Becoming a Product Manager: A Complete Guide

Learn what it takes to excel as a product manager. Get acquainted with the tools and techniques you need to successfully coordinate all aspects of product development.

1. Introduction to Product Management

• What is a product manager?
• What is a product?
• Three different types of product manager roles
• How to think about the type of PM you want to be
• Product vs. Project management
• A day in the life
• Why product management is awesome
• Hooray for free stuff

2. Introduction to Product Development

• The four major phases of the product lifecycle
• Product lifecycle phases: Real-world examples
• Product development process
• Getting deeper into the product development process
• What is Lean Product Development?
• What is Agile?
• What is Scrum and how does it work?
• What is Kanban and how does it work?
• What is Waterfall development?
• Real-world examples of Waterfall and Agile

3. Ideas and User Needs

• Introduction to ideas and user needs
• Where ideas come from as a PM
• Getting to the real user needs
• Users vs. Customers

4. Competitive and Market Analysis

• Market research: Sizing the market
• Introduction to finding competitors
• Find competitors as a product manager
• Direct, indirect, and potential competitors and their impact
• The five criteria for understanding competitors
• The last three criteria for understanding competitors
• Monitor competitors
• What is a feature table?
• Put together a feature table
• Practice building a feature table
• What do we ultimately care about as a product manager?

5. Customer Development

• What is customer development?
• The four types of interviews
• Key differences in customer development
• Who you should talk to
• Find interviewees externally
• Find interviewees internally
• How to get them to talk
• Practice writing emails
• How to run a customer interview correctly
• Good questions, bad questions
• Build user personas off your interviews
• Real-world examples of user persona
• The product manager and the data diet

6. Designing and Running Experiments

• What is an MVP?
• How do product managers think about MVPs?
• Seven steps to running an MVP experiment
• Identify your assumptions
• Follow along: Identify the assumption for Zirx
• Find the riskiest assumption of them all
• Make decisions: The risk/difficulty square
• What is a hypothesis?
• Put together a hypothesis
• Follow along: Identify Zirx's hypothesis
• What's a minimum criterion for success?
• Create a formula for your MCS
• Optional: Make the calculation for startups
• MVP techniques: Emails, shadows, 404, and coming soon
• More MVP techniques: Explainer, fake landing page, and pitch experiments
• Even more MVP techniques: Concierge, piecemeal, and Wizard of Oz
• Email based MVPs
• Shadow buttons
• 404 and coming soon MVPs
• Explainer videos
• Piecemeal MVPs
• Concierge service MVPs
• Optional: How do big companies think about MVP experiments?
• Evaluating results and learning from them

7. Conceptualizing the Solution

• Introduction to Wireframing
• Wireframe, Mockup, Prototype
• Jump into Sketching
• Sketching out a mobile app
• Using POP
• Intro to Balsamiq
• Building YouTube in Balsamiq

8. Metrics for Product Managers: Defining Success and Measuring Results

• Introduction to metrics
• Real-life examples of metrics
• Metrics of all kinds
• How to pick good metrics
• Using the HEART metrics framework: Part 1
• Using the HEART metrics framework: Part 2
• Using the AARRR (Pirate) metrics framework
• Tracking your metrics in practice

9. Building the Product: Project Management for PMs

• Introduction to epics
• Let's get into epic specs
• User stories and acceptance criteria
• Real-life examples of epics, specs, user stories, and the backlog
• Estimations and velocity
• Roadmapping
• Prioritization

10. Working with People and Stakeholders

• General communication skills
• Working with engineers
• Working with designers
• Working with executives and others

11. What You Should Do to Prepare Yourself for the Job

• Get relevant experience
• Build a portfolio with a side project
• Brand yourself

12. How to Look for a Job in Product Management

• Where to look and what to look for
• Inside advice on your PM job hunt

13. How to Get the Job in Product Management

• Resumes
• Interview for product management
• How to answer interview questions the right way
• Insider tips for getting the job

14. After You've Got the Job

• The first things to do
• Summary of the course

15. Extended Interviews with Current Product Managers

• Interview with Daniel Demetri, product lead at Earnest, ex-PM at Google
• Interview with David Lifson, VP of product at Homepolish