The MBA Decision Guide for Product Managers

Baker Library at Harvard Business School on a cloudy day—a snap from my camera roll circa 2013.

Is business school worth it? If you’re an early-career product manager working in tech, the question of whether to go back to school for an MBA has probably crossed your mind. I wrote this post to share everything I wish I’d known back when I made my own decision to go to business school.

Here’s a common pattern:

Straight out of college, you join a tech company as a product manager, possibly as part of an APM or RPM program. After a few years on the job, you start seeing peers of yours making their first big career and life moves. This sparks some reflection, and a thought: if product management sits at the intersection of technology and business, wouldn’t it make sense to learn more about business?

One day, you bring up the MBA question with someone you trust. Their response catches you off guard.

• Your manager: “Why would you spend the time and money to get an MBA? People go to business school to get the job you already have.”

• Your engineering peer: “Aren’t MBAs mainly for finance people and consultants? You’re not like them.”

• Your mentor: “Sure, you could go to business school. But I didn’t, and I think my career has turned out pretty well.”

• Your family friend who has an MBA: “I went to business school to switch careers, but you seem pretty happy where you are. I mean, I wouldn’t trade my experience for the world, but I think you’re in a pretty different situation.”

Soon enough, the doubtful voice inside your own head starts chiming in:

They’re right—it is a lot of time and money. And it’s a lot of work to apply. I’d have to take the GMAT or the GRE, and then what if my score isn’t good enough to get me into one of my top choice schools? Maybe I’ll apply in a few years if I feel stuck, but right now doesn’t seem like the time.

You’re coming face to face with the truth: business school is optional—especially for product people working in tech. And that means business school is a choice. You can’t lean on the illusion of necessity to help tip the balance; this decision is all on you.

Once you get past other people’s objections, it may seem like the business school decision should be a straightforward calculation. Do you want to go? Is the opportunity cost of taking two years away from your career right now relatively low? And do you think student debt will hold you back from what you most want to do next? If the answers are yes, yes, and no, you’re off to a good start. Yet it’s not that simple: this is your life. The MBA decision flows from figuring out what’s important to you in your life and career. In some ways, it’s a referendum on what you want your life to be. And for product people in tech, the decision may be one of the first times you’re weighing an educational choice not enthusiastically supported by those around you, which only increases the importance of reaching your own conviction.

In this post, I’ll share considerations, exercises, and frameworks to support you in thinking through the question of whether to go to business school. The cost-benefit analysis for product managers nets out less decisively than it does for those in other roles, making it an especially interesting puzzle—so much so that it ended up taking me three months and over a dozen interviews to research and write this post! This guide will likely be most useful for early-career product people weighing on-campus programs at top-tier business schools in the United States, since that’s the perspective I know best. But my hope is that it’s relevant for anyone thinking through the business school decision. An MBA is a long-term investment, and can only be evaluated against your own long game.

Along the way, I’ll share some personal stories of my experience at Harvard Business School from 2011-2013 and how it relates to my decade in product management roles, plus my decision to join Matrix Partners as an early-stage investor earlier this year. At the end, I’ll share an upcoming opportunity for virtual office hours I’m hosting. If you’re a product person weighing whether to get an MBA, I’d love to hear from you.

This guide is organized into three ways to look at an MBA:

• A deeply personal decision, clarified by hearing other people’s stories

• An investment of time, energy, and money, primed for a cost-benefit analysis

• A bundle that can be understood by breaking it down

More lenses means more chances to find a new perspective, so that’s what I’ve tried to map out. To start with the deeply personal decision lens, I’ll share my own story.

Business school is a deeply personal decision

I was admitted to Harvard Business School back in summer 2008 as part of the first cohort of 2+2. This meant that I had my admission in hand going into my senior year of college, and knew I’d have the option to go to HBS after two years in the working world. Once I graduated from college with a history degree, I moved to San Francisco in the summer of 2009 to work as a PM at Microsoft on the PowerPoint team. I stayed in San Francisco until I moved back East in fall 2011 to start at HBS, then graduated with my MBA in May 2013.

Looking back on it now, I think I can see what business school meant to me more clearly.

A reset: Soon after I moved to San Francisco, a sudden death in my family shook me and made it tough to focus on work. The opportunity to go to HBS after two difficult years in my life let me do a hard reset on my career. This is the thing I couldn’t have known I would need when I applied, but it was probably the biggest gift of the whole experience.

A few close friends: Self-conscious about socializing at business school as a relative introvert, I found a perspective that helped me relax: if “all” I get out of each major chapter of my life is one lifelong relationship, that’s more than enough. With that point of view in mind, I focused on deepening a handful of friendships and trying to stay friendly and present with everyone else.

