 A lot of fresh graduates and MBAs are very confused about their career path because what they choose is going to decide how fast they grow their salary in the long run. They can grow like rocket ship. They can also grow like flat and it's also going to decide how sexist they are in the future career. Are they going to rise quickly at the CEO of the company or they'll just be a mediocre worker in the company. So it's very critical to decide your career path very early in your career. 10 years ago, consulting career has been one of the most popular career. Even I wanted to become a consultant 10 years ago when I got my PhD. However, recently more and more people want to become a product manager working on software product. Even BCG and McKenzie consultant now want to become a product manager. In this video, I'm going to break down in terms of differences between product management and consulting career in terms of roles, responsibilities, lifestyle, career path, salary, and the skills required to become one of those. Make sure to stay until the end of this video. We're going to reveal the latest salary information in 2023. This is Doctrine and CD, a direct product and featured in force. I've held 100 people land a dream PM job offer in fan companies and unicorn startup and continue to get promoted as a product leader. If you're interested in product management course, please go to PM accelerator.io to learn more to learn the most effective way to become part manager. You should subscribe to channel and turn the bell button to notify every time we turn on your video every week. If you like any free tips we provide today, make sure to hit the like button because it's the only way YouTube algorithm will recognize me. I've been an entry-level PM and got promoted as a director product throughout my entire career and I also I work with so many consultants during work and several of my friends are also consulting the BCG, Deloitte, those kind of big consulting firm. So I have lots of insider information to tell you how much you're getting paid and what the lifestyle looks like. And for lots of people like me who had engineering background from 10 years ago getting a PhD, I saw management consulting is the only way for me to get out of technical space. However, plant management is a new way for people with engineering background, also a new way for people with business background to advance their career. First of all, let's understand what are the differences between roles and responsibilities of a consultant and a product manager. Now let's understand the number one thing we look at is what do they do every single day? Where do they spend most of time? First of all, as a consultant, you spend most of time doing PowerPoint presentation, not even giving presentation and making the PowerPoint deck. And as a product manager, we are spending lots of time writing product requirement documentation and communicate our requirement with a cross-functional team. And as a consultant, they spend lots of time serving executives like CEO, Chief Strategy Officer, CTO, different kind of C-levels make them feel like so excited and especially for entry-level people fresh out of schools. I'm solving problems for C-levels. It feels really good. Which is true, they are dealing with really big problems in the organization even if they're very young in their career. As a product manager, we spend lots of time serving end users and customers. We have lots of empathy of our customers. We really want to create the best product for our customers and customer empathy is the most important part of us being a product manager just like this. And consultants also spend lots of time doing strategic ideas. However, product managers spend lots of time understand end-to-end product management life cycle and execute all the ideas end-to-end. Now, let me give you a real-life example what does this look like. For example, in real life, I personally launched the first 5G Edge computing product in collaboration with Amazon and Microsoft. So this is one of the biggest industry products in the world. And when I launched it, we also hired a BCG consultant to go hand-to-hand with us. But when we hired BCG consultants, they charge us $1 million, create 50 different use cases regarding how Edge computing this new technology is going to change the world. They also did very comprehensive industry analysis, create lots of data, and also create a very beautiful PowerPoint as their deliverables. Now, as a product manager who worked hand-to-hand with those BCG consultants, what we did was that we had actually very similar product vision as those consultants knowing where different use cases could be. But we go deeper. We understand, well, if we want to launch this product, who are the different kind of user segmentations? What are the user pain points? What are the different kind of product features we need to build and design and develop for our end users? How are we able to launch the product and design a very compelling go-to-market strategy for our end users so that customers not only love the product and also recommend our product to all the end users and all the detail, planning and also strategies and figure out who exactly we need to work with and prioritize is not done by consultants. So consultants mainly think about the high-level ideas, but they are always also very important because their capability of putting all the data together and putting it into a PowerPoint presentation is so amazing to be frank. It's a very beautiful PowerPoint presentation and shows that they worth $1 million to do market research for us. And because the $1 million presentation PowerPoint deck, I was able to get exact approvals and give us hundreds of millions of dollars to build a product and bring the product to the hands of customers. So I actually need to send those consultants to make it happen for us. But all the consultants usually spend lots of time creating strategies, they never execute those strategies. And it's kind of a waste of time to be frank. And as a consultant, it's frequently only work with limited functions such as they mainly work with market