The Accidental Product Manager » MBA

Product Managers With No Time Find A Quicker Way To Get An MBA

Dr. Jim Anderson — Mon, 26 Apr 2010 04:01:32 +0000

If You Really Want An MBA But Don’t Have The Time, Maybe There’s Another Way…

As product managers who live in troubling times we are always trying to do two things: hold on to our jobs and make our product more successful. One of the best ways to do both of these, or so we have been told, is to go out and get an MBA. Well that’s all great and fine if you’ve got four or five years to burn, don’t need to do anything else at night, oh and have a big chunk of cash sitting around that you had no other plans for. Maybe it’s time to look for a better way to accomplish what we’re trying to do…

Say Hello To The Alternative To The MBA

Before you decide to either quit your product manager job and go back to school in order to get an MBA (really, really expensive) or start going to night school to get an MBA (just really expensive), maybe you should take a moment and consider all of your options. Maybe what you really want is a specialized Master’s degree.

Yeah, yeah – I know what you are thinking. We’ve all been drinking the “get an MBA” Kool-Aid for so long that it’s hard to imagine doing anything else. However, depending on what you want to do with your life, this might actually be a better solution for you.

If having spent time being a product manager has gotten you interested in business, then getting an advanced business degree of some sort is probably a good idea. However, one of the things that keeps us from doing this is often the time involved to get the degree.

The Appeal Of Specializing

Business schools are starting to get the message. They are beginning to offer more and more specialized business programs that are only 12 months long. In the 2008-2009 school year there were 645 programs offered. This is up from the 614 programs that had been offered just two years earlier.

What these types of degrees offer are parts of the typical MBA curriculum, but they are often more technical in nature and generally spend less time on general management skills.

Here in lies the rub: these types of specialty business degrees are not designed to get you promoted to eventually become the CEO. Rather what they are designed to do is to sharpen your business skills in a narrow area and make you more valuable to the company in your current job.

This type of continuing education especially appeals to new product managers: those who don’t have the five years of work experience that most MBA programs require for entrance. No matter if this is your case, or if you’ve just found some part of the product management job that you are really drawn to, a narrowly focused master’s degree might be just the ticket for you.

What To Do With Your New Degree

Ok, so let’s say that you bite the bullet and run off and skip the MBA and instead get a very focused master’s degree in marketing, finance, or some other business discipline. What then?

It turns out that taking this path, might feel like the right thing for you to do, but as they like to say on TV, your results may vary. Since specialty master’s degrees are not as well known as MBA’s you’re going to have to deal with some lack of recognition issues.

Although it may change in the future, right now MBA students still seem to get the best deal when it comes to getting the economic benefits from going through the effort of getting an advanced degree. The people who design the GMAT test that everyone takes to get admitted to graduate programs are reporting that MBA students are saying that they get a 73% increase in salary after graduating while students with specialty master’s degrees are only reporting a 26% increase.

What All Of This Means For You

In the end the decision rests with you. We all know that continuing our education is an important thing for every product manager to do. Going back to school almost seems like a no-brainer until you realize that you need to spend some time thinking about just what you want to get out of doing so.

A specialty master’s degree offers product managers who have been working for less than five years or who found one particular part of the job most interesting with a new option. By investing 12 months of study, they can walk away with both another degree as well as a deep understanding of one area of business.

The value of taking this educational route will really depend on the career that you want for yourself. If you are comfortable working inside of the business instead of running it, then a specialty master’s degree might be the right way to go for you!

- Dr. Jim Anderson
Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World Product Management Help

Question For You: Do you think that specialty master’s degree will become more or less valuable in the future?

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Are Executive MBAs Valuable To Product Mangers?

Dr. Jim Anderson — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 11:59:57 +0000

Product Managers Should Consider Getting An Executive MBA

As the world’s economy continues to shudder, everyone is scrambling to find ways to make themselves more valuable to both their current employer as well as to their next employer (if needed). For a long time, getting an MBA has been an option that many product managers have considered. The big drawback has always been the amount of time that this degree requires – on top of all of your other responsibilities. It turns out that there is another option: the executive MBA.

I guess a good question to start off with is how does an executive MBA differ from a “regular” MBA? An executive MBA generally meets every other weekend for two full days – Friday and Saturday. Students generally travel to campus to participate in classes. While not in class, remotely located students collaborate to complete class assignments.

There’s also the issue of time: an executive MBA generally takes two years from start to finish. If you are working and choose to participate in a regular MBA, there’s a good chance that it will end up taking you longer to complete your degree as you take one or two classes a semester.

Where to go is the big question if you choose to pursue an executive MBA. There are a lot of executive MBA programs out there and because they are such a profit center for universities, they are all marketed heavily. Thankfully the folks over at the Wall Street Journal have taken the time to conduct a survey and they’ve found the best places for a product manager to go.