Breadth: Business school introduced me to a big variety of topics—a grab bag that helped me identify unexpected interests and assemble a treasure chest of knowledge I draw from regularly in my work. In my time as a product leader at Quip and Salesforce, it felt great to get a real sparkle in my eye when one of our customers wanted to use our software for their business challenges related to something I knew a little about from my HBS classes and wanted to understand better, like supply-chain management. And now in my work as an early-stage investor at Matrix Partners, I talk with founders applying technology to a range of challenges every week. The breadth I was exposed to at HBS helps me to see the big picture and put new knowledge in context.

Brevity: At HBS, a large percentage of your grade in each class hinges on the quality of the comments you make. Professors are trained to memorize the flow of the class and go back to their computers afterward to assign each individual comment a grade. Knowing that my comments were under the microscope gave me many chances to experiment with how to add value to a conversation in 90-second increments—waiting for my moment, coming up with a fresh insight, and delivering it concisely and dynamically. This is the skill I expected the least that’s helped me the most. It comes in handy in my work as a board director representing Matrix, in our partner meetings, and in my daily work of talking with founders and trying to add value even as I work to understand their businesses. In fact, one of my first impressions upon joining Matrix was that working in VC was the closest thing I could imagine to business school as a job.

Analytical acumen: Before business school, my soft skills were more obvious than my analytical skills. I applied to HBS in part because I thought an MBA could be a way to position myself as fundamentally analytical, with a sprinkling of soft skills reframed as leadership potential. It’s hard to prove, but I do think that going to business school helped me to be perceived as more analytical. Fortunately, it was more than optics: I really did get better with spreadsheets at business school, and I really did become more fluent in applying economic concepts to various real-world challenges. I can’t control how others perceive me, but I can control which chips I keep on my shoulder and which I work to release. My MBA marked the end of me worrying about being analytically underestimated.

Stretch opportunities: It’s tough to say whether getting an MBA helped or hurt my personal brand as a product manager. I’d say it slightly reduced engineers’ opinions of me and was mostly neutral to positive for everyone else. (Especially once my MBA was already out of the way, and therefore not perceived as a looming flight risk of questionable value.) I don’t think the MBA helped much in getting “better” product opportunities than I would have had access to anyway as someone who’d begun building a product track record right out of college; product management is one of those jobs that no one believes you can do until you’ve done it, and then people mostly give you the benefit of the doubt. What I believe the MBA did help with was in making me a clear candidate for stretch opportunities. Beyond my day to day work, the MBA marked me as someone who was “ambitious,” “good with spreadsheets and slide decks,” and likely to be “comfortable with public speaking” and “good with customers.” After all, most stretch opportunities start as the insoluble problems of senior people. Someone’s going to have to make that extra board deck overnight, someone’s going to have to step in to give the keynote demo when the original speaker falls ill…and that someone is either going to be the already-overloaded senior person, or the high-potential eager beaver who’s assumed to be good with spreadsheets, decks, public speaking, and customers. I still had to prove myself, but at least I got my shot. And I believe my MBA made senior leaders optimistic that I’d welcome and deliver on last-minute high-profile work, rather than resent it. Note, though, that this is all belief: it’s the story I tell myself—not anything I have proof for.

Showing up in LinkedIn searches: This is the weirdest one that in the end counted for a lot. As a credential, an MBA doesn’t typically gate the opportunities you can go after; even a job description that features an MBA as a requirement may mostly be signaling “someone with business acumen,” and you’d be wise to apply anyway. But as a search criterion, whether and where you went to business school does impact the opportunities that find you. I can’t know all the filters that recruiters have used over the years to find my profile on LinkedIn, but I do know that I’m in my current role at Matrix because a recruiter reached out to me cold. It can feel strange to reduce life to a set of keywords, but increasing the number of filters you make it through can make all the difference in a career.

In the end, my two years at HBS are a part of me. It’s so hard to picture my life without them that I’m reluctant to even try. But what I can say is that I’d probably feel similarly about any way I’d spent two formative years. I don’t believe I’d be in exactly the same life I’m leading now, but I do believe I’d be in a life I’d love.

The big question

Business school is a deeply personal decision. So here’s a question: do you want to go to business school?

If you ask yourself whether you want to go to business school and a clear response swells up, you have your answer and the rest of this analysis becomes a lot simpler. If not, here are some more prompts to consider:

Are you looking for reasons to go to business school, or reasons not to? Plenty of reasons exist on both sides, but tuning in to your intent can help you see the lens you’re bringing to your research.

