I'm the academic head of this new program on the School of Computer Science side of things. Happy to answer any questions you might have about this program (though it will have to be in the morning since it's about 1am on the east coast and well past my bedtime) And no, I didn't plant this link. :)
One of the key strengths of our Master's of Product Management program is that it combines elements of computer science, user experience design, and business skills (including strategy and management). We also have a significant component devoted to communication and leadership skills, based on interactive workshops and personal mentoring.
On a personal note, this notion of marrying business skills with UX design and computer science has been a long-term goal of mine. I'm a techie at heart (I got my PhD from Berkeley CS), but I feel that having strong skills in user experience or CS only helps so much if you don't have decision-making authority. And to get to those decision-making positions, you need to be able to manage technical teams well, understand how a product fits within the existing market, and know about best practices in prototyping and evaluating user interfaces so that your product has a compelling user experience.
$65k is way too expensive to charge for this. Just how greedy is CMU to charge this much? Furthermore Product m
Managers are not CEOs, the departments which align to deliver the product don't report to them, nor do they control what resources are allocated or have budgetary control.
PM's have to negotiate and gain consensus on what is to be built and contend with resources available. In software you can be at the mercy of the development manager and what they want to build, can sometimes be at odds with what you want built. Other times you may have a dev lead who just decides that like as they are building it, they will code what they damn well please, and ignore your architecture team (if you are fortunate to have one).
Those are just some of the things a Product Manager learns to deal with to get their product built and shipped.
Good points, it turns out that $65k is lower than many of our other master's programs. We also ran through the numbers and that tuition x #students doesn't cover much more than our basic costs. We are a non-profit after all, and one that has a very strong track record in its educational program.
What you're telling us is actually very well aligned with what we've heard from our alums and from some companies. Yes, product managers are not CEOs and can't always just tell people what to do. Product managers work with their direct team (typically some engineers, QA, 1-2 UX designers, possibly a data scientist), but also need to know how to interface with marketing, sales, and others. Part of our curriculum looks at how to work with and positively influence others to achieve desired goals. But you're right, that's not easy, though there are some strategies and tactics that work better than others.
So, I'm a PM at Mozilla who did an MDes in Interaction Design at CMU. I'm a dataset of one, but my experience there was absolutely worth the cost. A few notes:
- 65k is a lot, but Pittsburgh is cheap compared to the Northern California or New York or almost anywhere. Someone on the thread tossed out 65k a year in additional cost of living; this number is way off. You can get a room for < 800 bucks a month (possibly significantly less if you're willing to commute even a little). Food is cheap, there is modest but acceptable public transit, the city's pretty bikable, and there's plenty of free stuff to do etc etc. TL;DR Pittsburgh is great.
- There are lots of fellowships for grads available through CMU. I TAed Web dev and creative coding courses and IIRC, the money I got for doing so completely covered my rent and internet bill.
- If you've spent any time at all on the CMU campus, it's pretty clear the the institution is absolutely unique WRT the depth and breadth of CS, Design, HCI, Robotics, and Business talent. BTW, this list is not exhaustive. The sheer density and variety and stuff happening on campus is simply not comparable to working at a startup (which requires laser focus). A big part of the CMU experience is expanding your horizons about what's possible in ways that MOOCS (and I daresay industry) cannot.
- Also CMU grad programs place nearly EVERYBODY. It's the primary reason I went there as a chronically underpaid, semi-clueless freelancer having trouble breaking into industry. Their relationships with industry – both formal, and through causal peer/alumni connections – are pretty staggering.
All of that being said, I didn't move into a PM role until I'd spent significant time in the UX org at Mozilla learning how the sausage gets made. I definitely only started to grok the on-the-ground dynamics of product management after several years in industry, and I'm still learning every day. My sense is that most PMs have similar trajectories of transitioning into the role after time in industry. I'd be curious about whether industry would look favorably on hiring PMs directly out of school.
