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As a product management discipline lead, I interview product management candidates. For some stupid reason someone in HR still puts "MBA preferred" on the post
by dbg31415 9y ago
As a product management discipline lead, I interview product management candidates.
For some stupid reason someone in HR still puts "MBA preferred" on the posting... but I have yet to meet anyone without hands-on experience that I want to hire. I don't care if you have an MBA, I don't care if you have a college degree... what I want to know is can you do the work?
If I ask about the SLDC, what I want to hear is that they know enough to keep everything balanced -- that they aren't going to get all flustered and just try and shoehorn devs and QA and content and UX designers into something you read out of a textbook but have never really implemented.
A PM should be a shit shield, they should be comfortable saying, "No," to stupid suggestions from people up the food chain -- this leads to success of people down the food chain. An MBA doesn't prepare them for that. They will have to be able to put themselves in other peoples' shoes... lead by example. (My ideal candidate has a few years Dev or QA experience... I can go with UX even... but they have to have done some real delivery work prior to being a PM in order to not suck at it -- my opinion.)
Anyway, long way of saying, "Undergrads, save your money. Go learn how to code, get a job doing that, then make the transition a few years in once you actually know how things work. At that point, if you want to go to school -- cool, you may find it useful to augment what you already learned on the job."
- WillPostForFood 9y agoThere are a lot of MBAs with undergrad CS degrees who know about the trench warfare and saying no. It is a solid combo.
- dbg31415 9y agoIt's a good combo, sure. But a CS degree is way too theoretical. Hands on experience for a leadership role is still going to be preferred. I want to hire a leader who can tell people on their team, "Hey, when I was in this situation a few years back... here's how we handled it... here's what went well, here's what didn't..." For anyone, I think getting an MBA straight out of undergrad sort of sets you up to be perpetually useless -- a stuffed shirt. You never get the hands-on experience doing the work you are supposed to be leading. Then you have to learn how to manage the work on the job, and as the old saying goes, "Months of dev work can save hours of planning!" No question, I'd advise people to get hands-on experience if they want to be a leader.
- tomashertus 9y agoHeh. Can I work for you?:) I switched in the end of last year from Team Lead Engineer to PM position and have had blast since then. The job is very challenging and I'm keep learning new and new things about our customers and users. Previously working with PMs who are not from engineering background was often very frustrating, because google can find any answer right?
- dbg31415 9y agoThat's about the best compliment I can think of, thanks! Worse than just trying to Google for the answers are the Product Managers who come over from Marketing and tend to just make up answers. Ha! You have to go over with them the whole notion of compromise, and how just because it's on a Gantt Chart, doesn't mean we want to commit to all the dates for all the features 6 months out... Perpetual compromise, stuff is going to come up, we adapt and reprioritize and if we're lucky (and a good bit of it is luck) then the wheels don't come off the car while we're driving.
- badloginagain 9y agoWhat is SLDC? Edit: Low effort Google gave me the answer: https://www.google.ca/search?q=sldc&gws_rd=cr&ei=C98bWZvbDIjYjwPP6rHoDA https://www.google.ca/search?q=sldc&gws_rd=cr&ei=C98bWZvbDIj...