You got multiple job offers, all in different functions? Congrats! Now what?
Framework for consciously navigating those kinds of dilemmas
One question that I get fairly often goes like this:
“I have an offer for a Product Management position from a company X, and another offer for a Product Marketing/Business Planning/Strategy & Operations/etc. position from a company Y. I think I want to be a Product Manager, but I am not sure. Can you help me decide?”
Sometimes, there are additional details, like one company is offering a slightly better compensation package than the other, or a team/area at one place looks like a better fit. However, those differences are usually minor enough to be generally unhelpful at resolving the fundamental dilemma that the person is facing.
As someone who had to go through a number of these situations over the years myself (I started my career in venture capital, then went to business school to make a career switch to big tech, worked for a bit as both Product Marketing Manager & Business Planner at Microsoft, and then worked in 3 very different Product Manager positions over the years) — and also helping others navigate similar situations fairly frequently — I came to view those kinds of dilemmas through a specific framework, which I am going to share in this post.
First & most important question to ask yourself is:
Do you know which function (product management, marketing, strategy, etc.) you really want to work in long-term?
If you do, great — go with that, and commit for the next few years at least (more on that below)
If you don’t (e.g., you haven’t really experienced any of those functions yet, and you just know that you want to work in tech), you have 2 options:
Go with the function that pays the highest and generally has the largest number of job openings at any given time (outside of software development/data science — and sales, which is a bit of a special case — that’s usually product management)
ORGo with the highest tier company you have an offer from, and then plan to figure it out from there
A few things to unpack here:
When in doubt, choosing the function that offers most flexibility (in terms of the number of jobs, and generally higher pay) should be self-explanatory
That being said, it’s also important not to focus on pay/flexibility above everything else
For example, if you are absolutely sure that you want to work in strategy, don’t join a company as a PM instead, since you will probably do better & be happier in the long run by choosing what you like & can do well (if the main thing you care about is making as much money as possible, Private Equity still pays loads more than anything in Tech — but you can also make plenty in technology not to have to care much about that)
Overall, changing functions is not easy, even within the same company, not to mention when also trying to change employers — so if you know which function you want to work in, that should have a highest priority over both the company’s prestige & pay (within reason)
That being said, if you are unsure, or you have offers from 2 companies with widely different pay / prestige, going for a higher tier company might still be a sensible choice (e.g., if you are trying to decide between Google Strategy & T-Mobile Product Management offers, I’d advice most people to take Google offer)
In many cases, answering this question will already provide you with a clear path forward.
However, if you have multiple offers to choose from, or some offers that seem quite similiar, you might want to dig a bit deeper, before finalizing your decision — in which case, keep reading.
The next few things to consider in your decision-making process are:
Do you feel that one team is a much better fit than others, based on your interactions with them?
If you are choosing between offers for widely different product areas (e.g., cloud vs. ridesharing marketplace vs. smart home hardware), is there one area that looks a lot more interesting to you than others?
Note that I’ve bolded ‘much’ & ‘a lot more’ portions above — this is truly a critical piece here.
When you’re still interviewing / chatting with the hiring managers after you got an offer, there is only so much information you can get: both you & the hiring managers face time constraints, there are often details that the company can’t share with you until you join, not to mention that certain things (such as culture fit with the team, or understanding the true nature of the work you’ll be doing) that take time to get a good feel on.
So, the signal you get on things like fit (both with the team & with the product) is going to be weak. Still, the magnitude of that signal matters: if you love one team & are ambivalent at best about all the others, or you’ve always wanted to work in one particular product area that you got an offer for, this is useful information to consider. Likewise, if you like a team / product area at one company just a little bit better than at the others, I’d suggest disregarding that information completely, and focusing on thinking through your answers for the initial question one more time instead.
You might have also noticed that I keep saying ‘product area’ & not ‘product’ here. I believe that’s another important thing to understand: while you might be able to get a general sense of what it would mean to work in the cloud space, vs. working on hardware, you stand almost no chance of figuring out whether working on Amazon Echo devices would be more exciting than working on Nest Doorbell (note that both products I’m using as examples here generally belong to the same broad product area) — so, at that point, focusing more on company / team culture & fit would be a lot more useful.
So, to recap, when trying to decide between multiple offers from different companies & different functions, in my experience, it’s very beneficial to think through the following questions (in that particular order):
Function you want to work in (if you have strong convinction on this)
If the answer to the previous question is ‘I don’t know’, you need to decide if you want to a) prioritize future job mobility & pay, or b) go for highest-tier company you have an offer from now
After that, if your choices still haven’t been narrowed enough, consider if you feel you have a much better fit with a) a team or b) a product area at one company, vs. the others
Obviously, there are other considerations to take into account, such as compensation, work format (remote vs. hybrid vs. on-site), office location, etc. — all of those are still very important & something you should carefully think through, even if they were out of scope for this post.
Hopefully, following this framework (as well as understanding the reasons behind it, discussed above) will help you make better decisions (or at least make those decisions easier) next time!