Can't say this is a compelling argument. Being lower cost than other programs just tells me those programs are overpriced too. Also the whole nonprofit argument is baseless; did you know the NFL was structured as a nonprofit until 2015? Universities and nonprofits in general are well known to waste funds, especially on administrative positions and vanity projects.
Not to call this a vanity project, and obviously I am not privy to all of the financial information at CMU so I may be wrong and this program may just be quite expensive. The main problem I see with something like this is that
1: As with most Master's programs, it's probably just a cash grab by the university. Although since this is CMU I assume the placement will be very good, I'm also of the opinion that programs like these can, but not necessarily will, taint the overall reputation of the university by setting lower standards.
2: It's fine for a few universities to offer degrees in Product Management. But the thing is, the market (at least within tech) for this role isn't THAT large, especially when you consider that a lot of product managers start out as developers to begin with. If enough universities start also offering these programs, I assume the placement and utility of the program will suffer greatly. We don't need a glut of PMs the same way we had a glut of lawyers following the recession.
Well, if you honestly believe that Carnegie Mellon University is the same as the NFL as a non-profit, especially given our long track record of education and research, there really isn't anything I can say to convince you. So let's just end this here.
His/her point is that being a non-profit is often just a legal structure with tax protection. It is not a valid reason to charge a high price for something. Not addressing his/her point does not make it any less valid.
Importantly, faculty and admin staff at both the NFL and CMU are both highly paid.
CMU has a great reputation and has come out with a program that is likely to be very successful and the top question is about price.
Everyone in higher education should pay attention. We may be seeing the tipping point here where people start questioning whether the best move for them is to borrow $100k for a non-mgmt degree.
I think our generation will be the first to raise our kids by saying college is great, but only for the right price.
As someone who attended CMU for an MBA and took product management courses in the SCS, it's likely worth it. The classes I took from SCS around use-case driven design, project management of software projects, and platform strategy were some of the most directly-applicable classes in the entire MBA program.
By way of comparison, I think an MBA from CMU runs somewhere > $110k these days. It is one of the most expensive schools in the country (largely due to its until-recently-non-existent endowment; a rarity among top private schools). Hopefully once the settlement with Maxtor shakes out the school will end up with a healthy endowment (I know they're not getting all $10B but $2B would be a nice start for an endowment).
Also, I reject the statement that as a product manager you have no control over the resources. In a product-focused matrix organization, the product manager is ideally responsible for P&L over the product, which means they absolutely do get control over budget. Product management has changed a lot over the last 10 years, and what used to be a powerless position that was a glorified business analyst is now getting budget and control as tech companies reorganize themselves to look like CPGs.
You may reject it, but you then say ideally. My experience comes from working in technology firms in Silicon Valley for 38 years, with the last 12 in Product Management. Matrix organizations are a rarity these days in high tech and P&L responsibility in the hands of PMs even more so. Further development teams do NOT report to you. Yet the CMU announcement trotted out the PM as the CEO, meme. It is not true and does prospective students a disservice.
~12yr PM here - curious how you teach interactions with Eng, Design and other disciplines (at Facebook, we call this 'Leadership and Drive').
This has always been the toughest area for me to teach and I'm wondering if you can give some detail on how you approach this in your component that you mentioned (interactive workshops/personal mentoring).
This is the part I'm the most confused about with this program. I'd love to be proven wrong, but I don't think this part of PM can be taught. The lessons learned from interacting with designers and engineers is something only experience can grant you, and a lot of that typically comes from being a designer or engineer yourself prior to getting into PM full-time.
Doesn't it seem like a better idea to apply for a startup accelerator like YC or 500 startups and get paid to get real-world product experience vs paying to get theoretical product experience?
Good question, and it's a personal decision as to what a person believes their best path is.