research team analysts and create a beautiful PowerPoint deck and they also work designers to design the PowerPoint deck. For product managers, we spend lots of time working a cross-functional team, could be engineers and designer who actually designed the feature not the PowerPoint deck and also legal team, self-marketing team and we almost work with everyone in the company to create a unique provision to serve our customers. From passion perspective, consultants mainly work on business related problems. And as a product manager, we work with both technical and business related questions. For example, consultant probably being asked to understand the pricing strategy of Airbnb, but as a product manager will be focusing on after we know the pricing strategy of Airbnb, what part of features we need to design and what product can we build first and which customers are we going to serve first. And consultants usually have very broad industry knowledge. They usually change project every two to three months and then they fly to different clients site and switch to another client project every two to three months. This means that they're able to get very broad exposure to any different industry. So it's actually quite exciting. But as a product manager, we stay in one industry, usually tech industry or healthcare industry or fintech industry or education industry, but we frequently stay with one or maybe two product and make sure that those product is being deployed and created end-to-end to our customers. So the life of a cycle product to last for one year, maybe two years, the typical length of creating a product from concept execution. So there's one downside for consultant changing project all the time was because once for a while to be put on the bench, once on the bench is very dangerous. They either get fired because they're not creating value, they can charge the customers and the next project they're going to be working on is a very bad project. So they have to stay focused to become very competitive, do not get on the bench. If you like all the comparison we provide today and make sure to like this video and share this video with any product managers and consultant. Let's continue. The second thing I like to emphasize is the work-life balance and lifestyle for consultant and product managers. Consultant frequently work between 60 to 80 hours and the reason is that the frequently travel to client side from Monday to Thursday and on Friday they work in the home office so they're on the road all the time. When you're on the road all the time you spend, you actually end up working longer hours. I have a friend, he is a BCG consultant and he is working for 12 to 14 hours per day and even if he just had a new baby. However, as a product manager our work-life balance is much better. We usually work about 40 hours, sometimes 50 hours per week and that's it. And sometimes when there's some urge and pre-lunches you might work longer but in general we work between 40 to 50 hours per week. And we frankly get to work from home instead of travel all the time. Of course, if you like the trouble points from airline companies you might really like being a consultant flying around the world. Now I also want you to think about the kind commitment as a consultant. Given you work between 60 to 80 hours per week and frequently it's very unlikely we spend most time with your families, we love one or invest in yourself including the time to work out and focusing on your personal life. If you're a product manager you're able to save about 30 hours per week and put it into any startup ideas or even spend the time going to the beaches every single day. And being a consultant I actually really bad for people who is going to start a new family. And actually my friend who a BCG consultant he had to quit his job after he had a new baby. And this is the same for both men and women. I actually have other women who is a BCG consultant inside a PM Exciter program I run and trying to get out of the consulting field was because she just felt like she want to start a new family. It is very difficult for her to have personal life and also have very stressful career as well. Now let's talk about the third comparison Korea Pass. Consulting industry has a very tight and cutthroat culture. They have a culture of up or out which means that every two years you have to get promoted or you're outside the company. So it's very very stressful which means that every every two years the people towards the bottom of the bench and they're gonna kick outside the company and then a new job immediately. As a product manager the career path is not as linear as what the consultant can be. As a product manager and usually we change jobs every two to three years because during two to three years you probably had several part lunches now you want to move on to create any new product and have a career growth. But it's not guaranteed every two to three years you will get promoted as a senior product manager and then every three years get promoted as a director. Someone can just be a senior product manager as an individual contributor throughout the entire career. But product manager is a very performance driven field. If your product actually have significant success you're able to get promoted much faster. For example I was able to get promoted three times within four years and became one of youngest director product within my company. And after became a director the CEO of my company actually invited me for coffee chat just because he heard about the rising star new talent within his organization. However I have to say that both consultant and product managers had very bright career future to be able to rise in the organization to become the VP of product and the CEO one day and both choices are pretty good. I have a detailed breakdown regarding step by step levels of changes of product managers in the organization all the way from entry level PM all the way to the CEO of the company. You can watch this video right here where I break it down in details. I'm going to also going to link it in the description of this video. Number four let's compare