What’s the fantasy? Telling your parents you got into your dream school? Getting into the university that rejected you for undergrad? Meeting your future best friend when you’re seated next to each other in section? Getting a break after a few tough years? Smoothly rising to the position of CEO before the age of 30? Your hopes and fears, especially the ones you won’t admit, will run you if you don’t spell them out—at least to yourself.

Do you plan to be in product forever? There’s a lot to love about a career in product, but life is long. You can be happy in product for now while also curious about knowing your options over the long run.

Desire matters because business school is a big investment: it’s only worth it if you really want it. We’ll turn to a cost-benefit analysis of business school next.

Business school is an investment

An MBA will cost you time, energy, and money. But it also has benefits, some of which will only play out probabilistically on very long time horizons. Like any investment, business school can be understood through the lens of an expected value analysis. In this section, we’ll look at the costs and benefits of business school and then put them all together.

Costs of going to business school

Time: Most MBA programs will take two years of your life. This is on top of the upfront cost of about a year’s effort in a background thread: to put together your application, anticipate the admissions decision, and likely uproot your life to move close to the campus you’re admitted to. If you began your application process at the age of 25, it would be pretty typical to graduate at 28. That’s a big chunk of your life! If you’re 30 or under, three years is at least 10% of your life so far.

Energy: Beyond the baseline energy you’d spend no matter what you were doing for two years of your life, there’s also a certain amount of activation energy required to tear yourself out of the life you’re leading and settle somewhere new. This is especially true if you’re moving across the country—or countries—to start your MBA. But it applies even if you’re “just” shifting from working at a Bay Area tech company to going to Stanford GSB or Berkeley Haas.

Money: Business school can get expensive; no two ways about it. The annual cost of attendance at Harvard Business School is over $100,000 USD. Same at the GSB. In addition, there’s the opportunity cost of lost income you would have made during those years, as well as any stock that would have vested.

But each cost also has a twist:

Time: There can be some benefit to entering the grad school tunnel in your mid-twenties and emerging at a time when you “round up to 30.” In my experience, your mid-twenties are when you’re most likely to be underestimated—especially as a candidate for leadership roles within larger organizations. Investing in yourself in a window when others won’t value your time as highly can be a good trade.

Energy: Business school takes energy, but it also gives energy. New experiences are costly to arrange, but also a big ingredient in what makes life worth living.

Money: Having an MBA should improve your salary prospects over not having an MBA; that’s part of the classic logic of investing in education. However, in tech, the immediate salary impact may be marginal. For instance, in one post-MBA job I took, the compensation formula only credited years of professional experience and technical graduate degrees, not MBAs. The more relevant perspective may be that while the list price of business school can be intimidating, there are many ways your experience of that cost can be reduced. It’s worth a look at the financial aid pages of the schools you’re considering to understand the full range of possibilities. At HBS, “approximately 50% of the class receives an award, and the average scholarship is $42,000 per year, or $84,000 total.” In general, the earlier in your career you are—the less of a salary track record you have to show—the greater your chances of receiving financial aid.

Benefits of going to business school

In sharing my story, I outlined the benefits I believe I got from business school: a reset; a few friends I hope to have for the rest of my life; the gift of breadth and the skill of brevity; a lift in my analytical ability, real and perceived; stretch opportunities in my jobs; the fact that I showed up in one LinkedIn search one time that opened the door to the job I have now. How could I calculate the value of all of that?

One way to think about the value of business school is to estimate not the average, predictable outcome in the near term, but the probability that your MBA experience will lead to one improbable, off-the-charts outcome that radically changes your life over a long time horizon. To make that less abstract, we can imagine some examples:

Relationships: On your first day of class, you sit next to someone who later becomes your co-founder in a company that represents your life’s work.

Introductions: Your favorite professor sits on the board of a small startup that’s looking to hire their first product person. They introduce you to the founders; after the conversation, you’re so excited you can’t sleep. You drop out to join as employee #25 at a company that goes on to IPO eight years later with a market cap of $10B.

Insight: Soon after arriving on campus, you meet someone you instantly click with. The two of you follow each other on Instagram, but then get busy. Five years later, you see them post a photo of their new baby. Turns out you just had a baby, too, so you end up sending a flurry of messages and realize your careers brought you to the same city. You meet up with the kids at the playground and slowly become closer and closer friends. At one key moment when you’re deciding on your next career move, they pose a question that stuns you with its insight. This leads to a bold decision you wouldn’t have otherwise made.

Diligence: As an early-stage investor, you’re chasing a deal you’re excited about but still need to do your diligence on. Problem is, it’s not in your usual industry, so you’re struggling to put the company in context. Combing LinkedIn late at night, you realize that a business school classmate you haven’t spoken to in 15 years happened to overlap with the founder in their first jobs out of college. You reach out, apologize for being out of touch, reminisce, and then ask them for what it was like to work with the person who’s now a founder. The reference is overwhelmingly positive; you get to conviction on the investment and push it through. This becomes the investment that makes your career.

