Is Product the new Strategy? A delve in to the numbers

LinkedIn gives us access to an outstanding realtime data set, which made us think about exploring a trend we’ve seen in the last few years: Is Product the new Strategy?  By this, I mean do individuals with a consulting background, the area of focus to us at 325 Consulting, secure roles in the Product arena post-consulting, or does strategy still dominate?  Furthermore, and a much broader question: what sort of roles do individuals actually move into post-consulting?

The Question

Is Product the new Strategy? Do individuals with a consulting background, the area of focus to us at 325 Consulting, secure roles in the Product arena post-consulting, or does strategy still dominate?

The Dataset

Australia-based

(A) former consultants from the MBB (McKinsey, Bain and BCG) firms;

together with

(B) other global consulting firms, such as LEK, Kearney, Strategy&, Roland Berger, Oliver Wyman, etc; and;

(C) boutique consulting firms, such as Port Jackson Partners, etc

who are now in industry and are working for companies with more than 10 employees

The Results

Key Learnings

With 26%, Strategy roles are by far the largest single pool of jobs in industry for consultants to access, and therefore the safest path in industry for consultants to pursue at this time.

Encouragingly for ex-consultants, nearly one-third (32%) have made it to C-suite, MD, Head of, and GM level leadership roles (excluding strategy, product, marketing, etc) in industry.

Although these types of roles are of increasing popularity recently, only 5% of ex-consultants currently hold a role with the word Operations in the title, only 3% with the word Transformation, and only 1% as Chief of Staff.

Only 5% of ex-consultants have made it into Product roles, but this number is still higher than those in Transformation, Marketing and Corporate Development / M&A roles.

Only 4% of ex-consultants have moved into the rapidly growing fields of Data and Insights to date.

Despite many consulting firms building practices focused on the Marketing arena in recent years, only 3% of ex-consultants actually sit in Marketing roles at this time. Furthermore, this is the same story with Customer (3%) and Digital (2%) roles too.

Despite many consulting firms undertaking Pricing and Innovation projects, and some firms being specialists in these areas (e.g.Simon-Kucher & Partners and 2nd Road), these are very rare roles in industry for exconsultants to take up.

Only 2% of ex-consultants go into (or get into) the Private Equity and Venture Capital industry. Furthermore, ex-consultants appear to not like doing deals that much, with only 5% in total moving into Corporate Development / M&A and Private Equity/ Venture Capital roles in total.