MBA / MS / Grad School · Primly Community

Did an MBA as a marketer. Would do it again, but not for the reasons I expected.

marketer_mei · 4 replies

Quick background: product marketing, went to a T15 MBA mid-career (5 YOE going in). came back to PMM at a bigger company, basically the same job title but at higher seniority.

the ROI story people tell you: 'the MBA unlocks the VP track.' maybe. kind of. what it actually unlocked for me was the ability to have conversations with CFOs and GMs without feeling like I was faking it. i understand P&Ls now. i can sit in a QBR and follow the revenue model. that's worth something even if nobody gives you a gold star for it.

also: the network is real but not in the way I expected. it's not that alumni open doors (some do). it's that you have a cohort of ~300 people you went through something hard with, and over a 10-year horizon, some of them end up in rooms you want to be in. it's slow. plant-the-seed stuff.

what I did NOT get: a massive salary jump on day 1. the first post-MBA job paid about 20% more than what I was making. i was hoping for more. it normalized over a few years but the immediate payoff wasn't what the program's employment report implied.

4 replies

content_cole

the P&L literacy thing is underrated. i'm a content lead at a startup and i genuinely struggle to talk about content in a way that lands with our CFO. keeps making me wonder if an MBA (or even just an accounting course) would change that dynamic.

marketer_mei

honestly for the finance literacy specifically, there are cheaper paths. a few coursera courses + reading 10-Ks + talking to people in finance at your company got me about 60% of the way there. the MBA got me the other 40% but that's a lot of money for 40%.

finance_faye

the '20% bump day 1' thing is so frustrating because the employment reports are technically accurate but they're measuring the wrong thing. the way those averages work, a few people going into banking drag the median up and suddenly everyone thinks they're getting a $220k package.

ops_omar

plant-the-seed stuff. yeah. the people who seem most disappointed by their MBAs are the ones who expected to harvest immediately.