An investigation of whether there are any differences between product managers in the UK & USA

Abstract

Why is London a less successful entrepreneurial eco-system than the San Francisco Bay Area and arguably Boston? This question is discussed in the context of access to funding and, more specifically the quality and quantity of talent pools. This thesis then focuses on the role of the Product manager as a key source of talent in the growth of technology firms, it attempts to understand if the Bay Area/Silicon Valley innovation eco-system has an advantage because it tends to train and retain high quality PMs as it contains either the headquarters of the largest technology companies or the offices where key products are built. It found that the Bay Area contains significantly more PMs who have worked for the biggest, most iconic technology companies and that alumni of these firms constitute a much larger population relative to the number of PMs in firms of 500 people or less in the Bay Area than in London or Boston. The Bay Area also has significantly more Product Directors currently working for the most iconic technology companies. In branch offices there seems to be a perception (amongst junior staff) that PMs gain better experience/or career progression than their peers when based in the Bay Area, but this is disputed by more senior people (as long as the branch office has a certain scale). It is possible that informal advantages accrue to those working in large Bay Area hubs and/or that the most career focused product managers self-select by going to the Bay Area. To gather more quantitative data on this question, an exercise was undertaken to understand if there was a difference in the proportion of big tech product manager alumni founding startups between the three locations, and whether this was correlated with the success of startup fundraising and therefore the innovation eco-system. In the companies sampled, those based in the Bay Area had more than double the proportion of these alumni co-founders than London or Boston, but no substantive evidence was found that this gave the companies an advantage in terms of the amount of follow-on funding raised, but it did point to the possibility that these companies are more successful at raising any funding post Series A. However, more research is needed as due to the quality of data available, effective sample sizes were very small.