Meaningful opportunities: At your thirty-year business school reunion, you reconnect with a classmate who’s desperately looking to fill a seat on their nonprofit’s board of directors. You just happen to have the right experience and a passion for the area. This becomes the focus of your next chapter.

One thing these imagined outcomes have in common is that they have nothing to do with skill or knowledge. They’re not about being “better at business” or knowing a key piece of information at the right moment in time. They’re about how meaningful relationships with people across industries lead to opportunities and insight down the line.

This is what I had a hard time seeing when people told me about the importance of “networking” and the value of the HBS “network.” The term sounded so transactional to me, and as a relative introvert I couldn’t help but feel bad at what I thought networking looked like: going to parties, making small talk, connecting on LinkedIn. What I’ve realized in the years since is that it doesn’t have to look that way at all. Business school gives you something in common with your fellow students, and anything you hold in common can be the base for a beautiful conversation that leads to lasting connection or impact—now, or far in the future.

So what’s the probability of any one of these outcomes? Low, certainly. But let’s invert that: what’s the probability that meeting hundreds of interesting people early in your career leads to zero life-changing outcomes over the next five decades? Low, too! There’s no way to know where the relationships you build in business school will lead, and business school is definitely not the only way to build relationships. But as a way of covering your bases and planting seeds of serendipity, you could do far worse.

Optimize for outlier outcomes

Putting all of these costs and benefits together can help us do an expected value analysis on the investment of business school. To quote Investopedia (a site you’ll end up on a lot if you do get your MBA), “the expected value is calculated by multiplying each of the possible outcomes by the likelihood each outcome will occur and then summing all of those values. By calculating expected values, investors can choose the scenario most likely to give the desired outcome.”

The costs of business school are mostly knowable and short-term. The near-term benefits are knowable, too: you’ll learn something, you’ll make some friends, you’ll gain some skills, and you’ll come away with a solid hypothesis on where you want to turn next in your career. But for the sake of argument, let’s just net all those costs and benefits to zero. The greatest value of your MBA will come from the seeds of serendipity you plant while there that lead to outlier outcomes decades down the line. Any one of those outcomes is improbable on its own, but the probability of ending up with at least one outlier positive outcome—whether in your career or in the kinds of relationships that make life worth living—is high. Multiplying a high probability by a high-value outcome gives you a big expected upside value.

To use another investing term, going to business school has an asymmetric payoff profile: limited costs, unlimited potential benefits. The big asterisk to this perspective is that the opportunity cost of going to business school is asymmetric in the other direction. If you’re already in an asymmetric payoff experience—working at a high-growth startup or working on your own startup, to give two examples—the opportunity cost of going to business school will feel higher and weigh more heavily in your analysis.

To clarify the tradeoffs of business school further, it can help to analyze the opportunity through one more lens: as a bundle that can be understood by breaking it down.

Business school is a bundle

Business school is a bundled experience. If you decide to attend a residential program, you’ll be moving somewhere new, meeting dozens of new people, getting exposed to new ideas, and carving out space to reflect—all at the same time.

But as with any choice, clarity comes from knowing your options. By going through the thought exercise of unbundling the business school experience, you can identify which parts of it spark the most hope for you and dream up ways to build your own bundle. The bundle you design for yourself may well have more favorable cost-benefit profiles for you and your needs—with the added benefit that most of those bundles won’t require leaving your fate in the hands of an admissions officer at a highly selective school. Even if you come away from this thought exercise with your heart still set on business school, knowing that you have options can lower your anxiety as you await your admissions decision.

For our purposes in this thought exercise, it’s great that business school is so expensive, since that creates a big price umbrella; lots of options look inexpensive when compared to an MBA. Let’s imagine that you get into HBS and receive the average need-based scholarship amount of $84,000 over two years. Subtracting that from the two-year cost of attendance for a single person attending HBS (about $223,000) gives us about $139,000 USD. With that as our baseline, any bundle of experiences that costs less than $139,000 in total should be on the table as an alternative to business school. (And if you add the opportunity cost of lost income, the price umbrella will be even larger!)

Let’s take a look at some of the components of a business school experience and imagine how we might be able to secure them in other ways.

Prompts to think deeply about your life and career. It starts with the application process, where you’ll be asked deep questions like what matters most to you and why? It continues through the flagship leadership courses at each school: at Stanford GSB, Interpersonal Dynamics (also known as “Touchy Feely”); at HBS, Authentic Leadership Development. And it carries through all of your late-night conversations with classmates as you share stories from your lives so far and reveal vulnerable hopes for the future. Part of the bundle of business school is getting prompted to think deeply about who you are and what you’re here to do.