Speaking as someone who has co-founded a successful company (Wombat Security Technologies, over a thousand customers for our security training software), I really didn't know what I didn't know. As an undergrad and a PhD student in CS, I learned tons about graphics, distributed systems, hardware, algorithms, and so on. But that didn't prepare me to read balance sheets, understand how to do a good competitive analysis, know how to manage people, know the best methods for rapidly prototyping and validating ideas, how to do sales and marketing and (more importantly) how to measure it, and so on.
Just on this last point, like most techies, I originally had a negative view of sales and marketing. I never realized how hard it was, how good you have to be at it, and that it can actually be measured in useful ways. If you're lucky enough to be part of a good team that can teach you these and other skills, that's really fantastic.
Now, our Master's of Product Management won't teach you all of the skills above, but it covers many of them. It also does it in a safe space where it's ok to try out ideas, take risks, and fail. You can do it without having to worry about making payroll (though of course there is tuition), or having to find space to lease, or figuring out founder's pies, or worrying about lots of other logistics and paperwork.
That is, at a startup, you are focused solely on one thing: survival. You don't have a lot of time for reflection, for deep thinking, for understanding what are best practices backed by lots of empirical evidence. Like I had when doing my startup, you might also have a narrow view of things because you simply don't know what you don't know. You don't know what other options are possible. And making too many mistakes can be fatal for a startup, resulting in bad feelings from your co-founders and funders.
Now obviously no single master's program can address all of that, or even guarantee success. These are just very different paths for learning, with lots of different goals and tradeoffs.
It's also worth pointing out that startups are not for everyone. Some people might be at a large company and want to make a career change, but still want to stay at a large company. Again, different goals and different tradeoffs.
Thanks for the reply. I definitely agree on many of the points you mentioned. I wanted to pose the question for the HN community because there is probably a slightly stronger negative bias towards this technique of gaining experience.
I definitely look forward to hearing about the experience of this class after its first one or two semesters.
I imagine this is intended for large companies that have hundreds or thousands of employees. Product manager is a specialized role that incorporates strategy and business development. I'm sure startup experience would be great too, but this is different. Product Management often targets projects with multi-year contracts whose lifetime span careers.
I imagine a number of interested folks might ask "I'm considering a masters in CS or maybe this new PM one; why should I choose one over the other?". How will you answer them?
Good question, it really depends on what you want to do in your career.
If you search for "CMU CS Master's", you will end up here: https://www.cs.cmu.edu/masters-programs . We have 26 options for master's programs, ranging from machine learning, human computer interaction, language technologies, robotics, and more.
The high order bit here is that our Master's of Product Management is focused on the combination of business, tech, and UX with an eye towards jobs in managing the strategy, design, implementation, and rollout of products and services. In contrast, most other CS master's programs focus entirely on strengthening your portfolio of technical skills.
While I have been working in tech industry as backend engineer for 3 years (startups including) I don't have an undergrad degree in CS/Software (I have an M.Sc in Physics). Would that disqualify a candidate like me from being admitted?
What advantage would this course give over an M.B.A?
What kind of recognition do you think this degree would get in the industry being that it is a new program?
Not having an undergrad degree in CS would not disqualify you. We are looking primarily for people with strong tech skills, for several reasons.
When we talked to companies and alums of our other programs who are now product managers, they mentioned that the vast majority of product managers came from engineering backgrounds. This is necessary for leading teams of engineers, to understand how products work, what the tradeoffs are, and where trends are going. It's also very useful for additional credibility with respect to the engineers.
Our Master's of Product Management (MSPM) also requires students to take a technical elective in computer science, e.g. cloud computing, parallel computing, machine learning, networking, etc. We want our students to have technical depth too, since that will help with the above as well as making students better at charting out potential business opportunities.
The main advantages of this program over an MBA are that it is 1 year (instead of 2), it offers more technical depth in CS than MBA programs, and it also brings in a strong component of user experience design. This latter part of UX is something that many of our alums commented on as being important for products and for product managers. Other advantages (though it depends on which MBA track one chooses) are courses in managing people (incentives, motivations, negotiation), high tech marketing, basics of data science, and a capstone course focused on putting those skills together.
