How to choose your first job
A framework to think about the common “management consulting vs product management” dilemma right out of school
[Source: Modified from Amoeboids]
Every week, I receive several emails like the one below. A college senior, or recent graduate, is in the fortunate position of having multiple job offers upon graduation. One from McKinsey/BCG/Bain for a management consulting business analyst (BA) role and the other from Google/Apple/ Meta/Amazon/Microsoft for an entry-level product management/marketing (PM/PMM) role. They’re having a hard time choosing between them, and are looking for advice from someone who’s worked in both industries.
Why is the “consulting vs PM” dilemma such a common one for recent graduates? Apart from the fact that both these roles are prestigious, pay competitively and sponsor work visas in the US for non-US citizens, many graduates go into consulting and product management for similar reasons - to satiate their intellectual curiosity as generalists, to work with and learn from diverse colleagues, get cross functional executive exposure and have potential for a strong upward career trajectory. However, the nuances of each role and what every person wants to get out of it are where these two career paths begin to considerably differ. A framework I often share to think through the choice (with the caveat that it might be unhelpful or biased based on my personal experience) is as follows:
1. Reflect on your starting point.
Most generalist roles highly value early to mid-career people who demonstrate that they can:
absorb things quickly, analyze them rigorously and come to conclusions,
bring cross functional stakeholders along and influence them (often without direct authority) on a proposed course of action, and
communicate articulately with senior leaders.
Entry-level management consulting roles have well-oiled training programs and a widely embraced model of apprenticeship to develop these skills (or what they call the “toolkit”). Over a brief period of time, newly minted management consultants are trained until their toolkit reaches a point of “unconscious competence” - at which point they can undertake complex analyses, develop and present “executive-ready” materials, build enduring relationships with clients and ultimately manage others on their teams to deliver similar results.
One can most certainly pick up these skills in a product role as well. But the initial learning curve might be steeper and the resources at your disposal to ascend that learning curve might be more dispersed. If you think you’d hit the ground running on these skills based on prior academic experience and/or professional exposure through internships and the like, product management roles do bring the added benefit of honing other skills from the get go that a management consultant typically doesn’t - such as developing a strong customer-centric approach to problem solving and building product intuition.
2. Think about where you might want to go longer term.
For several folks, it’s hard to definitively know at 22 (or even later) “what you want to be when you grow up”. But having a directional sense of what excites you can help guide your decision making.
I was drawn to consulting after business school because I knew that I would get to work on different kinds of problems with clients in a lot of different industries. And I did - I worked on everything from digital transformations across industries to mergers, acquisitions and divestitures in healthcare and industrial goods companies to restructuring the organizational setup of a bankrupt wedding dress retailer! In the process, I learnt a lot but also realized that my work as a consultant usually ended with a recommendation on what the client should do. I longed for more ownership and the ability to see a project in the real world through from conception to completion in a customer-grounded manner. Like many others, the couple of years in consulting left me with the opportunity to do that in a variety of set-ups ranging from Chief of Staff roles in startups to in-house corporate strategy roles at larger companies or a more product-centric role like my current role at Microsoft.
While the skills learned as a management consultant transfer extremely well to product roles, you should start off in product itself if you know that what gets you excited is:
talking to customers,
building products,
getting engaged at the user level with design and feature decisions and
working cross functionally to bring a product vision to life.
3. Be realistic about the kind of lifestyle you are signing up for.
The exuberance at the thought of seeing the world (with the added benefit of doing so on an expense account) as a young management consultant wears thin pretty fast. The reality is that, more often than not, most management consultants get burnt out fairly quickly by the weekly travel to often unglamorous locations and grueling work hours they have to put in at the expense of their social life, hobbies and even health.
While product roles also most certainly see cyclicality in work intensity, the work travel is less, and work-life balance is better because setting boundaries for protected time is typically easier. As long as you’re getting the work done, you manage your time and how you’re doing it.
While it is certainly easier to put in the long hours when you’re straight out of college, think hard about how hard you want to work rather than how hard you can work before picking your job. For some, the choice still remains “I’ll-do-nothing-else-for-two-years-and-then-have-a-life”. For others, it skews towards something more sustainable from the get go.
(Hustle Fuel represents my own personal views. I am speaking for myself and not on behalf of my employer, Microsoft Corporation.)