Product Management

Product management is one of the fastest growing and most lucrative jobs available today. Companies have awoken to the desperate need for product managers to create products that customers love, that integrate design, functionality, and business solutions. In our course, we define the fundamentals of product management and why this role is so coveted as a launch pad for future CEOs and startup founders.

To be effective, product managers need a clear understanding of their jobs and duties. They also need a clear understanding of the required skills and competencies. An appreciation of these roles, responsibilities, skills, and capabilities is also beneficial for stakeholders and team members who collaborate with product managers.

This course investigates the framework for success in product management by defining the product manager’s position in an organization and the key responsibilities. We will examine the skills and competencies most critical to carrying out those responsibilities. To further improve your understanding of product management, we will discuss how product managers engage with the product team and stakeholders to create and manage successful products.

Product managers must also know how to establish, organize, and lead a team. They must know the typical product development life cycle and be able to select the right development methodology for the product and the target market. To meet these challenges to product team leadership, we will consider the phases of product development and the roles that product managers play in each step. We’ll examine a variety of team structures and product development methodologies, and the importance of establishing a team charter. Lastly, we will also explore the opportunities and challenges of market development and commercialization. We’ll provide an orientation to key marketing concepts critical to developing and commercializing innovative products and services.

Entrepreneur and investor Marc Andreessen coined the term product-market fit in 2007 when he said, “Product-market fit means being in a good market with a product that can satisfy that market.” While there are ample articles that mention the term, detailed guidance on how to actually achieve product-market fit is scarce.

Through our course we will explore an actionable model that defines product-market fit using five key components. From bottom to top, we will examine the layers of product-market fit beginning with your target customer and transitioning through your customer’s underserved needs, your value proposition, your feature set, and ultimately your user experience (UX).

Our process is an iterative, easy-to-follow guide through each layer to achieve product-market fit. This process helps you to articulate, test, and revise your key hypotheses about your product and the market so you can define and improve your product-market fit.

Using the principles of Lean Product Process, our course is structured in seven steps: determining your target customer, identifying underserved customer needs, defining your value proposition, specifying your minimum viable product (MVP) feature set, creating your MVP prototype, testing your MVP with customers, and iterating to improve product-market fit.

Designing the customer and user experience is essential to creating great products today. Gone is the old paradigm of “form follows function” model of design. The process must be iterative and follow the best product design and development processes. While designing a great user experience can be a lengthy and expensive process, there are approaches to doing it faster and smarter, without compromising results.

This essential product management course explains key design thinking principles around personas, story mapping, and prototyping. Product managers need to know and appreciate product designer tools and processes. By combining these principles with good scrum processes, you’ll learn to create great products that don’t sacrifice design for functionality or feasibility.

This course enables students to transition from ideas to prototyping and concept testing of their products and services. Students learn how best to effectively translate ideas into marketable offerings so that the best product and service ideas are harnessed and create real value for customers and the organization. Emphasis is placed on an integrated and interdisciplinary approach to engineering design, concurrent engineering, design for manufacturing, industrial design, and the business of new product development. Topics include design methods, modeling and simulation, material and manufacturing process selection, platform and modular design, mass customization, planning and scheduling.

Modern systems today must be designed for agility in order to outpace the competition. Concepts like Agile, DevOps, and Data Science were once considered only for the technology-based companies. Today that means every company. Because there is no greater currency than timely information for optimizing operations and meeting the needs of customers.

Modern product management requires that every development and operations value stream is identified and continuously improved. This means using Lean and DevOps principles to streamline handoffs and information flows across teams. It means reorienting towards self-service and automation wherever possible. And to avoid incrementalism, it means a robust Agile development process to keep innovations important and aggressive enough to make noticeable improvements in value delivery.

Agile systems in a DevOps environment requires that products are built completely differently from a traditional designs. Modularity, open set architectures, and flexible data management paradigms are a starting point. The evolutionary nature of the product with so much change enables functionality, design, and technology to drive and influence each other simultaneously. And beneath it all is a data collection and feedback loop essential for anticipating and reacting to business needs both for operations and marketing.

Data science and analytics are the lifeblood of any product organization, and enable product managers to tackle risks early. Luckily, new technologies allow us to collect and integrate data without extreme upfront constraints and onerous controls. This means all data is fair game, and when tagged and stored properly, can be made available at nearly any scale for preparation, visualization, analysis, and modeling.

We’ll teach you the paradigms, processes, and introduce some key technologies that make the data-driven product organization the optimal competitor in the market.