With respect to recognition, it's a tough question to answer since it is a new program. One main advantage here is the reputation of CMU's School of Computer Science and the Tepper School of Business. We also have strong industry ties and an active Career Opportunities Center to help students find good jobs.
I've heard from other academics (though from universities with less prestige) that there is an effort to expand programs to accept foreign students that would otherwise be turned away either due to space constraints or poor program fit. The way it was described to me was they didn't want to dilute their CS or MBA programs but still wanted to accept the foreign students. They are seeing a demand for masters degrees from both sides: demand for classroom space by foreign applicants and demand for entry level employees with master's degrees by employers.
Curious if Carnegie Mellon is following the same train of thought.
I know that some public universities have this conflict, in terms of wanting to serve their mission of helping in-state students, but also needing more money to do so (ie foreign students can never be in-state, so they always pay full tuition). It's a bad bind because of decreasing state funds spent on universities. My friends and I often talk about how many public universities get so little from their respective states that they are essentially private universities but are still constrained by their state legislatures. In contrast, private universities don't have as strong an incentive to accept more foreign students.
Anyways, that's a digression.
The short answer is that we are keeping standards very high for admissions for this program. Also, having been in academia for many years, I can easily say that there are lots of brilliant people from all over the world.
I think the success will depend largely on what H1B reforms are brought in and if taking the academic (MS) first will be of continued benefit (as it currently is). Personally I think this is one of the better options vs the body shop route. And there are plenty of smart qualified people around the world as well.
I wish I could've done this as my undergrad. There don't seem to be enough people who realise how important this cross section of skills is because each one feeds back in the others, whether that be positively or negatively.
As someone who did his undergrad at CMU - and loved it - it's great to see this. I studied Information Systems with a minor in Design, and it set me up for an awesome string of startup jobs where I could blend my various interests and skill sets.
CMU is an incredibly unique school that has world-class programs in business, computer science, and design. They are especially perfect for this kind of multidisciplinary program.
Im wondering what the difference is between this new program and the Msc. Business Informatics programs already available (at least at European universities, Im getting mine at Utrecht University). From what Im reading they sound very similar, with the outlined key strengths in your post being virtually the same.
Thanks for taking the time to answer some questions here.
Looking over your program at Utrecht, it feels like the Business Informatics program is more geared towards general business processes with respect to technologies. The closest course at Utrecht to what we're envision with the Master's of Product Management is your Software Product Management elective.
It also seems like the expected roles for people coming out of your program would be general kinds of managers, consultants, or researchers.
There's also a certain underlying style and set of assumptions in the coursework in your program that, for lack of a better term, is European. Have you noticed that in the US that computer science theory usually means complexity theory, but in Europe, it often means automata theory? Sort of the same thing here. There's a strong emphasis in your program on knowledge networks, methods and processes, and so on. It's not that one is better than the other, it's just very different underlying assumptions and starting points for a curriculum.
We talked to a lot of companies and alums before rolling out this program, and there was uniform agreement that industry really needs a lot more (good) product managers.
One further observation was that Google, Facebook, Yelp, and likely other companies had their own internal programs for training product managers, in large part because of a mismatch in supply and demand.
So we believe that placement will be good and in high demand at prominent tech companies.
In terms of comparing the Master's of Product Management (MSPM) to MBAs, that's hard to say at this point. One of the big differences is that the MSPM has a stronger component in UX design and computer science than a typical MBA. It would also depend on what areas of business you specialize in your MBA, e.g. finance and marketing graduates would likely be viewed very differently from the MSPM graduates.
Currently no scholarship options. This is something we will revisit as the program gets larger.
We do have a staff member who can assist with financial aid. Given current projections of salary for product managers and likely high placement rates, I think that this would still be a good option, but that's also a personal decision that you would have to make.
