Product Management as a preferred post-MBA career goal
Product Management is a preferred post-MBA career goals for many applicants to ISB. This is not surprising since Product Management perfectly aligns with what an MBA is designed to teach, namely:
1) Strategy
2) Leadership
3) Decision-making under uncertainty
4) Cross-functional collaboration
However, a post-MBA career goal of Product Management is not a natural fit for all the applicants. This blog post discusses the pre-MBA profiles that are best suited for a post-MBA career goal of Product Management. Further, it discusses how applicants with a post-MBA career goal of Product Management should articulate their Statement of purpose (the goals essay).
Pre-MBA profiles best suited for a post-MBA career goal of Product Management
1) Software Engineers or Tech Roles: These candidates have an understanding of how products are built and have often interacted with Product Managers, witnessing first-hand the role that Product Managers play in bringing new products and product-features to life. Hence, their post-MBA career goal of Product Management comes across as a natural progression.
2) Tech or Digital Consultants: Experience in Consulting progressively hones Structured Problem Solving, a skill directly transferrable to Product Management. Further, working in Tech or Digital often provides these consultants with exposure to Product implementation and tech projects, bolstering their claim to a post-MBA career goal of Product Management.
3) Existing Product Managers: If existing Product Managers mention Product Management as their post-MBA career goal, this basically means that these applicants already are what they want to be! However, this puts the onus on these applicants to convince the admissions committee that an MBA is crucial for these applicants to become better at what they are already doing.
4) Data and Analytics Professionals: Data is indeed the oil of the twenty first century. Data and Analytics Professionals are often skilled in metrics interpretation and user behavior insights, skills that can enable these professionals to become great Product Managers.
Profiles not best suited for a post-MBA career goal of Product Management
Pre-MBA profiles that are generally not best suited for a post-MBA career goal of Product Management include:
1) Non-Tech
2) Pure Finance
3) Core Domains
For such applicants, a post-MBA career goal of Product Management can come across as an abrupt shift.
What should be highlighted in the Statement of Purpose essay
Let us now see the aspects of their profile that applicants with a post-MBA career goal of Product Management should highlight, in their ISB essays:
1) Feature development and not just software coding: If you are a software developer, do not just emphasize the coding aspect of your job; highlight any features that you have developed at work.
2) First-hand Interaction with Product Managers: As discussed earlier, a first-hand interaction with Product Managers enables you to witness the role that Product Managers play in bringing new products and product-features to life. Such first-hand interactions give credibility to the applicant’s post-MBA career goal of Product Management.
3) Cross-functional collaboration: Product Managers often extensively interact with Cross-functional teams such as Strategy, Finance, and Engineering. Hence, if the applicants have experience in Program Management, which typically entails significant cross-functional collaboration, such experience would bolster the applicant’s claim of a post-MBA career goal of Product Management.
4) Tech proficiency: In view of a Product Manager’s extensive interaction with the Engineering team, the tech background of a Product Manager certainly helps. Further, since AI increasingly becoming an inextricable part of almost all tech products, any experience of working in AI should also be highlighted.
5) User centricity: All products ultimately serve users. Hence, if you have ever identified user pain-points or improved user experience using data-driven decision making, it is indicative of your Product mindset and should be highlighted in the essays.
We hope that this post would help the ISB applicants not only in assessing their fitment for a post-MBA career goal in Product Management but also in crafting an impactful statement of purpose as part of the ISB application.