Alternative: If what you’re after is a kick in the pants to prompt reflection, one way to accomplish that is to just do it: ask yourself questions, then write down the answers. Another path is hiring a leadership coach. (I know a good one.) A cycle of leadership coaching will likely run you thousands of dollars, but not tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars. As an added bonus, leadership coaching can be implemented in just a few hours a month alongside the life you’re already in. Even if you think you’re likely to go to business school in the end anyway, investing in a leadership coach isn’t a bad idea as a first step: you can start now, there’s not much risk you won’t be accepted, and any clarity you gain will serve as a multiplier on the way you go about business school if you do end up attending.

A chance to learn by doing. Some people learn best by doing; I know I do. Business school is full of project-based work, which can create opportunities for learning and bonding. My closest friend from business school is someone I connected with through our assigned entrepreneurship project.

Alternative: One way to pursue project-based learning and bonding is in your personal pursuits, which can include nonprofit work and side hustles alongside the job you’re in. Another way is to pursue additional stretch projects within the job you’re already in. And a third way is to join or start a startup! Even if your startup goes nowhere, you’ll get a lot of learning out of it. And if it costs you less than $139,000 in lost income relative to what you’re making at your current job, it could still be a fair trade for business school.

A way out of a learning rut. Maybe you’re a few years into your career and feel like your rate of learning is slowing down, yet it’s tough to find your way out when you’re deep in something like burnout. The dream of going back to school can be about the promise of abundant new information paired with the accountability to actually process it.

Alternative: Take yourself out to lunch one day and sketch out a self-directed curriculum, hitting the notes of topics, format, and accountability mechanisms. What topics are you fascinated by? Who do you admire, and what have they been posting about lately? What books have you been meaning to read? Organize the early ideas into themes, then turn the page in your notebook and jot down some thoughts about the formats that help you learn best. Do you love listening to podcasts and audiobooks? Do videos work for you? How about live presentations? Finally, think through accountability: what do you know about how to get yourself to do stuff? Give yourself an imaginary budget of $1,000 a year for learning. What hopes does that spark in you? What clarity does it give you?

A break. Are you running on fumes? If so, it’s important to admit it, at least to yourself. A change in scenery—for instance, a move to business school—can seem like an appealing way to reset. But if that’s your driving force, you may need to give yourself some time to recover before you show up on campus anyway.

Alternative: Give yourself an imaginary budget of $10,000 for the retreat of your dreams. (Remember: anything less than $139,000 is on the table for consideration.) A beautiful setting; no obligations; nourishing food served daily. Does that sound like heaven? Let yourself fantasize about a true break, then shift your attention back to business school to see if it still seems like a good idea.

A refreshed LinkedIn profile. At some point toward the end of business school, you’re going to sit down and refresh your LinkedIn profile. This will likely go hand in hand with applying for full-time jobs. You’ll add keywords and activities, update your headshot, and maybe give or ask for a recommendation or two. This one-time refresh will serve you well for years to come.

Alternative: Refresh your LinkedIn profile preemptively. Find a way to update your headshot; think through the 10 most talented people you know and make sure you’re connected to them; add a post about lessons you learned from your first job out of college. This exercise won’t take much time and there’s no reason it can’t stand alone, independent of business school.

Time and space to work out every day. The fantasy of business school can sometimes be the fantasy of a college do-over paired with a lifestyle fresh start. If your vivid dream of business school involves moving into on-campus housing and walking through the crisp morning air to the gorgeous gym every day, you are not alone. I’ve heard this from applicants more than once.

Alternative: Ask yourself, is this about the gym or about “finally” beginning to lead a life that’s perfect from now on? Much to all of our sorrow, life will never be perfect from now on. If you go into business school expecting that, you’re bound to be disappointed. But craving a fresh start plus a beautiful environment for doing right by yourself is something we can work with. See if there’s any beauty you can add to your exercise routine—a new running location, a $500 self-declared shopping spree for new tennis gear, an outdoor yoga class in your city’s most scenic spot. And if you’re looking to start an exercise routine from scratch, look into an app like Future where trainers will design routines for you and hold you accountable.

An excuse to cold email anyone. One of the great things about being a student is that you can reach out cold to absolutely anyone and they’ll likely be flattered—and quite possibly reply. Being a student gives you a halo that casts you outside of a transactional context: as long as you’re in school, you’re a standard bearer for learning and growth.

