom of the early 2000's — some people would drop out of business school, go start a business, and then more often than not come back a few years later wishing they would have stayed. It can be helpful to build up the network and tools needed to get funding and launch a successful business through an MBA first.
If you end up going the MBA route, what kind of experiences make a strong applicant, and how long would you recommend working before starting the MBA?
Ideally, you’d have two different experiences after undergrad and before starting an MBA. This gives you a chance to see a lot of the gray area and ambiguity inherent in product roles at different companies. You’ll have more to contribute to your MBA class, and will be a better candidate for a role with more responsibility and ambiguity coming out of your MBA, such as a Group PM.
A HUGE thank you to Adam for his time and wisdom! If you have questions or comments, please feel free to shoot them my way.
How Does a MBA Fit Into a PM Career Path? was originally published in The Aspiring Product Manager on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.