I’ve been spending time with both paths—talking to people who went the tech PM route and others doing corporate strategy at F500 companies—and I’m realizing the first-year experience is way more different than I expected. Both sound like you’re “doing strategy” and “leading cross-functional work,” but from what I’m hearing, the daily rhythm is almost unrecognizable between the two.
In tech PM, people keep mentioning that the feedback loop is absurdly fast—you ship something on Tuesday and have user data by Wednesday. In corporate strategy, people are talking about six-month cycles and getting alignment through a maze of stakeholders. One sounds exhilarating, the other sounds like it requires a completely different skill.
What’s throwing me is that every path talks about “impact” but they seem to measure it so differently. Tech PM impact is about adoption and retention curves. Corporate strategy impact is about positioning the company for a market shift that might not pay off for 18 months.
Can anyone who made this actual jump tell me what felt like the biggest gear shift in year one? Was it the speed of feedback? The way you measure success? The complexity of stakeholder dynamics? Or something totally different that nobody warns you about?
I went tech PM route at a B2B SaaS company, and the wildest part wasn’t just speed—it was accountability. My first big feature launch, I was genuinely responsible for whether it succeeded or failed. No “well, the business case was sound but market timing was off.” It was: users either loved it or they didn’t, and I had to watch that happen in real time. That exposed every assumption I’d made in consulting. In corporate strategy, I think the burden feels more distributed, but also… success takes forever to actually see.
lol the corporate strategy move is honestly just consulting on someone else’s dime where you have to care about the outcome. in tech PM you actually have to face the consequences if you screwed up the prioritization. which one sounds better depends on whether you like being right or whether you like shipping things. consulting trains you for the former; PM teaches you the latter.
Empirical comparison: tech PM roles typically see 4-6 week decision cycles with weekly metric reviews. Corporate strategy operates on quarterly strategy reviews with forward-looking modeling. In year one, tech PMs report spending 35-40% of time on execution validation versus 15-20% in corporate strategy. Conversely, corporate strategy requires 45% stakeholder management versus 25% in tech PM. The psychological shift is measurable—tech PMs experience higher frequency of success/failure signals, which some find motivating and others find destabilizing. Corporate strategy offers longer-term thesis building but ambiguous causality on outcomes.
The gulf between these paths is real, and most people underestimate it. In tech PM, you’re learning product instinct through rapid iteration and user feedback. The skill transfer from consulting is immediate but incomplete—you have the rigor and stakeholder management, but you’re missing the product intuition that comes from shipping at velocity. In corporate strategy, you’re leveraging your consulting skills directly, learning how companies actually operate at scale, and building influence through institutional knowledge. The challenge isn’t capability; it’s whether you want to develop depth in product thinking or strategic influence. Both compound, but in opposite directions.
wow so tech PM is like constant feedback loops and corp strategy is more like… building a long thesis? that’'s actually really helpful framing thx
Both paths are incredible in different ways! You’ll grow fast in either direction—it just depends on whether you want rapid iteration or strategic influence!