Should A Product Manager Pursue An MBA Degree?

If you are looking for a role where you can have a lot of influence on a new product, you should look at getting into a product manager position. Besides being interesting, it is a well-paid job. You’ll be involved with market research, product definition, product development and launching the product.

Every company that develops and markets products or services needs a product manager to guide the product development process. This means that product management is a career path with plenty of employment opportunities.

There are several ways you can attain an MBA (Masters in Business Administration) that will enhance your career in product management. Other than conventional learning, more and more people are opting to pursue their MBA online.

Aspects to be mastered to be a good PM

There are several aspects of the profession that you must master. These include market research skills, communication skills, packaging knowledge and so on. These are the most important aspects since the products need to be well marketed to make an impact in the market.

Usually a PM will work on existing products as well as products under development. It is not unusual for a PM to manage a range of related products in the portfolio. Existing products usually need support in the areas of logistics and sales.

Needless to say, this is a pivotal role in the company and so the PM needs to be a well-rounded individual. An MBA degree is one way of acquiring a variety of skills that are helpful to the job.

What an MBA is

An MBA education is a collection of courses on a variety of business topics from finance to marketing. It is thus specifically tailored to the corporate environment and it’s challenges. Because of this, MBA graduates often have a competitive edge in the job market.

If you have an affinity for business but don’t have a business degree, an MBA degree will give you quick and credible primer to move into more business oriented roles, like product management. To further enhance your chances, choose a reputable MBA program.

Can anyone enter an MBA program?

Different programs have different requirements, but generally you need multiple years of work experience and a Bachelor’s degree or equivalent work experience. Usually, lower entry criteria mean weaker schools.

Business schools want MBA students to have work experience so they can apply their experiences on the case studies. This helps students learn modern methods of solving problems in a business environment.

Many companies understand the value of an MBA degree and prefer candidates that hold the degree for business related roles, like product management.

MBA programs with product management specializations

While a more generic MBA program will provide ample value to a PM, there are some specialized MBA programs out there. These specialized programs tend to focus a lot on brand management and marketing.

Market research, consumer behavior and product positioning are all important topics for PMs and are usually covered in marketing courses. Brand management is useful because it deals with the identity of the company and that identity supports and needs to be supported by the product shipping under it’s brand.

MBA degrees can be pursued at well-regarded business schools around the world, so you do not have necessarily have to leave your home country for one.

MBA study options

Full-time

Full-time programs are great, because you get to focus purely on studying and you get to know your fellow students very well. Though this is the quickest way of doing an MBA, it also requires a significant financial commitment. During the approximately 2 years of a full-time program, you’ll have to be able to pay for the tuition costs and costs of study materials, while have little to no income.

Part-time programs

If you cannot let go of your job or let go of the income it provides, you could choose to do a part-time program. Classes are often in the evening, once or twice a week and frequently also during the day on weekends every second week. It usually takes about 4 years to complete an MBA this way. While this is a more affordable way of obtaining your degree, it also cuts into your free time significantly, so make sure you and your spouse are ok with that.

Online

If time and/or money is highly constrained and the acquisition of skills is the most important reason for choosing to pursue an MBA degree, you might also want to do it online. There are several institutions that offer distance and e-learning.

More information

For more information on how an MBA, even a more generic one, can help you build your skill, you should read “An MBA In Product Management” on wyzerme.com

Be opportunity driven, not solution driven

When you start on a new product, spend time to deeply comprehend the customer problem you are setting out to address. Even more desirable would be if you can guide a group to define a succinct, motivating product vision. This vision emphasizes the problem your product is going to address, instead of an available solution. That vision can function as the constant as you evaluate a lot of solution approaches. By staying focused on the problem or the opportunity space, you can remove yourself from the solutions. It enables you to evaluate the solutions more objectively and to make the tough call to pivotto a different solution.

You can keep your focus on the problem by being explicit about what you are trying to solve. One suggestion is to develop a visual guide that is posted in the team work environment. It really should feature the explanation of the problem space, the consumer needs and insights. Throughout your solution review you should look for some sort of consumer verification, as you gain insights, add them to the workspace.

In the event that you are in a web product setting and use A/B testing or lean startup strategies, use the workspace and documentation during the specification of each and every experiment. In the case of a physical product environment, use the work area for your feature decisions. It will support your team stay grounded in the problem statement rather than drifting away from it.

On a recent product program, I got invested in the solution instead of the problem. Me, the group and the leaders had grown so invested in the solution that we kept trying to make improvements to the solution instead of admitting the solution we had selected was not optimal for the problem statement. Rather, we should have pivoted to a different solution much earlier.

Recently I have been going to wyzerme.com to build my product management skills

Lean Startup’s effect on Product Management

Recently, my company – a large software enterprise – implemented the strategies in Eric Ries’ book “The Lean Start Up”. I have found the methodology has substantial impacts on the approach of the product manager.

At the root of The Lean Start Up is the idea to minimise any resource or time investments in components or experiences which have not been legitimized by consumers. A way to do that is to generate light-weight features that only verify customer intention. For instance, rather than thoroughly detailing and developing a new shopping cart feature, a lean test would show a link for the feature. The big difference is that there would be no true capability enabled and as product manager, you would be observing the number of customers are deciding to click the link. If the enthusiasm is substantial enough, then you would certainly focus on the development of the tested feature.

