Product Management vs Tier 3 Consulting

Having a debate with my friend. He has a summer internship offer to do product management at a top payments firm (Mastercard/Visa) and is currently waiting to hear back from a tier 3 consulting firm (think Big 4 non-strategy/Baringa/Alix Partners), both in London. He is debating whether to take the tier 3 consulting firm if extended an offer or to stick with the product management offer. How do these two offers compare in:

- prestige

- exit opportunities

- MBA placement

Haven't been able to find much information on this comparison online and so would appreciate any insight. My initial thoughts are that the quality of person would likely be higher in consulting but that the brand name of the product management firm would be useful. What would you do?

5 Comments
 

Product management better by a mile. PM manages real products used by 1M+ customers. Big four consulting does digital transformation for traditional industry ( back office ERP system, IT configuration, implementation, vendor management etc ). The fun is not even close. Also, non-strategy consulting is essentially cheap outsourced labor for clients' back office functions. Lack of long-term ownership and zero access to client's core business. It's very hard to transition from non-strat consulting to PM. I know someone who spent 10 years in big four strategy consulting, who finally transitioned to PM at a bottom tier tech company in his 40s, and that's for strategy consulting, so non-strat consulting is even worse than that

 

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