 A lot of people ask me this question. Hey Nancy, do you need MBA to become a product manager? Do I need to invest this $200,000 to get an MBA degree so that I can become my dream product manager in fan companies, Google, Apple, Amazon? In this video, I'm going to break it down. Specifically, what are the different kind of roles, responsibilities, does relevant product management, does MBA degree actually adding additional success rate to become product manager or not. And we're also going to break down regarding the requirement in big tech companies to become a product manager so that you can make decisions whether MBA awards your $200,000 investment or not. Hey guys, this is Dr. Nancy Lee, a director of product and featured in Forbes. I have helped hundreds of people blend their dream PM job offer in fan companies and unicorn startups and continue to get promoted as a product leader. If you want to achieve the same kind of success, you can go to PM Accelerator DAO to learn more. If you want to learn the most effective way to become a product manager, subscribe to the channel, hit the like button so we can notify every time I turn on your video every Wednesday. Make sure to check out the behind scenes stories on Instagram to find out lots of people with very similar background just like you. If you like any of the free advice we provide today, please make sure to like this video and share this with any aspiring product managers. First of all, let's use data to prove do you need MBA or not to become a product manager. Let's look into the latest job descriptions from Google and Amazon. I personally believe that you do not need MBA to become a product manager. However, some companies have preferences towards MBA students. Some company does not have preferences at all. For example, look at this job description from Spotify, one of the most popular video streaming app. In this job descriptions, they didn't mention they need MBA at all. However, they said they preferred experience like the following. You have five years of engineering product or program management experience in tech industries, especially in the ads tech. This product management position is for ad platform. So they prefer people who have prior experience in the ads domain compared with you need MBA. So to them, experience working with the right product and also experience working with engineering teams and experience working with product and project management is very critical for the company's success. Let's use another example from Amazon. So Amazon is specifically known for preferred MBA candidate. So if you go to campus recruiting, Amazon love MBA campus recruiting. If you got MBA fresh, graduate MBA, Amazon love to bring you in as L6 instead of L5, even if you have no prior product management experience. So if you're MBA, you are in luck. You should actually leverage your own campus recruiting opportunities to interview with Amazon. This job is for senior program manager of low core ML machine learning platform. In the job description, they said the following. They prefer MBA or master's degree in engineering management or technology prefer. So which means that you have MBA or master's degree in management or engineering domain that you like your background, even if it is for machine learning technical position. So therefore, whether you need MBA or not really depends on the company. Now let's also use another extreme Google as an example. This is for senior product manager for Android connectivity, PM position at Google. And they said the following. They prefer people with master's in a technology or business related field. Five years experience working a cross-functional team with engineering, UX, UI, sales, finance, and other stakeholders. So if you want to interview for Google, actually, Google prefer people with engineering domain compared with business domain because in Google, they have technology driven company. They want to, their engineers want to be challenged. So if you do not have MBA, I would focus on Google or Spotify, those kind of companies to go after these. And you should still try for Amazon because Amazon also like people with master's degree. So they're all open for outstanding product managers to apply for the companies. In my last video, I talked about how it became a product manager with no MBA or no product management experience. You should watch this video right here where I talked in depth regarding how can you break into product management with no MBA and how to able to bridge the gap very quickly. The second step is look into the roles and responsibilities of product managers and how much are actually related to MBA degree. The key roles and responsibilities for product managers are the following. Number one, set up the product vision to lead the team to achieve the vision together. Number two, product managers need to be able to provide requirements and manage roadmap to manage the entire process to make sure the product are developed and launched. Number three, product managers need to work in a cross-functional team to make sure all the teams are aligned and moving towards the same vision. Those include engineering team, business team, sales and marketing, and UIUX design. And those key responsibilities especially the cross-functional team responsibilities actually relevant to what MBA is bringing to the table because they are more business driven. However, other roles and responsibilities such as writing requirement I don't think is part of the MBA curriculum at all. If you want to learn how to write requirements and actually I prefer people study systems design and actually that's what I study at MIT to learn about system design and actually helps me to write requirement better. Now