Alternative: If the blessing to reach out cold to leaders you admire is what you’re after with business school, there are other ways. One is to organize a conference (or Clubhouse session!) and invite people you admire to speak. I did this with ROFLCon, the first internet culture conference, and to this day some of the speakers we invited remain close friends. Another path is to write a book or start a podcast fueled by interviews with leaders. And another route is to just…reach out! Try writing a thoughtful, detailed note of gratitude with no call to action at the end. The same non-transactional halo you’re automatically granted as a student is within reach if you write in the right spirit.

Analytical identity ballast. Do you feel underestimated in your analytical ability, or possibly even self-conscious about your analytical skill? Feeling that way is a close cousin to feeling self-conscious about whether you’re “technical enough”—a classic question for PMs from non-Computer Science backgrounds. An MBA can help to anchor your personal brand as being more analytical than not.

Alternative: Analytical identity ballast is about both perception and reality, so any good alternative will be something you can put on your résumé as well as legitimately learn through. If you’re a PM from a non-CS background, one idea is to tackle analytical and technical underestimation simultaneously by finding a coding bootcamp program to attend. This will take time and money, but not two years and hundreds of thousands of dollars. If you’re looking for spreadsheet skills specifically, I’ve heard great things about Training the Street. A fast track financial modeling course open to the public will run you $2,200 as of spring 2021 at their early bird rate. Something to remember here is that you can’t control how other people perceive you. If bolstering your analytical ability and credentials will increase your confidence, it’s worth something—but it’s not a guarantee that you’ll never be underestimated again.

Question drills: Any skill you drill through deliberate practice is bound to improve. Business school involves hundreds of chances to practice adding value across a wide range of topics in 90-second increments—often by asking powerful questions, rather than knowing every answer.

Alternative: Beyond business school, the curriculum that helped me most in asking good questions was leadership coach training at the Co-Active Training Institute. Coaching is all about asking powerful questions and creating space for others to hear themselves think and say things they’ve never said before. In particular, I found the training useful in drilling the skill of asking a compact question and then waiting calmly for a reply instead of stumbling over my words and rushing into self-judgment about whether my question was good. People will ask for clarification when a question is confusing, but really good questions do take a while to answer. A full cycle of coach training at CTI will run you $6,675 in North America as of spring 2021 (certification is more). Not cheap, but not $139,000, and you can start in the next few months.

Build your own bundle

Let’s just say you did everything outlined above. How much would it all cost?

$8,000 — One cycle of leadership coaching as a prompt to think deeply about life
$30,000 — Living expenses while you work on an unfunded startup as a vehicle for self-directed learning
$1,000 — Book & learning materials budget
$10,000 — Retreat / vacation of your dreams
$2,000 — “Scenic workout” budget
$2,200 — Spreadsheet course to bolster your analytical identity
$6,675 — Coach training as a vehicle for drilling the skill of asking powerful questions

All together, that comes out to less than $60,000—or less than half of the $139,000 number we put out there as a realistic prospective cost of business school after need-based financial aid.

Of course, it’s not quite that simple. It’s often straightforward to get loans for graduate school; the retreat of your dreams, not so much. But let’s take the plan down a notch. If you save up $10,000, could you add into your life viable alternatives for one or two of the main elements you’re craving from business school? Absolutely. You can start saving up today.

This unbundling-and-rebundling exercise will spark different realizations for different people, and that’s the point: by giving yourself concrete alternatives to react to, you’ll learn more about what you really want. For my part, what struck me as I wrote this all out was how much the time, space, and accountability aspects of business school matter. You could spend $1,000 on books and never read them. But if you’re on the hook for $139,000 and move thousands of miles away to spend two years learning surrounded by peers doing the same, something transformative is going to happen. Whatever is normal in a given environment requires less willpower to execute. At business school, transformation is the norm.

Next steps

So far, we’ve walked through three ways of looking at an MBA—as a deeply personal decision, an investment, and a bundle. With any luck, these lenses have sparked some new lines of thought for you. Now we’re ready to take it a step further with some exercises you can take on to figure out what’s right for you.

Tune in to what you want with these ten prompts

Earlier, I posed the big question: do you want to go to business school? If you want to go, that desire is telling you something important about what you long for in life—and that can be a doorway to what’s next for you, regardless of whether business school is ultimately it.

To take your motivations for considering business school a level deeper, here are ten prompts for reflection.

1. You turn 70 and you’re reflecting on the fact that you never did end up going to business school. How do you feel about that fact?

This can help clarify whether business school is a strong desire for you or something you could go either way on.

2. You’ve been admitted to your top choice program. You’re holding the admissions letter in your hands. What comes up for you?