Just how do you go about ranking executive MBA programs? Well over at the WSJ they decided to go about doing it based on multiple criteria. The most important factor that they chose was how corporations viewed the programs – I mean you’re really getting the degree to boost your marketability, right? Next came how students in the program actually felt about the program. Finally, the value of what they were being taught was factored in.

So who won? Here’s the ranking of the top 10 executive MBA programs as computed by the Wall Street Journal:

So what do YOU need to consider if you are thinking about enrolling in an executive MBA program above and beyond which program ranks the highest? One interesting point is just how much this is going to cost.

The executive MBA programs that were reviewed by the Wall Street Journal cost between $65,000 and $160,000 just in tuition (books, travel, etc. would all be extra). Since lots of students work for firms that pay all/part of the cost of the program, the median out-of-pocket cost turned out to be something like $45,000. Of course then there’s the issue of travel…

In the survey, 64% of the executive MBA students traveled less than 50 miles to go to school which means most of them are local to the school. However 7% traveled up to 200 miles and 9% traveled more than 1,000 miles.

In the end, the big question is if this is all worth it? Once again we can go back to the survey to find out. 24% of those students surveyed said that they had been given a both a raise and a promotion since they started executive MBA classes. Another 30% said that they expect both in the next year.

So what do you think: is an executive MBA the way to go or is a regular MBA better? Do you think that getting an MBA would be worth $45,000+? Could you stay at your current company or would you have to leave once you got your degree? Leave me a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

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Should You Get An MBA?

Dr. Jim Anderson — Fri, 29 Aug 2008 19:36:00 +0000

I had a chance to talk with one of my friends the other day who is a product manager working in the telcom space. Carol is basically happy with her job, but she’s tired of always gathering requirements and she is already starting to think about the next step in her career – becoming a Director. She told me that she was thinking about getting an MBA; however, she had not made up her mind yet as to if it would be worth the time, energy, and expense required to get one. She wanted to know what I thought?

Just a little background info for you here: I’ve collected four university degrees. I’ve got a BS, MS, and PhD in Computer Science and then I went on and just for good measure I picked up an MBA with a focus on Marketing. All in all this took me about 15 years to do. Because of the time, energy, and expense that I’ve gone through I felt that Carol was talking to the right person!

The first thing that I asked Carol was where she wanted to take her career and what she thought that she needed to do to get there (besides getting an MBA). She said that she had been doing some studying of the last four or five IT people who had been promoted to a Director position. What she had found that they had all been at the company for at least 5 years, they had been associated with a successful project, they were well known to the Executive Director that they would be reporting to. She then said that only two of the five new Directors had an MBA – the other three had at least a Masters technical degree.

Carol had done her homework! We then spent some time talking about what you can expect to get if you get an MBA. Assuming that you can’t take time off from your job to go to school for two years, then you are probably looking at going to night school for 4-5 years. I realize that there are other options such as the University of Phoenix and Executive MBA programs; however, my experience has been with the traditional butt-in-a-classroom-at-night approach. One of the first questions that I asked Carol was if she expected to be living where she was right now for the next 5 years – nothing could be sadder than moving half-way through a program! Carol said that yes, she expected to be in town for the next 5 years.

I got my MBA for two reasons: I wanted to have the vocabulary that was needed to work with the people who are running the business and I wanted to network with other people who were at the same stage of their career as I was. In the end, I feel that I got the vocabulary that I wanted. A lot of that vocabulary has to do with finance, organizational behavior, and marketing and these had been things that I didn’t know much about before starting my MBA.

The networking with other folks who were working on their MBA didn’t work out as well. When one attends the big Ivy League schools to get an MBA, you have the advantage of moving though your courses with your peers in lock step. The MBA program that I was in had more people in it and so we were spread out both over time (some people completed in 3 years, some took as long as 7 years) and in courses – there were a lot of courses offered each semester. This meant that few close relationships were formed that lasted more than a semester or two. In my case I moved out of town after completing the degree and so the value of the networking was even more minimized. All that being said, I believe that if you went into the program with networking as a key goal, you could build up a healthy LinkedIn network by the time you were though.

The final benefit of getting an MBA is that you get a chance to be exposed to a great deal of business information that you may have heard of, but never had a chance to study before. Depending on what your background is, this material may be very straightforward. Unlike technical degrees, an MBA requires you to work in teams, give in-class presentations and really doesn’t have that many problem sets to turn in. Rather, questions require wordy answers – you have to memorize a great deal of information that does not have a formula or numbers associated with it. I found the studying to be easy because it was all new. It kept my interest and was easy to memorize.

After I had shared all of this with Carol, she decided to go ahead and take the GMAT in order to apply to enter an MBA program. What helped her to finally make her mind up is that she took a look at the people who would be her competition for the next Director position and decided that an MBA would set her apart from them.

What do you think about Product Managers getting an MBA? Do you think that it helps make them better Product Managers or is it just so much window dressing? At your firm, do people with MBAs seem to go higher, faster in their careers? Leave a comment and let me know what you think.

Tags: MBA, GMAT, product manager, product manager jobs, software product manager

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