Overview
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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.
Syllabus
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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
- 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
- Introduction to ideas and user needs
- Where ideas come from as a PM
- Getting to the real user needs
- Users vs. Customers
- 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?
- 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
- 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
- Introduction to Wireframing
- Wireframe, Mockup, Prototype
- Jump into Sketching
- Sketching out a mobile app
- Using POP
- Intro to Balsamiq
- Building YouTube in Balsamiq
- 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
- 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
- General communication skills
- Working with engineers
- Working with designers
- Working with executives and others
- Get relevant experience
- Build a portfolio with a side project
- Brand yourself
- Where to look and what to look for
- Inside advice on your PM job hunt
- Resumes
- Interview for product management
- How to answer interview questions the right way
- Insider tips for getting the job
- The first things to do
- Summary of the course
- Interview with Daniel Demetri, product lead at Earnest, ex-PM at Google
- Interview with David Lifson, VP of product at Homepolish