MOOCs have a less-than-positive view at CMU, in part because the evidence is strongly mixed as to their effectiveness in practice. One thing I've learned after being at CMU for many years is that people across the board here really care a lot about empirical evidence.
A MOOC would also make it hard to teach interpersonal skills, as well as assemble a cohort that can learn from each other.
Some of the differences are that the Master's of Product Management (MSPM) has a much stronger emphasis on HCI and User Experience Design, and is on a different cycle. That is, the MSPM runs from January to December (1 full year, off cycle), whereas the Master's of Software Management is on the regular cycle. The MSM is also available for part-time students. Lastly, the MSM has a stronger focus on being an engineering manager, though there will be some overlap with being a product manager.
As a product management discipline lead, I interview product management candidates.
For some stupid reason someone in HR still puts "MBA preferred" on the posting... but I have yet to meet anyone without hands-on experience that I want to hire. I don't care if you have an MBA, I don't care if you have a college degree... what I want to know is can you do the work?
If I ask about the SLDC, what I want to hear is that they know enough to keep everything balanced -- that they aren't going to get all flustered and just try and shoehorn devs and QA and content and UX designers into something you read out of a textbook but have never really implemented.
A PM should be a shit shield, they should be comfortable saying, "No," to stupid suggestions from people up the food chain -- this leads to success of people down the food chain. An MBA doesn't prepare them for that. They will have to be able to put themselves in other peoples' shoes... lead by example. (My ideal candidate has a few years Dev or QA experience... I can go with UX even... but they have to have done some real delivery work prior to being a PM in order to not suck at it -- my opinion.)
Anyway, long way of saying, "Undergrads, save your money. Go learn how to code, get a job doing that, then make the transition a few years in once you actually know how things work. At that point, if you want to go to school -- cool, you may find it useful to augment what you already learned on the job."
I switched in the end of last year from Team Lead Engineer to PM position and have had blast since then. The job is very challenging and I'm keep learning new and new things about our customers and users. Previously working with PMs who are not from engineering background was often very frustrating, because google can find any answer right?
That's about the best compliment I can think of, thanks!
Worse than just trying to Google for the answers are the Product Managers who come over from Marketing and tend to just make up answers. Ha! You have to go over with them the whole notion of compromise, and how just because it's on a Gantt Chart, doesn't mean we want to commit to all the dates for all the features 6 months out... Perpetual compromise, stuff is going to come up, we adapt and reprioritize and if we're lucky (and a good bit of it is luck) then the wheels don't come off the car while we're driving.
It's a good combo, sure. But a CS degree is way too theoretical. Hands on experience for a leadership role is still going to be preferred. I want to hire a leader who can tell people on their team, "Hey, when I was in this situation a few years back... here's how we handled it... here's what went well, here's what didn't..."
For anyone, I think getting an MBA straight out of undergrad sort of sets you up to be perpetually useless -- a stuffed shirt. You never get the hands-on experience doing the work you are supposed to be leading. Then you have to learn how to manage the work on the job, and as the old saying goes, "Months of dev work can save hours of planning!"
No question, I'd advise people to get hands-on experience if they want to be a leader.
I can't speak to the cost but it sounds like they are trying to fill a validated market need. I disagree that just working for a startup for a year will give you the same experience.
> I disagree that just working for a startup for a year will give you the same experience.
Why? Actually working on delivering a product seems like far better experience than any educational program, internship or not. Since most people go to school with the end goal of getting a job, it seems far better to skip school if you have the option. What are they going to teach you that you can't learn on the job?
I'd much rather a manager have real experience in the role of the people he's managing than come straight out of school with a pretense of expertise.
My experience is that it is a nightmare to hire product managers who will "figure it out as they go". There are so many skills that a talented product manager needs to be successful. Leadership, communication, technical expertise, and so on are all mentioned in the announcement.
