Q) What are your post-MBA goals and how will your prior experience and the London Business School programme contribute towards these? (500 words)
Profile: Miss. AD
Profile (Background): Miss AD’s strength is in communicating across cross-functional leadership teams in the telecom and IT infrastructure sectors in Canada. With a background in management and a career in engaging with technology leadership, she has gained the buy-side perspective of customers and how they value technology products.
Essay Approach: “Why LBS MBA?”
Although she has gained a network in the government and the private sector, the influence on the product team is still driven by the leadership in the technology team and product managers.
The frustrating part of her career is that she has both the perspective of the customer and the perspective of the product team, but her lack of an engineering degree limits offering hands-on advice to the technology team.
With an LBS MBA and the integration of AI in several management courses catered to the technology industry, she would compensate for a lack of a technology background with a cross-functional expertise that an LBS MBA would offer.
She also plans to pivot into purpose-driven roles in the technology sector, focusing on product innovation and sustainability-led initiatives to reduce carbon footprint in cloud computing and integrate AI in a human and sustainable manner.
Essay Planning
Problem: Miss AD, with experience in pre-sales in the technology sector, wants to pivot to Product management and strategy.
Problem (Explained): Although Miss AD has gained perspective both from the customer and the product side, her influence on the product milestones has been limited. To cross the functional boundary, Miss AD must acquire the technical, strategic, and cross-functional expertise to be a product manager.
Feasible Goals: Pre-Sales to Product Manager
Short-term Goal: Gain exposure to the lifecycle of a product
Long-Term Goal: To build a functional and strategic perspective to innovate and lead the product through multiple iterations of a product’s lifecycle.
LBS’ Strength: London Business School’s tailor-made technology curriculum that offers a mix of technical and strategic perspectives to take the product through multiple iterations.
Opener: I wanted to capture the applicant’s direct involvement with AI integration in their banking app.
Strategy: The strategy is to share a slice of the life narrative of a pre-sales profile, demonstrating the challenges of incorporating customer demands while also keeping the product team’s morale high.
The gap in skills is not a weakness but is organically presented through the applicant’s experience integrating AI into a banking solution. The experience shows the importance of balancing product management and strategy perspectives that the applicant wants to acquire with an LBS MBA.
Sample LBS MBA Essay: Post-MBA Goals (Pre-Sales to Product Management (491 Words)
As the pre-sales person of a legacy technology company, I was inundated with requests for AI features. We had built a state-of-the-art banking solution with an ‘investment assistant’ that offered suggestions to invest and even flagged excessive line expenses. The users and banking customers loved our non-intrusive style of engagement.
With an LBS MBA, I want to gain both the strategy and the product management perspectives to ..
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