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?
bump
Product likely better in all aspects than T3 consulting (in terms of interesting work, comp, WLB, exit opps)
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
These are pretty different jobs, but I will say that if your friend is thinking about product management as a potential exit from consulting, then it'd be better to skip the extra step and go straight into PM now, especially if he already has an offer from a reputable company in hand.
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