 I got an MBA from Harvard, but I still couldn't get a product manager job. Having a degree is not that important, but you need to learn the real skills, bro. There's a big gap between a consultant and a product manager, but no worries. I can tell you what kind of skills that you need to learn to make the smooth transition. Recently, several my students transitioned from a consultant and MBA background into offers in the fan company. So what kind of management skills do they learn to make the smooth transition? In this video, I'm shared with you the eight skills you need to learn to become a product manager from a business background. Hey guys, this is Dr. Nancy Lee, a director product from drnancyd.com. I help people transition from worker B to a product manager and business leader. If you want to know the most effective way to become a product manager and get a job very quickly, feel free to subscribe to this channel and turn on the red bell button so it will be notified every time when I post a new video every Wednesday. If you like any of my today's tips, feel free to hit the like button and share so that more people will discover this amazing content. So first of all, let's look into what you need to gain as a consultant and business background such as MBA to transition into product management. Skill number one, technical acumen. People heard of business acumen before, so what is technical acumen? Technical acumen is the skills you need to master to be able to communicate and understand the engineering concept. For example, as people coming from consulting and MBA background, you may not know how to code, but you need to know the basic concept in terms of what is API, what is STK, what is AI, what is blockchain and all those key fundamental technology you need to get to know so that you are able to show that you have interest in technology. On top of that, I also recommend all of you guys to take some entry-level software architecture classes and there are many free or very cheap classes on LinkedIn and other places. What you need to know from those classes is, in a high level, how does software engineering systems work, what are the different cloud and database compute systems, where is a layer of AI sitting, how does system one integrate with the other system. And to be honest, it's not that difficult if you pay close attention into the high-level systems diagram and systems engineering. I prepared the list of recommended classes I believe all of you guys need to take as entry-level classes for you to get to know this basic engineering concept. Feel free to click the link at the description of the video where you can see all the list of recommended classes by Dr. Nancy Lee. Another thing you need to learn to build technical acumen is to speak the language of designers and engineers. One of the best ways to speak their language is to build a product portfolio by working with them through your side project. And in your product portfolio, you can directly work on some kind of interesting new ideas you can work on with engineers. And some of those hack songs are available now ever since virtual, you can join those hack songs and work with engineers to build some new ideas, get to know them and figure out how do they work together as well. If you also want to learn what's the best way to build a product portfolio, I highly recommend this video. This will increase your interview and resume success rate significantly. Now, besides the hack song, there are 13 different kinds of projects you can do. I also have a cheat sheet where you guys can directly download and check out what are the different kinds of 13 projects you can do to build a product portfolio and start to learn the language of software engineers and designers. Scale number two is write requirements. There are five different kinds of requirements, but in the high level, as a product manager, we write very detailed requirements and user stories. Their customer facing business requirements, I believe all the consultants and MBAs knows how to write business requirements. But I also recommend all of you guys to learn different kinds of functional requirements, technical requirements, performance requirements. There are so many different types of requirements you guys need to write once you start to get to work on your own product so that engineers will be able to design the right product for you. What are the different kind of requirements? Feel free to check out the other video I made for you. And today I'm just going to give you a quick summary about different kinds of requirements. I've seen lots of people try to write requirements, but to be honest, those requirements you guys have written is not very specific and it's not very easy for engineers to digest. You can write some requirements in one or two sentences, but engineer can come out with different designs. So therefore I recommend you very specific and concise about your requirement. Skill number three is have customer empathy and customer interview skills. I know majority of the consultant MBAs, you guys are very good at making the strategies and PowerPoint presentations. But once we dive into your strategies, how did you get those results? You may only talk to a few people and come out with grand vision, five year plan. To be honest, as a product manager, we work reversely. We use an agile approach. We want to understand what is a pain point? Why they make such a decision? And on top of that, how can we start to help them solve problems today? And we will do AB testing, rolling out MEPs, a different kind of smaller set for customers to start to solve their problems and also test out our product idea. Therefore, I recommend consultant and MBA start to build customer empathy, to wear the shoes of customers, learn those pain point and start to contact customer interviews as well. Of course, a specific way to do customer interview. I recommend all of you guys to use the right approach to do customer interview. If you want me to make a specific video