The Best Tech Roles After Consulting
Tags: Tech, Recruiting, Silicon Valley, Jobs, Consulting

The Okay Fit Roles

Strategic Finance / FP&A

I’m probably triggering a couple people by putting these two roles together, so apologies if I’m being too loose with my bucketing.

Strategic Finance (StratFin) is similar to Corporate Strategy in the sense that the team handles important, high visibility projects for a company’s leaders. However, they tend to solve those projects with financial analysis.

For example, a StratFin associate may build a model that projects the path to monetization of a company based on various scenarios.

I personally don’t work with anyone in StratFin at my company, so this is just what I gleaned from conversations with friends.

Financial planning & analysis (FP&A) is thematically similar — although a far more structured and detail-oriented activity.

FP&A analysts forecast the cost base of a company on a quarterly basis, projecting the cash burn rate of a startup and giving executives visibility into the company’s costs.

Consultants that enjoy model building and have strong analytical skills will be a decent fit for this role. I put these roles in the Okay Fit bucket, because investment bankers tend to be more qualified for these roles.

However, if you’ve been on a ton of due diligence (DD) cases or just cases with heavy modeling required, you’ll do fine in the interview process.

Corporate Development

Corporate Development (CorpDev) is the M&A function of a company. They acquire companies.

Unlike a Private Equity firm, CorpDev doesn’t acquire companies purely for ROI. At a larger tech company, CorpDev may have an investment mandate of increasing shareholder value — such as acquiring a company to gain share in a market, or merge with a company for cost synergies.

At a startup, CorpDev may have a slightly different mandate of improving the product— acting similarly to a Business Development team — or hiring great talent through acquisition.

Like StratFin, CorpDev is heavy on model building and investment deck creation. Investment bankers may be better suited for these role, but consultants with relevant DD experience are competitive as well.

StratFin and CorpDev are the banker jobs. Photo by Sebastian Herrmann on Unsplash

Business Development / Strategic Partnerships

Business Development (BD), also sometimes referred to as Strategic Partnerships, is a business function that expands product adoption through deals and partnerships.

The BD team establishes collaborations with organizations, such as large industry players, universities, or the government, in order to further a company’s business objectives.

They close big, bespoke deals that can step-functionally improve their company — whether it be a lighthouse customer to drastically increase sales or an infrastructure partner to improve the product.

BD is a pretty great career path and generally takes in associates from a variety of backgrounds.

Like consulting, BD associates need to have great communication and interpersonal skills. Just how a consultant has a good read on a client’s emotions and desires (we used to call it seeing underneath the iceberg), a BD associate needs to be able to do the same with a prospective player and play off their emotional state.

However, unlike consulting, BD has a strong relationship management and pipeline component to it — more like a sales role. BD associates need to keep warm leads for months, they need to know what levers to pull on constructing a deal, and they need to know how to close.

If you’re coming from consulting, you’ll need to highlight your experiences that really showcase those capabilities.

Growth / Digital Marketing / Marketing Analytics

Again, I’m probably triggering people by putting these two roles together (again, it totally varies by company), but IMO they require a pretty similar skill set.

Each of these three roles has a customer acquisition component, an analytics component, and an optimization component.

Customer acquisition. These roles want more people to look at and beware of their company. They may do things like run a Youtube ad campaign or pay for some keywords on Google search so that the company website pops up under the sponsored results.

These roles also ultimately want people to do some action that benefits the company. Either buying a product or downloading an app or connecting the company with another company’s vendor management team.

In order to link the Youtube campaign to an actual app download, there needs to be data instrumentation in place so that these roles can analyze the effectiveness of the campaign.

Is $10 per app download good? These roles should know the answer.

Finally, these roles want to optimize the spend of these campaigns. Or they want to optimize the likelihood that a person seeing the campaign will download an app.

Optimize, meaning run experiments. Change the length of an ad, switch the location of an ad, play around with the color and design of the homepage.

Maybe these roles see that people really like the ad on Youtube but not on TikTok. Or maybe these roles see that more people leave if the homepage doesn’t have a fun graphic as the hero.

They’ll optimize accordingly.

In some companies, Growth is under the Marketing team; in others, Growth is a standalone team or a part of the Product team. In the latter scenario, Growth has a larger mandate and full product ownership on how to said mandate.

For example, a Growth Associate — sometimes called Growth Hacker — is tasked with increasing user activation for a B2B SaaS productivity product; companies are buying software subscriptions but their employees aren’t logging on and using it. Come time for renewal, the company will see low usage of the SaaS product and choose to not renew — i.e., the cohort attrition rate will be high, and therefore costly for the B2B SaaS company.

Image from Oberlo

This is a larger scope than a Growth Marketing Associate, who is mainly interested in increasing conversion for top-of-funnel activities like website visitors or newsletter signups.

This Growth PM may have a team of Growth Engineers who build and ship features to increase user activation — features like reminder emails and single sign-on integration. This Growth PM may have a really good sense of why users aren’t activating their accounts, and may spec out features that remediate the funnel drop-off.

If you’ve been on a marketing case, or if you’re great with analytics and optimization, you can apply to these roles. However, this is a rather niche skill set, and there will likely be other candidates who have down this work before at other companies.

Product Operations

I’ll be honest — I’m not entirely familiar with a Product Ops role; I‘ve typically seen them in larger companies (like Series D+). But the ethos behind this role is to improve the effectiveness of the Product team.

A Product Ops associate works closely with the Product team, supporting the team by being the source-of-truth for specific Product activities.

Image from Product-Led Institute

Before spec’ing out a feature, the Product team may turn to a Product Ops associate to be the source of truth for all user information — driving user research and interviews and distilling themes into documents for the Product team to digest.

After a feature is shipped, a Product Ops associate helps the Product team conduct experiments and analyze the experiment data to help Product make better-informed decisions. Or, the Product Ops associate may document the feature in a digestible way and train the customer-facing teams on how to talk about, sell, or troubleshoot the new feature.

Since it’s a rather niche role, companies would prefer to hire a candidate with previous Product Ops or product-related experience, but consultants can be strong candidates for the same reason why they’re competitive for Business Operations roles.

Consultants may see this role as a great gateway to becoming a Product Manager for two reasons: (1) it’s a role that has more capability overlap with consulting than Product does; (2) it works closely with the Product team so you can slowly ramp up to being a Product Manager.

Product Analytics

The Product Analytics team is a great fit for consultants who really love working with data and producing insights from data analysis.

Product Analysts measure product adoption and usage and build reports to give visibility to internal stakeholders like Product Managers, Business Operations, and executives.

They may also work with the product engineering team to set up the right data instrumentation to measure and track product usage.

In an ideal world (i.e., as portrayed in the Lean Startup), Product Analysts are embedded into the engineering sprint team so that the team sees the impact of the features that they ship.

To be a great product analyst, you’ll need to know a querying language (like SQL) and sometime a language for statistical regressions (like R or Python).

You’ll also need to be familiar with data visualization tools (like Looker or Tableau) in order to create helpful dashboard and reports for your analyses.