regarding setting up product vision and this is very personal and unique to you. I don't think you need MBA to be able to set up product vision and in reality for students inside a PM accelerator majority of students even do not have MBA but together we're still able to lend hundreds of offers from fan companies and unicorn startups. So therefore it's essential for you to master the essential skills for you to become a better product manager compared with just getting a degree. I'm going to make in-depth video to cover all the top 10 essential skills for product managers and it's going to be published right here on top of my video sometime in the future you just subscribe to channel and get notified once the video is available to you. So learn those key skills is better than getting a degree. However, I personally believe that MBA is a really good investment if you want to break into a consulting type of role. A majority of the consultants they have an MBA but majority of the product managers we do not have an MBA and however if you want to leverage the MBA network you can definitely go for MBA just for the purpose of gaining the right skills for product management. I don't think MBA is designed for that. So do you have MBA or not? Comment on the chat. I love to learn about you and also do you know any of your friends who got MBA who became a product manager? I love to learn from them as well so comment on the chat. Now let's break down the third most asked questions. Does MBA actually have higher success rate or not to become a product manager? The answer is no. As I said actually inside PMX surgery a majority of our students do not have an MBA. Now if you look around in big tech companies for all the product managers do they have an MBA or not? And actually if you look around a majority of product managers do not have an MBA because MBA is a skill and experience based position. It's not a degree based position. Same thing as what I said earlier majority of the job descriptions didn't ask for MBA but they want people who have more experience in the domain of product or engineering or UI, UX domain they're gonna be working on. So that's more important and essential for product management. So therefore I think the $200,000 investment as a tuition to get an MBA degree for the purpose of becoming a product manager may not worth it. So therefore I would rather you spend the same amount of money to master any kind of experience or skills to become a product manager. For example the best way actually for you to master the product management skills is by doing side project building your product portfolio to demonstrate you have very relevant experience in the domain they're having for and also have experience writing requirements you know how to work with engineers and UI looks design and how to communicate with stakeholders those are very critical to become a product manager. I make a video talk about the how to gain product management experience using product portfolio you can watch this video right here and you should also start to build your side project by gaining product management experience and then leverage that to quickly become a product manager you can go to this website to download the 13 different kind of project you can work on right now to start gaining experience. I'm going to put the searching different kind of project in the link of the description so that you can download yourself. Having MBA does not guarantee you have higher success rate at all and because I actually have lots of people who are MBAs and reach out to me saying hey Nancy I saw I got MBA I can land many jobs in tech companies however they're not even able to learn interview at all it was because they don't know how to write a resume how to package their experience. So check out this video where we talk about how to package your experience put in your resume that's actually more relevant than just having a degree. The number four thing I want to highlight is that after you become a product manager does MBA actually help you or not to become a senior product manager, director product or any kind of leadership positions in the company and actually I have been working for multiple fortune-fragile companies when I look around the people who are in director VP different kind of levels majority of them do not have an MBA degree. However the ones who climb up faster as someone who is able to better present themselves who are faster at increasing the scope of work and of course if you want to climb up through the strategy letter such as corporate strategy or chief strategy officer MBA would definitely help significantly but from the product domain it's more impact-driven experience space and did you really launch a product that had millions of dollars using it that's more important than having a degree or not. So therefore my personal humble opinion is that you do not need MBA to become a product manager all you need is that you start to gain also required skills to become a product manager. However if already product managers you should totally leverage your opportunities to target the on-campus recruiting with amazon because they prefer MBA students in general. We have a student who got an MBA and also went through the on-campus recruiting with amazon he was able to land an offer within six weeks that's very fast so I want you guys already have MBA to leverage on-campus recruiting fast track to quickly break into these fan companies. If you like the tips that provided please make sure to like this video and share this video with any aspiring prime managers or who is currently MBA I want to hear their opinion as well this is Dr. Nancy Lee from PM Accelerator Diode I'm going to see you next time in my video bye