Let me be upfront: I went to a state school, worked for three years in customer success at a SaaS startup, and had zero relationships in the PM world when I decided to make the switch. I got into Notion as an APM 14 months later.
No MBA. No bootcamp. No referral.
Here's what I actually did.
Why I Skipped the MBA
First, let me be clear: MBAs can work. If you're trying to break in from consulting, banking, or a completely unrelated industry, an MBA at a target school creates real signal. Recruiting pipelines at companies like Google and Meta are genuinely MBA-friendly.
But for me, the math didn't add up. $150K in debt, two years out of the workforce, and no guarantee of a PM role on the other side? The risk-adjusted return felt shaky.
I decided to spend those two years doing the work instead.
What I Did Instead
I built something. I spent three months building a Notion template suite for customer success teams — partly because it was directly related to my background, and partly because I could point to it as a real product decision. Building even a simple product teaches you things no course can.
I wrote publicly. I started a small newsletter documenting my PM prep journey. 200 subscribers, nothing fancy. But the process of writing about frameworks, interview questions, and product teardowns forced me to understand them deeply. And it became a portfolio artifact.
I did informational interviews relentlessly. Not to ask for jobs — just to understand what the day-to-day looked like. I did 40 of them over 6 months. By the end, I knew the job better than most people who'd already been doing it.
I got specific about my angle. I didn't try to be a generalist PM. I leaned into my customer success background as a superpower for PLG-stage products — companies where onboarding, activation, and retention are the core product challenges. That specificity made my pitch much sharper.
The Actual Unlock
The thing that got me the Notion interview was a product teardown I wrote about their onboarding flow. I posted it on LinkedIn. Someone from their recruiting team DM'd me.
Not a connection. Not a referral. Just a piece of public work that showed I understood what they cared about.
You don't need an MBA. You need evidence. Go create some.
3 Comments
This breakdown is exactly what I needed heading into my Google loop next week. The CIRCLES method always felt a bit mechanical to me — your framing around trade-offs makes it feel much more natural.
The part about not jumping to solutions before defining the problem — I messed this up in my first Meta screen. Wish I'd read this before. Saving for my next prep cycle.
Great writeup. One thing I'd add: interviewers at top companies often care as much about how you react to pushback as the answer itself. Would love a follow-up post on handling live objections.
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