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&lt;p&gt;An article earlier this week in the &lt;em&gt;Wall Street Journal&lt;/em&gt; noted that, for MBAs, there is a new job title to rule them all: Product Manager.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;It makes sense: that title is most commonly seen at the likes of Facebook and Google, and denotes a level of authority for the holder over, well, everything to do with a product—from research right through to design and implementation. As the &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.wsj.com/articles/coveted-job-title-for-m-b-a-s-product-manager-1456933303&quot; target=&quot;_blank&quot;&gt;Journal&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/em&gt;puts it, the product manager sits &quot;at the nexus of a company’s business and technology functions&quot; and, from the descriptions in the article, operates as something of a mini-CEO.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;But while the &lt;em&gt;Journal &lt;/em&gt;presents this as a major new trend, the numbers don&#39;t exactly signal a mass sea-change among MBA grads: sure, the piece notes that Harvard Business School&#39;s 45-place product management 101 class was oversubscribed last year, and that &quot;between 6% and 7% of last year’s class of 908 students took product-management jobs.&quot; But at most, that&#39;s fewer than 65 positions—with no indication of whether that number is higher, lower, or the same as in recent years.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;A Google Trends search doesn&#39;t exactly fill me with confidence either: the term &quot;product manager&quot; has garnered more than 100 searches worldwide just three times in any given month in the past 10 years. And we&#39;re currently in one of those months, which suggests that the &lt;em&gt;Journal&lt;/em&gt; is either on the bleeding edge of the explosion or, perhaps, that its coverage has driven interest in the term. Either way: 70-80 searches per month is not the stuff that sea-changes in MBA grad career preferences are made of—especially when the majority of those searches originate in Singapore.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&#160;&lt;img src=&quot;https://media2.vault.com/18698/product_manager_snip.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Product Manager Stats&quot; /&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;One final point to consider comes from the &lt;em&gt;Journal &lt;/em&gt;article itself: most MBAs have a hard time landing project management positions because they don&#39;t have the tech background. As one startup founder told the paper: &quot;&#39;I’m not really sold on the idea that you could hire an M.B.A. product manager&#39; who lacks a grounding in computer science or engineering, he said.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;So for as much as the MBA-as-product-manager story is intriguing, it rather feels like the &lt;em&gt;Journal&lt;/em&gt; has buried the lede on this one: the interesting point isn&#39;t that MBAs want to get hired as product managers; it&#39;s that the MBA alone isn&#39;t adequate preparation for the role. In fact, going by the latter third of the article, an aspiring product manager would be far better served taking the time to get a strong grounding in technology, rather than committing a significant amount of time and money to getting an MBA.&lt;/p&gt;

Are MBAs Really Flocking to Product Manager Jobs?

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