Recruiting for Product Management Roles from Consulting, Finance, or Marketing
Going from a business function such as consulting, finance, or marketing to product management seems straightforward since you are in a customer-facing role and often need to perform market research or understand a financial portfolio of a company and make tactical decisions on which products/services/assets are best performing for customers/investors. However, there is a significant aspect of product management that these roles do not prepare you for, which is execution. More importantly, these roles also do not provide you with a strong domain emphasis unless you carve one out yourself, which is also a key facet of product management. I elaborate on both of these points below.
Understanding Product Execution
I have a lot of friends who are new grads or currently in school and want to try product management from consulting or banking. While these people tend to have great product sense when it comes to analytical thinking and understanding user needs, they often have not built something themselves since their jobs mainly revolve around making recommendations based on portfolios, performing market research, and analyzing data. My friends in marketing and sales are also in a similar position where they may not necessarily know how products they market are built, which is a key facet of product management.
My personal recommendation to people in this boat is to go out and build a side project or side business where you need to think about how to design your product (ie. make mockups/go through design thinking) and actually build a product and test it in the market. I would also recommend taking a few basic programming courses just to get a better sense of engineering fundamentals so you can better talk to engineers if you are a non-technical major.
Learning to execute is such a critical role of product development and it’s important that product managers know how to put out fires and make key decisions on the fly.
Define Your Domain Emphasis
Defining a domain emphasis is highly underrated as a product manager. I can say from personal experience that I try to lean on my domain emphases in data science and operations whenever I think of product design as well as implementation and prioritization of projects on my team.
If you are a technical person in consulting or banking (maybe a data/engineering analyst or quant trader), you can easily form a domain emphasis in engineering or data science. If you are nontechnical, I would think a little bit more about forming a domain emphasis in design, product marketing, or strategy.
Ultimately, your choice of domain is up to you, and while PMs are known for being familiar with multiple domains, you don’t want to be considered a jack of all trades and master of none.
Conclusion
Think carefully about how you wish to transition to product management and what kinds of companies you wish to target. This will be based on your own experiences in a business-facing role, so do your homework as you navigate the transition. This may or may not involve business school since some product management roles like to see you have an MBA, have a technical degree, or that you went through a rotation product management program, but there are definitely people who make the transition without falling into any of these categories.
Anyhow, best of luck to you all as you go through the process! Check out my budding youtube channel if you are interested in more free content related to product management, data science, or consulting. If you are looking for an overhaul or your resume/LinkedIn for PM roles among other things, check out my services at https://collegeconsulting.me/.