teaching you how to do customer interview, please comment towards the link down below. So I know there's a huge demand so that I can make a separate video for all of you guys. Skill number four is execution skills. This is very specific to consultant and MBA students. I know 90% of consultants only do certain section of the product or project and you never watch it end to end. But this is critical for product managers because we need to see a product from concept to execution. So I recommend all of you guys start to figure out in your current experience what kind of product you have built, which is one side of product management, but you're missing the other side such as GTN or engineering facing type of project. So therefore I will focus on the part you do not know. Now you may ask, what is the end to end product management cycle? And you can check out this video. I talk in details about different type of roles and responsibilities of product managers and in different stages of developing a product. So watch the video and understand what product execution process you're missing and come up with those different product and project experience that can help you to fulfill the entire experience. If you like any of my tips so far, I really appreciate you hit the like button and share this video because more people need to see this awesome organic content. Now let's also look into the transferable skill set that consultant and MBA students have and how can we use it for product management. So skills number five is the stakeholder management skill. As a consultant or MBA in general, you should have done this before to get alignment among different kind of stakeholders. As a product manager, we need to sell our product vision and align all the missions among different department. So this kind of stakeholder management skills is much to have and also very transferable in this business domain as well. Last time I interviewed Crystal, my friend who successfully transitioned from consultant into product management by building her own roadmap. So I recommend all of you guys figure out what's your own way to define what kind of roadmap you can use to leverage your existing transferable skills to transition into product management as well. So you can check out this video and learn from her. Scale number six, presentation and communication skills. And these are fundamental to be successful in all the jobs to be honest. And it's also critical important for product management career paths. As a product manager, when we go to the third part of the product management cycle, which is launching your product, and we're going to design a GTM, which is go to market strategy, and then you will start to sell your product to your end customers, to your early adopters. So in that case, we need to present in conferences, present in different kind of early adopters and stakeholders as well. So those kind of presentation skills are very critical. And on the other side, as a consultant, this is what you do all the time. You present to executives, trying to get that by end and they pay you millions of dollars for one month of work as a joke. So the same skills that you do for consulting project can be directly transferable into product management job as well. Whenever I talk about public speaking, communication skills, people always ask me this question. Nancy, do you have any courses you recommend to improve your public speaking skills? So I made a separate video talk about how to improve your English public speaking skills. In this video, you can see the description of the video with all the recommended courses as well. Scale number seven, the benchmarking and comparative analysis skills. As a product manager, as well as a consultant MBA, it's very likely you'll be asked to understand what are the different alternative solutions in this market? What are the competitors doing? What's your value proposition? What's your competitive strengths compared with your competitors? All of this are fundamental is also very critical at the beginning of product management stage, which is ideation stage. Just when we come out with product ideas, so consulting can directly to leverage their market research skills into the product management field as well. So that we can come up with the best product strategy and win the market. Scale number eight, which is data analytics and the visualization skills. So those are very critical especially for the B2C type of companies. You will have millions of consumer data. So you need to analyze to drive the customer insight from those massive data. You also need to create the data very quickly and understand what is the next decision you need to make regarding the product features and how to launch your product as well. And there are several tools I recommend all the entry-level product managers to master, such as SQL or Excel. Those are fundamental to process large amount of customer data. If you work in like B2B type environment, you still process customer data, but the volume is slightly smaller, but you still should be able to see customer feedback and customer usage data to understand and inform your product decision. If you want to learn how to quickly transition from a consultant or MBA or business background into product management, you should check out this free training where I teach you how my student quickly got like three offers last week and four offers this week into like TikTok, Facebook and Amazon, Microsoft. And you will learn lots of insider information regarding how to build a product portfolio and how to make transferable skillset to get into product management. I'm looking forward to see you in those free training as well. If you're getting ready for product manager interview, I recommend all of you guys to check out the playlist of product manager interview questions and answers. I wish all of you guys good luck and get offered very quickly. Please make sure you like and subscribe to this channel. I'm going to see you next time. This is Dr. Nia CD. Bye.