The cost of engineering makes product missteps extremely expensive over time in both the large and the small.
So hire a product manager with previous experience in another position, ideally the kind he'd be managing. Sure, if the program can impart all of those skills onto its graduates then it sounds great. But having gone through school to the point of quitting my PhD, working at various companies of various sizes and starting my own company, I put very little weight in degrees - especially anything with an emphasis on business.
Yes, I am biased. But I would be happy to be convinced otherwise if someone can provide the data.
> What are they going to teach you that you can't learn on the job?
How to solve common problems of the job without ending a complete wreck? Or sinking the project? Or having to overwork the whole team to compensate for your lack of preparation?
Real world experience is great, but it is always better for you and your environment if you at least try not to make the same mistakes as your predecessors.
In addition to what others said, there is no guarantee working at a startup is going to give you broad exposure to all the skills you will need later. A well designed and delivered program can do this.
Some grad programs similar to this one also lead up to a capstone course that brings previous students back and gets them exposed to new graduates. This greatly improves exposure and success.
There's no guarantee a "well-designed" program is going to do this either. FWIW, I quit my PhD at CMU. I worked on self-driving cars as a student and now I do it again as an employee (and did many other things inbetween). Startups are better.
Key problem: At least in the tech world, companies maintain a 10:1 (or even 100:1) engineer:product manager ratio. In my experience it is extremely difficult to land even a non-senior PM role, while companies will hire engineers dozens at a time. You think companies are overly picky about their engineering candidates? Hooo boy! Do a few PM interviews and get back to me.
I think a specialized degree in Product Management is great though! Had this been available when I decided to do a very expensive MBA program, I would have chosen it instead in a heartbeat! This program is half the time commitment and half the cost of my MBA--no brainer.
Graduate student at Cornell Tech, amazing program to learn graduate level machine learning and cs topics with a deep dive into product/startup development. I am in the 2 year program, and the program is top notch for only being 5 years old. Ping me at aem336@cornell.edu if you have any interests or questions :)
A good friend is one of the organizers of the Cornell Tech program and he pulled together a ton of great PM's and Eng's from NYC to get feedback and idea when designing the program. Glad to hear that the program is going well :D
Thats awesome! I hope the leadership for the product development curriculum stays as that makes Cornell Tech a really unique experience. They do an amazing job getting companies from all over NYC to advise on our product projects.
Also a side note, I would love to hear about your experience as a PM in the VR industry, as I am both passionate about developing Augmented Reality products and looking for opportunities to break into the VR industry!
Not a lot unfortunately :(. Cornell Tech organizes a two week trip to the Technion where we interact with various departments, students, and the Israeli startup scene, but they always ask for feedback on how we would like to interact with Technion better.
Also, I've seen some students from Cornell Tech do research internship at the Technion and several Technion appointed professors are lecturers at Cornell Tech.
It would be great to hear any suggestions you have on how you and other students at the Technion would want to collaborate/interact and I can pass it along to the dean of the school. Cornell Tech is really great about listening to the feedback of the students!
You're not considering an important factor: connections and opportunities. If doing this course makes you multiple steps closer to getting hired at Big Cos, then I think the tuition fee is worth it. Same applies for almost every degree in the world. Courses are easy to replicate; environment is not.
Like you said: Courses are easy to replicate; environment is not.
Do you think the connections and opportunities in CMU program are better than the connections and opportunities in a YC startup? If you don't, then I suggest you can just jump in a YC startup then learn something REAL.
I think the value here is more for non-technical (or just less-technical) folks. "Just dive into a startup" is fine advice for programmers, but for those of us who aren't at that skill level, it's easier said than done. Nobody wants to hire a 'product guy' with financial skills and business acumen to help them manage their pet project. I see this program as being valuable to allow semi-technical folks like myself to learn more directly useful skills without spending years becoming a developer first.
pay 65k for just this, spend another 65k throughout that period on other living/study expenses, then work at 35k for
5 years because they need somebody with experience:)
"Tuition for the Master of Science in Product Management program is charged at a flat rate of $65,000 for the 12-month program. This cost covers tuition only. It does not include university fees, summer electives or other miscellaneous expenses."
