MBA? Nah bro.

A long time ago, I was working for a company where I had been the senior (and for a while the only) product manager they had. I had survived several iterations of leadership regimes, and the one that broke my back was when they brought in a new EVP of our product group.

I left not much after that, but one of the last things he told me was that I would never be promoted, and frankly if I wanted to remain in the product manager role there, I needed to get an MBA.[1]

At the time, I had been in role more than 6 years at that company, and been a product manager for almost 12 years, so I was not new, or a tyro. Still, he was a former senior exec that felt that all of the business leaders (and product management is a business leader) needed to have done a trip through B-school.

I wrote a sarcastic piece that I published anonymously about how an MBA is not needed for most product managers, and in fact, if you are a fresh MBA and think you can step in and be effective in product management, you will flame out.

Hard.

Anyhow, I put that thought into the ether, and then forgot about it.

Fast forward to today.

We are at an inflection point in our business, and we need to move from a SKU based point sale and subscription access model to a consumption based business model.

Frankly, this is not something I have done before (and to be clear, it is not strictly my role to define and implement this transition, I am tasked with the transformation of our development process to accommodate this) and I am not a consultant class b-school grad, so I did what all the cool kids are doing.

I asked ChatGPT.

I explained our current state, and the desired end state, and let it run.

And it gave a really solid analysis, three options for the migration, How to address the needs of the B2C and the B2B markets (without cannibalzing either channel,) the pitfalls to be cautious about, and how to measure success.[2]

It was a 5 page brief. It was coherent, it was rational.

Is it perfect? No, but it is probably 90%, and good enough to seed the discussion with our leadership team.

A great start. Something that I might have gotten to with a couple of weeks intense thinking and research.

Thus, with this simple exercise, I feel that I am no longer at a diadvantage by not having the MBA credential, and that my original thought that the value of an MBA is the connections and network you build by spending the 2 years and $100K+ to earn.

A solid use case for GenAI in product management.

1 - I studied physics in college, and I have a knack for numbers. Over the years, I have "reverse engineered" a lot of what you learn in an MBA program (and at times, I have explained the math to MBA's who just know the formulae). I do not believe that this lack of an MBA has been a detriment.

2 - I didn't prompt it to identify success criteria, but it is one thing that I teach all my product managers. Define what "success" looks like, and if you can't envision it, then you probably shouldn't go forward with the project