However, before we race off to start creating tests, there are 3 vital things a product manager will need to have:

1. A clear product vision. 
This will keep you and your team on the right track. This vision ought to be constructed from consumer understanding, be inspiring and devoid of a predefined solution. An example is the iPod vision of “thousands of tunes in your pocket”.

2. A number of thoughts on how to accomplish the vision.
The product manager should have a large number of solutions to build out on the vision. You should also adopt the attitude that ‘ideas are inexpensive’ — don’t become attached to ideas because you may need to have the ability to move quickly from one to another.

3. Flexibility to develop and draw conclusions from the tests.
A product manager needs to ensure the process, technology and staff will be in place to take care of both internet-based and real-world tests. That is not to say it is easy, as you can read in this excellent article: What Every Product Manager Should Know About Pivoting

With that infrastructure in place, a product manager is poised for success to employ the Lean strategy.

Given that one of the key tasks of a product manager is to describe and prioritize the product features, you will now have a new area of jobs to consider. Product managers should now be weighing the need to put together lean experiments to find out about what to develop next with the actual designing of the product.

The value of using the Lean method is that you will can prioritize based on what customers are telling you in just about real-time. As product manager, you will be able to focus your team and limited available resources on the most valuable parts of the product.

 

The 7 habits of successful product managers

Marshall Sports Business Case Team (Photo credit: JMR_Photography)

1. Understand your customer
You are delivering a product for a customer segment. Make sure that you understand the needs of that segment. What you need to understand are:
who influences them to consider your product

• their purchase triggers
• their willingness to spend
• what delights them

This will help you create your product requirements as well as validate your business case.

2. Keep an eye on your business case
Your senior management has financial expectations from your product. These expectations are the foundations for growth targets or at the very least cost control. Make sure you regularly update your business case. If the business case does not meet the expectations of management, you have three options: 1) adjust the product, 2) adjust the expectations, 3) kill the product

3. Socialize ideas and decisions
People are naturally resistant to change. If you are planning a major change to the product, it’s business case or it’s positioning, make sure you socialize the idea first. If the change needs to be approved in some board meeting, make sure the meeting is a rubber stamp, the decision makers must have decided to agree already before the meeting. If you fail to do this, these meetings will be messy, and you might end up getting directions that you are unprepared to handle.

4. Display empathy
During product development there will always be change and there will always be problems. The engineering team often has to accommodate these changes or solve those problems, which can mean lots of extra work for them. It is easy for them to blame  the product manager, which can poison the relationship. Remember that as a product manager, you are a leader and good leaders show empathy.

5. Be an authority
A product manager is a leader in product development. You set the direction for what the product delivers. You prioritize the requirements. This is an important role, it drives what people will work on. Make sure you exhibit confidence in your decisions. Make sure you can properly motivate your decisions. Understand how to communicate the decision to your different audiences. Engineers often like to be taken through the evidence first and than be presented with a conclusion. Executives want to hear the executive summary first and dive deeper if they feel they need to.

6. Have your 1, 3, and 5 minute product pitches ready
You never know who you might run into at the water cooler, the elevator or the lunch buffet. It is important for a product manager to mobilize broad support for the product in the organization. So make sure you can pitch your products and the areas you need help from the top of your head.

7. Be enthusiastic (or fake it)
Nobody wants to work on or support a product that they don’t believe in. Your job as a product manager is to make people believe in the product. That means you have to be enthusiastic about the product. If you can’t do that, try to switch to a product you feel better about or fake your enthusiasm.

To help you build this these skills, you should consider if an MBA is right for you

Product Manager Job Description

Product Managers work on the development and launch of a product. The product needs to be a good fit for the target customer segment and offer competitive features during it’s market life-cycle.

As a product manager, you can expect to be involved with the following:

Product range planning: during this phase a range of products is planned on a fairly abstract level. Usually only price, timing and volume are planned at this stage. A key input in this process is the CEO/CFO long-term growth plan.

Product driver identification: during this phase you identify and document what drives your product. Which consumer segment do you target, what are their purchase triggers, what is the sales forecast, what does the business case look like?

Product concept creation: a creative phase where the design of the product and it’s feature set are defined and documented. Keep an eye on the target consumer and the business case.

Product requirements definition: during this phase you’ll (hopefully) work with a requirements manager to document the engineering requirements for the product.

Market deployment planning: during this phase you’ll plan which channels will sell your product at which time. This is really to deal with limited resources and limited manufacturing capacity.

Marketing campaign planning: in this phase you’ll make sure the marketing department is prepared to launch your product. They need to have marketing campaigns planned etc. Make sure they understand what makes your product unique.

Front-line enablement: educate the support and sales staff on how to deal with customer questions. Familiarize them with the product and it’s features.

Launch: When the product starts selling and you see people starting to use it. Great feeling.

Mid-cycle updates: The purpose here is to make sure that the product stays up-to-date and competitive.

Ramp-down: Alas, all good things come to an end and the product will end it’s commercial life-cycle to be replaced by something bigger, better, faster or shinier. Ramp down is an orderly process, business cases can be completely undone if this is not managed properly.

I’ve also found some good information on product management here