It's very funny that "Get rich quick! Buy my DVD and come to my training course to learn how" scammers are thought of in a negative light but when you are a university and charge more money it becomes noble endeavor.
Maybe, maybe not. It's not just $65k plus fees and expenses, its also the opportunity cost of having sunk a year into this.
How long would it take to recuperate those losses on a product manager salary?
Perhaps just landing an entry level product manager job would teach you the practical skills you need, and you get paid for doing it instead of the other way around.
100% agree. The key here is that they are targeting people who already have a CS undergrad degree and thus are likely already employed or going to be employed in high-paying jobs with good future prospects. I'm not really seeing the ROI on this.
Well it formalizes the product manager role.. so like an MBA? Here you also get connections across the software industry. You probably learn some skills as well. Longer term it might help push you further up the food chain.
As a resident of a country where education of all levels is basically free, this always sounds so unreal to me. I would never even think about it, how would you make that kind of money back in a reasonable amount of time to be worth it ?
I'm paid to do my master's degree and it's still expensive. The difference between the job I left and my pay as a student is about $70k/year. Choosing to do my degree has left me roughly $200k poorer than I otherwise would have been.
I doubt it will ever be a net positive financially. It's worth it to me personally, though.
I could easily forsee being able to make $10,000 extra per year with this credential, probably a lot more. After 6.5 years this would've paid for itself financially. Maybe this is one of the reasons US jobs pay more (at least software product focused ones like software engineer, product manager, designer etc) than in European countries.
you aren't factoring in the year of not getting paid as well as living costs. To start, costs outside of tuition probably bring it to 80k. Next, you could have made a good amount of money for that year. (varies how much)
ah got it, i thought you were implying my parents were paying the taxes so i can have free education, which is right to some degree (i didn't downvote you btw)
PMs at established tech companies can make $200k+ in salary and usually have extra massive stock options to boot. An Amazon PM averages something like $600k/year if they stick around for 5 years.
Ask yourself: even if you disagree with the parent's numbers, do these numbers from Glassdoor make sense to you?
A friend of mine has a younger sister who was offered $120k base salary out of college to work at Google in NYC, and another 30k in RSUs. She's told me this compares favorably with what friends of hers were offered at similar companies on the east and west coasts.
I'm going to avoid a discussion about merit, but suffice it to say that I believe seniors PMs working at Amazon for a few years are far closer to $600k than $100k.
Numbers at Glassdoor are at least based on some kind of aggregate data. You can argue about their methodology, but I would trust it over "that guy on HN who swears his brother's nephew's roommate knows one guy who makes $600K at Google."
well one: seattle companies pay around 10 pct less because of state taxes.
two: I got an offer from Amazon when I graduated and it was very low compared to other companies. Only around 100k whereas other companies offered more than your friend's little sister.
This is really not true. PMs with 4-6yrs of experience at Facebook/Google easily make >$300k/yr. Can't imagine Amazon being too behind. $40k in stock after 4-6yrs of PM experience is ludicrous - not sure any bright PM will ever take that.
Here we go with another one of those "Tech workers average $600K in salary" threads again. This time it's product managers instead of senior software engineers.
Getting grants of AMZN (or GOOG/GOOGL) every year or so for the last ~5 years has worked out pretty well for those of us who have been so fortunate, but if the stock had been flat or moved downward I doubt you'd have many PMs pulling even half of that.
If you're paid heavily in stock you are taking on a bit of risk, and summarizing $200k in salary and $400k in vested stock as "averages something like $600k/year" fails to capture that information.
