Product Management
Offered By: University System of Maryland via edX
Course Description
Overview
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. This is a one of kind product management certification that covers the skill sets for the entire product lifecycle.
We start with the fundamentals of product management and why this role is so coveted as a launch pad for future CEOs and startup founders. By exploring the roles and responsibilities of being a product manager, we’ll identify its relationship to stakeholders external and internal, including customers, engineering, legal, finance, marketing, and customer service.
As a product manager you have to own the results of your product’s success by tackling risks early and setting up your teams for success. This is why we immediately move on to discussing product-market fit, with a detailed examination of target customers, customer’s underserved needs, value propositions, feature sets, and user experiences.
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. 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.
Agile systems engineering ensures great products truly excel over time in all three areas of design, functionality, and technical feasibility. Agile systems engineering uses tools such as rapid prototyping, open set architectures, and platform design. By using an agile methodology not just for business and design, you'll innovate and collaborate better, manage costly technical debt, and validate your product ideas with data science and innovation metrics.
Finally, you cannot lead products without core skills in leadership and influence. Product managers are masters at internal sales, team building, delegation, and empowerment. They also know that great product management careers are not built alone. From envisioning a product strategy to correctly portraying the product roadmap, the process must be inclusive, interactive, and motivating. This course will enable you to align product teams, product designs, and product development for speed and innovation at scale.
Syllabus
Course 1: Product Management Fundamentals
Understand the keys to successfully navigating the roles and responsibilities of being a product manager to champion change with internal and external collaborators and influencers
Course 2: Achieving Product-Market Fit
Learn how to truly know your target customer, your customer’s underserved needs, your value proposition, your product feature set, and your user experience, then integrate this knowledge into product and market requirements and positioning plans
Course 3: Product Design, Prototyping, and Testing
Translate product ideas into tangible assets by creating wireframes, 3D renderings, prototypes, and minimum viable products (MVPs) to test assumptions and validate customer interests
Course 4: Data Science and Agile Systems for Product Management
Deliver faster, higher quality, and fault-tolerant products regardless of industry using the latest in Agile, DevOps, and Data Science.
Course 5: Modern Product Leadership
Lead product teams and organizations to deliver winning solutions for customers while driving engagement and innovation across the enterprise
Courses
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Product Managers are masters at internal sales, team building, delegation, and empowerment. They also know that great product management careers are not built alone. From envisioning a product strategy to correctly portraying the product roadmap, the process must be inclusive, interactive, and motivating with modern leadership techniques. As your products grow, you’ll also need to skills to manage teams of teams. This course will enable you to align product teams, product designs, and product development for speed and innovation at scale.
Product Managers have one of the toughest, most demanding positions in the modern product organization. They must be both visionaries and evangelists, as well as facilitators and coaches. Often they must communicate clearly and effectively across a wide range of audiences. To do this well means being the expert in a number of key competencies of leadership.
Modern leadership principles emphasize empowerment and ownership. Meanwhile products require teams to work together at scale. This course will starts by resetting on what is good leadership based on actual data and studies. Not half-proven theories or intuition. Drawing on actual research and met studies we’ll cover the key elements of what makes a good product leader based on work by Jim Collins John Maxwell, Peter Northouse, Melissa Perri, and more. One of the key findings is that a leader’s success is driven by their team, and how well that team aligns with the mission. Understanding this, we’ll show you how to maximize the team’s effect on the leader and vice versa.
Next we’ll dive into how to build the team. This is essential if you want to move the culture and practices of your organization to truly thrive. We’ll also go over principles of encouraging ownership and continuously replenish your leadership pipeline.
In the third week, we’ll look at the core influential competencies of a product evangelist. This means vision setting, roadmapping problems, setting goals and objectives, demoing effectively and more. We’ll also discuss the art of negotiating across departments and interests, and how to manage conflicts to resolution quickly through good leadership and problem solving.
Finally we’ll turn to frameworks for organizing teams at multiple scales of product development. Whether an aspiring product manager or Head of Product, this will enable better understanding of how leaders align teams. Starting with basic Agile processes we’ll move on to scaling techniques for integrating hardware and software teams of teams. We’ll also discuss how to deploy influence and guide the work with discovery frameworks and techniques at scale. Understanding core processes and trade-offs at scale is critical to leading products to success.
Taught by
John Johnson, Cait von Schnetlage and James Green
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