Hi, Is it possible to get a PM role without any prior PM experience and an MBA degree? If so, which companies are hiring for it? Ps- Looking for something at the intersection of product management and analytics
Yes it is possible. Just have a good story for what you bring to the role. I would look to PM some aspect of a data product. Think Excel, Tableau, Palantir etc.
Definitely possible but it's up to you to craft the right story and develop good product sense. No company is looking specifically for DSs turned PMs obviously, but any team with a DS heavy product would benefit from your background.
fyi, I'm an MBA going into PM. I've done DS in the past.
Is the mba close to necessary, or you can switch with only DS or SWE experiences if you craft a good story that your experience brings value to the team?
What’s the motivation for this move? Is PM pay more than DS?
PMs definitely are paid much less (1.5-2x) than DS in my company. But PM can influence frontend while DS is usually focused on backend.
You are saying that you are not the typical DS. This might be just you having some insecurities about your future as DS. If you move to PM, you will start to have other kinds of insecurities. You won't be happy. Influence is what you see, reality might be different. A lot of meetings and stakeholders to management (aka internal account manager). I'm not trying to stop you. Just setting expectations. Give it a try anyway. You will be able to go back to DS if you want. MBA is not needed. Just start with a product that need DS skills.
Check Salesforce Einstein - specific data science products that you can get in to as PM. They acquired Beyond Core few years back if you want to check some history
It’s actually quite common to see PMs who were trained outside of the top tech companies came from background like business analytics.
Similar situation. Still a DS, but started more actively working design on production ops projects no one asked to mess with. Scheduling UX research style interviews, digging through data to see when might work for users better, thinking extensively about design, and running experiments with it. It's fun because it changes things up from the technical work. At the same time, continued technical work on it gives me an edge in understanding the product and keeps me from getting bored of the PM side (which isn't technically challenging at all and might feel tedious if I switch to it 100%). I recommend you try this too, unless you already have. On a side note, this overlaps a lot with what a data science team manager on a small team does. Just without the HR and paperwork stuff that comes with being management
PM and DS are divergent paths. It’d be an easier transition for a DS to move into PM than the other way around.
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Yes. Data scientists and PMs have rather different personality types though. If your personality matches that of a typical DS, you are likely to be miserable as a PM.
Yeah, I am not a typical DS so would like to get a taste of PM
I'm thinking of that switch too. What personality type can be alarming to try to be a good PM?