It's a great deal. Way more cheaper than some fly-by-night coding "academy" which charge 35K$ for 4 months. Also they offer a real degree, from a good US university accepted as a valid qualification by governments & corporations world-wide.
I'm a mobile senior software engineer at a startup.
How can I jump into product management? I founded a startup previously so I can say I have a strong product vision, and I can just feel intuitively that it's the position i'd be good at.
I'm reluctant to put 65k to make the move though. Anyone else made the move Senior software dev -> PM, if yes, how did you go about it?
Does your startup have PMs and is looking for more? If so I would just ask if there is an option to switch. This is how I did it years ago. Shadowed one of the PMs for a bit and then slowly took over more responsibility.
Getting that first bit of experience seems hard for a product manager. Most places will only hire people with experience as a product manager, and for those who will hire someone without prior experience, they seem to prefer MBAs. This at least seems like a path to product management that isn't a MBA.
A lot of people who aren't technical see the Product Manager role as something they can do in tech. This leads to a lot of poorly qualified people applying for positions, and HR responding by trying to have them self-screen out, "Must have 3-5 years..." (The number of Product Managers with some sort of fluff History / Political Science / Sociology degree is pretty high... some get in, but you have to sift through a lot of Philosophy degrees to find a good one.)
Instead of going right for the Product Manger role, people should aim for some sort of delivery internship. And from there a Business Analyst role, Software Engineering role, UX Designer role, Quality Assurance Engineering role... anything hands-on. This sets them up to be good at Product Management -- better than the kids who come straight out of school anyway.
There's a good amount of "inflation of self-worth" (for lack of a better word) around people coming out of college right now. It's true that college costs a lot, but virtually everyone has a degree. AND we all know that there's massive grade inflation going on -- so it's hard to take a college degree seriously. Also hard not to have one... not an ideal situation, to be sure. (There's a lot of role inflation too... people now are "senior" with a year or two experience? Come on.)
Anyway, requirements are inflated to screen people with 0 experience out. If you have done well for a few years at a staff role, nobody is going to care that you don't specifically have N years as a product manager. But it's a HUGE risk taking someone out of college and giving them a leadership position. Better for them, and the company that hires them, if they spend a little time in the trenches.
This sounds more promising than getting a "decorated" MBA degree from an overrated "top league" school. It makes sense to hire a person whose managerial skills are forged in technical training.
Spend the $65k on starting your own thing for a year. You learn similar things and if you're lucky you end up with a successful business or at least a positive ROI.
Right now Harvard has the best course in the US.
Stanford and Berkeley are a joke.
The best path into PM is still doing something hands-on in that area. If it is enterprise, then start in consulting or pre-sales. Consumer is pure chance.
Not Indian and I find this comment terribly offensive. What does race have to do with wanting to better oneself? Who cares what race the model in the photograph is?!
Or get a MBA for 1/5 the price from literally anywhere and be able to do whatever you want with it, including being a PM/Director but also just about anything else.
Do you mean average MBA cost, or tuition per year. 26k is very low for two year tuition, even at a state school, and if you are out of state it is going to be a lot higher.
I'm the academic head of this new program on the School of Computer Science side of things. Happy to answer any questions you might have about this program (though it will have to be in the morning since it's about 1am on the east coast and well past my bedtime) And no, I didn't plant this link. :)
One of the key strengths of our Master's of Product Management program is that it combines elements of computer science, user experience design, and business skills (including strategy and management). We also have a significant component devoted to communication and leadership skills, based on interactive workshops and personal mentoring.
On a personal note, this notion of marrying business skills with UX design and computer science has been a long-term goal of mine. I'm a techie at heart (I got my PhD from Berkeley CS), but I feel that having strong skills in user experience or CS only helps so much if you don't have decision-making authority. And to get to those decision-making positions, you need to be able to manage technical teams well, understand how a product fits within the existing market, and know about best practices in prototyping and evaluating user interfaces so that your product has a compelling user experience.