the salaries. Well everyone asked about salaries for the transparency I know more than 100 people salaries out there because I negotiate top salary for other people. Everything I tell you is the latest salary information we discussed within 2023. In general product managers getting paid higher than comes out. If you are fresh MBA you're able to join like BCG or McKenzie consulting companies you're able to get total compensation of $200,000 per year. And the base salary is about $165,000 per year plus some bonuses total add up to be 200k. However I have fresh MBA student who joined MATA as a product manager he's getting paid over $300,000 per year. And other people who joined like Google, Amazon, those kind of companies they all the salaries as around $300,000 per year. And I would say product managers definitely getting paid higher than comes out and based on the same years of experience. Now for entry level fresh undergrad if you become a product manager as entry level in like big tech companies such as I was enjoying Microsoft and as a fresh undergrad he was she's getting paid $150,000 per year. But for fresh undergrad joining any consulting company you're probably getting paid $80,000 per year maximum $100,000 per year at the maximum. As a fresh undergrad it's likely you're going to join those like consulting company only getting paid $80,000 per year. So which means that there are huge gap in terms of the salary. Of course for entry level product managers in any startups unknown companies we're getting paid at least $80,000 per year as a product manager and likely you'll have students joining like unicorn startups are getting paid at $130,000 per year. So product managers get definitely getting paid significantly more than comes out. I also want you to understand for people who already have years experience with transition into product management and they're getting paid above $300,000 per year if you join fan companies like Google meta and if you join other unicorn startups such as TikTok they also pay people over $300,000 per year. Someone still enjoying Snowflake they're getting paid over $400,000 per year. Someone joined crypto trading company getting paid over $400,000 per year as well. So those are like very amazing salaries and then all of them are about like 20 something years old and getting paid that much money. So I'm very very impressed regarding the potential upside how much the tech companies can pay you and also think about if you join a tech unicorn and they go IPO one day your stock option is going to worth millions of dollars. Actually I have a student who joined energy company the company is going to go IPO in Q2 2023 so that his equity is going to become millions of dollars and except the total compensation I also want you guys to think about the hourly rate. If you're getting paid at $200,000 per year by joining BCG as a consultant for MBA graduate students so your hourly rate is actually $50 per hour because you work 80 hours per week but for a manager who joined Google or unicorn startups you're getting paid at hourly rate of $130 per hour because you only work about 40 to 50 hours per week. So the hourly rate for managers is also the highest in the industry that's why this is the best career ever. Now let's also talk about direct levels so directors in big tech companies like Google Meta they get paid at least a million dollars. I have a student who joined Meta as a product lead he's not even director yet he's getting paid at $800,000 per year as a product lead for Meta L7 position. Now if you become a partner at a consulting company you're getting paid around one million dollars per year so that's very little money for how much work you put in as a partner but it's your personal choice. I have detailed video breakdown the seven to six figure tech salaries and in terms of equity based salary bonuses for this look like you should check out this video right here and study those breakdown in details. Number five let's compare the skills needed to become a consultant and a product manager. To be frank the skills are very similar both professions require communication skills leadership skills and public speaking skills and the way to work in the cross-functional team all the people's skills are the same in both professions and to be frank for a consultant the skills of creating powerpoint a slice is even more advanced compared with a product manager but the advanced skills is quite different for the advanced skills for product managers we want to have a product management skills at the foundation which means that we need to know how to write product requirement documentation we need to create a long-term short-term product roadmap and we need to understand the agile methodology and all of those are advanced skills the product managers need to master before they even become a product manager and that's why we have like students from like BZG consulting companies or EY and Ernest Yang those kind of consulting companies inside PM&S to learn those advanced skills so that they can become a product manager much faster. I have a detailed breakdown regarding the top six essential skills for product managers you should watch this video right here I'm also going to link it in the description of this video so have you decided what career path would you choose but I will tell you either one you choose will be a good choice anyway regardless you choose product management or consulting career the foundation writing the key to resume is the same so go to this website you can download the key to product manager resume that we use by nine thousand product managers and help you stand out from the severe competition I'm going to also link the website in the description of this video comment below what career paths would you choose I love to hear about your opinion and make sure to watch those playlists I tell you all different roles and responsibilities of product management and how you're able to break into product management as well so make sure to like and share our video with any expert product managers and consultant and this is dark name city and we'll see you next time bye guys