This can help clarify whether fear of rejection—or overwhelm at the prospect of applying—is holding you back from letting yourself want business school.

3. You’ve been admitted to your third choice program. You’re holding two rejection letters and one acceptance letter in your hands. What feelings come up? What questions would you need answered to know whether you want to go at all?

This can help clarify whether any yearning for business school is really a fantasy about the prestige or the experience of going somewhere specific, and not necessarily the degree itself.

4. A pandemic hits just before your first semester begins. You’re allowed to defer. Do you attend remotely or decide to wait it out? If you decide to wait it out: what do you do with your newfound time?

While we would all hope that we’re done with pandemics for a while, we now understand the sudden shift to remote working and learning as a real possibility. This prompt can help clarify how many of your hopes and dreams are about the in-person experience of a campus, friendship, and fun activities. It can also help show you any other latent desires that would flood in if you found yourself with a suddenly clear calendar.

5. Picture yourself ten years in the future. Where do you want to be in life? Do you imagine you’ll still be a product manager then, or is there something else you’d be disappointed if you didn’t get to try? How about twenty years in the future? How about fifty?

This can help clarify whether your current satisfaction with product management is a “for now” or a “forever” kind of thing. Business school can help create future career optionality in a few different ways, so if you have an inkling that you might reinvent yourself a few times, that can offer a different lens on what you’d get out of business school: not a credential, but option value.

6. List out the names of 3-5 people you admire, then look them up and see what educational choices they’ve made. Did any of them go to business school? What can you learn about how they view that decision in retrospect? (If these are people in your life, you can just ask them. If they’re famous figures, you can try to look up interviews with them. Or, you could reach out to them cold! There’s always a chance they’ll reply.)

This can help to uncover some of the inputs to your interest in business school: you may be subconsciously patterning your desire on the decisions you perceive others to have made. So go straight to the source and let yourself understand the contours of what inspires you.

7. Take stock of your personal life. Do you feel you have all the close peer relationships you need, or are you craving another burst of relationship serendipity?

This can help clarify how heavily interpersonal relationships weigh in what you expect to get out of business school. If relationships are a big motivation for you, that could be something you can focus on proactively instead of waiting for the bundled experience of business school to solve it for you. But it can also be a valid and deeply meaningful reason to go to school. Intense, immersive experiences can create strong bonds.

8. What are the concrete skills you assume you’ll learn at business school? Do you know anyone who can help you get perspective on whether those skills are learnable at business school?

This can help clarify whether there are any particular insecurities you’re hoping to chip away at in business school, or specific interests you want to go deeper on. For instance, I sometimes hear people say that their goal in attending business school is to “learn to read a P&L” (profit and loss statement)—but I can say from my own experience at Harvard Business School that learning to read P&Ls was not the focus.

9. You’re about to begin your first semester at your top choice program. Who’s the person in your life who’s happiest about this? You? Your parents? Your partner? Your current boss?

This can help illuminate who, if anyone, you’re hoping to “please” by being admitted to and attending business school. It’s fine to be influenced by people you care about, but it’s best to know the influence they wield.

10. Imagine you discover the 2-month retreat of your dreams. Could be a writing retreat; could be a surfing retreat; could be a meditation retreat; could be anything your heart desires. Everyone in your life is wildly supportive, and payment plans are even available so that you don’t need to come up with all the funds at once. The only catch is that you can’t do both the retreat and business school; you have to choose. What feelings and thoughts come up for you?

This can help clarify how much of your desire to go to business school is about getting a societally-approved break to “focus on yourself” and how much is about the specific content and format of business school.

By the time you’ve gone through these prompts, you should have a pretty good idea of whether you want to go to business school or not. Desire is only one ingredient in the decision, but everything starts there. Once you know what you want in life and why, you have a lot more context for designing your next steps.

Touch the dream

My friends and I have a saying: touch every dream. When you hold onto a dream for too long, it can start to morph and come to represent all sorts of things that it didn’t when it first popped into your head. Bringing the dream back down to earth can help you chart the path forward from where you are now.

Some steps you can take:

1. Attend admissions events at more than one school. Weighing multiple options will put you into a “compare and contrast” mindset, where you’re weighing what’s right for you. In pre-pandemic times, it was often possible to register to sit in on a single session of a class. Seeing the HBS case method in action was a big ingredient in giving me the clarity that I wanted to go, so I definitely recommend sitting in on a class if that’s an option for you.

2. Visit campus and sit down on a bench to journal in a notebook or record a voice memo with your thoughts as they arise. Being in the setting of your dreams can help make the fantasy concrete and expose some of the subtler motivations you’re harboring.

