Issue #4 | Demystifying the MBA myth for Product Managers
Understanding from logical standpoint, do we really need a MBA degree for an early PM roles
If you are an aspiring PM or someone who wants to transition to the PM role, following questions might have popped up in your mind for sure,
Do i need to have an MBA degree to get a Product Management job?
Answering the question of whether a Product Manager needs a MBA degree is not a black and white situation where we have a definite answer.
First let’s us discuss what makes a good product manager and then analyse how MBA can help you with your career as a Product Manager and where it doesn’t make a difference
Let’s analyse it together fundamentally using Demand and Supply Framework
Let’s look at the situation through the lens of demand and supply. What does the demand and supply part covers? It covers the key skills that all the good Product Managers have or develop over time to grow in their role.
Demand: Skills required for an Product Manager
Supply: Skills and knowledge gained after studying MBA
Looking at the most important skills that good product managers have,
Great communication skills
Stakeholder Management
Empathy
Product Sense
Problem solving skills
Critical decision making
Prioritization
Curosity
What MBA does well is teaching you the frameworks around business development, marketing, finance, project management, team-work etc. so that you can utilize those framework to make better business decisions.
After you are done with your MBA, you would be able to
Read and understand balance sheet which critical for understanding the finance side of the business
Understand the business model and the USP of the product
What different marketing strategies are available
Work in a team to complete a project
So basically, MBA will help you in understanding the business aspect of your product, which is important to know but not crucial factor to be a good Product Manager.
MBA doesn’t teach us stakeholder management which in my opinion is super critical and very underrated skill. We as PMs are constantly in presence to these stakeholder trying to balance everything to make the whole process smoother by effectively communicating and removing the potential roadblocks.
MBA doesn’t teach us to be empathetic towards our customers. Hell, people don’t even talk to the customers. Being empathetic is the next stage to that.
MBA doesn’t teach us to have product sense, which basically means
Having an understanding of what problem the product is solving,
Deeply understanding the goals of a product, both for the business and the customer.
Constantly evaluating how well the product is serving those goals
Identifying the most important and impactful opportunities
We don’t become better at prioritization or curious by doing an MBA.
We have seen now that MBA doesn’t tick most of the boxes that makes a good Product Manager but it can help you when you have no technical experience in Product Management and you want to transition into PM. But it is an expensive option in my opinion and unless the specialization is in Product Management, it doesn’t make sense to invest so much money to learn skills that you won’t be able to apply to your work.
Is there anything we can do instead??
Yes, absolutely! Personally i believe joining cohort based courses are best way to learn new things practically, also providing a community of similar learners. There are many cohort based courses available for Product Management as well that you can join to get a practical sense of solving real life problem, building MVPs and testing it out in the real environment.
Some advantages of cohort-based course as compared with self-paced courses
Learning by doing, so no passive learning
Learn with cohort of peers
Community support
Some of the cohort-based courses that you can check are:
Insurjo -> It’s totally free!
I hope you now now have an understanding of where MBA can be useful and where it wont be in regards to Product Management and what other options are available to us. I hope you found this article useful and if you did kindly like and share this article to your friends or someone who might find it useful. That would be really great 😁