3. Review course catalogs and design your best-case-scenario course load. This can help you start to feel out what your days would really be like at business school, which should either increase or decrease your excitement in a useful way.

4. Make the alternative vivid. A campus is a physical place you can visit and get excited about. Your own bold startup idea or non-traditional life plan will only be as solid as you make it. See if you can externalize your idea—through writing, drawing, collage, or any other medium that speaks to you; the more visual, the better. This can help your mind process your best alternative as a real option worth getting excited about and making tradeoffs for.

5. Start down the road to applying even if you’re not sure. This is a particularly time-consuming option, but it pays off in extra clarity. We’ll go over the costs and benefits of this path next.

Apply to create clarity

Going to business school may or may not be worth it for you. But if even a tiny part of you wants to go, starting down the road to applying to business school is almost certainly worth it. This is partly because the costs of applying are relatively low (a fraction of the costs of actually attending) and partly because the benefit is relatively high—applying creates clarity even if it doesn’t result in admission or attendance.

Some of the costs of applying to business school:

Money: Applying to three programs will probably run you a minimum of $1,000 USD: $250 to take the GMAT (or $205 to take the GRE) as of spring 2021, plus a few hundred dollars in application fees per program. Paying for test prep, taking the GMAT or GRE multiple times, or applying to more programs can all increase the cost. But these expenses, while non-trivial, pale in comparison to the costs of attendance.

Time: I texted a friend of mine who’s headed to business school this fall to ask him how long he spent on his application process; he estimated 120-150 hours total. That translates to three to four 40-hour workweeks, or about three months of weekends spent working 6 hours per day. Here again, though, the time required to apply is a fraction of the time you’ll invest if you actually go.

Ego: Applying to business school can be a reckoning. Even contemplating applying can put you face to face with fear of failure. But fear and hope go hand in hand, and it’s healthy to work through your dread to see what’s on the other side.

Some of the benefits of applying to business school:

Community: Applying to business school can rally your family and community around you. It’s courageous to share that you want something you’re not sure you can get, and you may be surprised by who shows up for you along the way.

Reflection: The essay prompts for business school can get deep. If you take them seriously, you’ll learn a lot about who you are and what you want in life.

Option value: Starting down the road of applying to business school can help you spread the effort over more time and gain options for the future. Take the GMAT and decide you don’t want to apply this year after all? No problem; most schools will accept GMAT scores for up to five years. Get accepted to your dream school at the same time that a big stretch opportunity in your current job comes up? Many programs will let you defer your start.

If you’re still on the fence about business school, take half a day to start planning your application process and see how far you can get yourself to go—and what hopes and fears rise up along the way. Pay special attention to the essay prompts for the schools you’re considering. If you take them as opportunities to authentically reflect, they can create a lot of clarity in themselves. The classic prompt from Stanford GSB is “What matters most to you, and why?” Think on that for a few weeks in a background thread and you’ll definitely know yourself better. One of Kellogg’s prompts is “Provide a recent example where you have demonstrated leadership and created value. What challenges did you face and what did you learn?” This can help put your career so far in perspective. See if you can get yourself to at least journal about your real gut reaction to these questions—not the versions you think will sound good. This will support your introspection process better, and may well lead to better answers anyway. As Harvard’s essay instructions recommend: “Don't overthink, overcraft and overwrite. Just answer the question in clear language that those of us who don't know your world can understand.”

What’s next

Is business school what’s next for you? In this guide, I’ve outlined three paths to finding your own answer:

Reflect deeply. Ask people you identify with to share their own stories as a spark for discovering your own. Tune in to your hopes and fears.

Analyze the costs and benefits. Try to put numbers to them—not as a cold calculation, but as a way of challenging yourself to get specific and assign value to blurry desired outcomes.

Break down the experience. Spell out what you’re after with business school and think through alternatives. The bundle may well still be worth it, but this analysis will help you understand why.

For product people, an MBA really isn’t a hard requirement. Since it’s a choice, you can afford to be choosy. My dearest hope is that this piece will help you feel supported in choosing wisely.

A big thank you to all the people in my life who made time to read drafts of this piece and encourage me to keep going over the past three months—Angela, Anjali, Ellen, Lisa, Logan, Katja, Ketan, Kojo, Lindsay, and my partners at Matrix. And special thanks to the many wonderful people I met and interviewed while trying to get new perspectives on the MBA decision for product managers. Speaking with you convinced me to go all out on this.

Are you a product manager weighing whether to go to business school? I’d love to hear from you. Drop me a line at diana@matrix.vc and let me know what stuck with you from this piece—and where you’re still stuck. And if you’re part of an APM program, I’m open to doing a virtual Q&A with your cohort. I look forward to hearing from you.