About this course: Not so long ago, the job of product manager was about assessing market data, creating requirements, and managing the hand-off to sales/marketing. Maybe you’d talk to a customer somewhere in there and they’d tell you what features they wanted. But companies that manage product that way are dying. Being a product person today is a new game, and product managers are at the center of it. Today, particularly if your product is mostly digital, you might update it several times a day. Massive troves of data are available for making decisions and, at the same time, deep insights into customer motivation and experience are more important than ever. The job of the modern product manager is to charter a direction and create a successful working environment for all the actors involved in product success. It’s not a simple job or an easy job, but it is a meaningful job where you’ll be learning all the time. This course will help you along your learning journey and prepare you with the skills and perspective you need to: Create the actionable focus to successfully manage your product (week 1) Focus your work using modern product management methods (week 2) Manage new products and explore new product ideas (week 3) Manage and amplify existing products (week 4) This course is ideal for current product or general managers interested in today's modern product management methods. This course was developed with the generous support of the Batten Institute at UVA’s Darden School of Business. The Batten Institute’s mission is to improve the world through entrepreneurship and innovation: www.batteninstitute.org.
Who is this class for: This course is designed for anyone interested in becoming a product manager, including current project or product managers who want to learn modern fundamentals.
Created by: University of Virginia
Taught by: Alex Cowan, Faculty & Batten Fellow
Darden School of Business
| Level | Beginner |
| Commitment | 4 weeks of study, 4-6 hours/week |
| Language | English |
| How To Pass | Pass all graded assignments to complete the course. |
| User Ratings |
Syllabus
WEEK 1
Achieving Focus and #Winning
As a product manager, you and your team will always have more ideas and more requests than you can possibly manage. Making matters still more complicated, part of your job is to develop and then ‘sell’ a particular view of what should happen with your product to diverse stakeholders (engineering, marketing, etc.). How do you do it? Success requires an actionable, testable focus. The successful product manager identifies vivid, testable customer outcomes and creates focus around them. This week we’ll show you how to interface effectively with all your stakeholders to create that actionable focus.
19 videos, 1 reading, 2 practice quizzes
- Video: Tomorrow's Product Manager
- Reading: Course Overview & Requirements
- Discussion Prompt: Get to know your classmates
- Video: You, the Product Manager
- Video: Why Is a Product Never a Product?
- Video: You and Your Customer
- Practice Quiz: Practice Quiz on the #Winning PM
- Video: You and Your Design Team
- Video: You and Your Development Team
- Video: Product Manager vs. Product Owner
- Video: Greg Cohen on PM vs. PO?
- Video: What Is Data Science?
- Video: You and Your Data Science Team
- Video: Meet Enable Quiz, Our Startup Company Example
- Video: You and Your Consulting and/or Support Team
- Video: Focal Tool: The Customer Journey
- Video: Nastia Root on Creating a Strong Interface with Support
- Video: You and Your Sales and Marketing Team
- Video: You and Your Finance/Accounting and Legal Teams
- Video: You and Your Project Manager
- Video: You and Your Management Team
- Discussion Prompt: Issues interfacing with various teams?
- Practice Quiz: Practice Quiz on Many Areas, One Focus
- Video: Week 1 Takeaways
Graded: Week 1 Final Quiz
WEEK 2
Using Today's Product Management Methods
You’ve probably heard that the days of ‘build it and they will come’ are over. But what exactly should you be doing instead? There’s no shortage of material out there on how to be innovative--but you only have so much time. This week we’ll step through the method’s today’s most successful product managers are using and give you tips to “sell” those methods to your stakeholders. We’ll also show you how to analyze growth, engagement and monetization using qualitative and quantitative methods. You’ll finish the week with an understanding of which methods to apply when and hear from practitioners who are using these methods to make breakthrough products.
20 videos, 3 practice quizzes
- Video: Module intro: Ready for Week 2
- Video: What Kind of PM Are You?
- Video: Methods and PMs
- Video: Agile and Product Management
- Video: Design Thinking and the Product Manager
- Video: Lean Startup and the Product Manager
- Video: Managing Habits: Trigger and Action
- Video: Managing Habits: Variable Reward and Investment
- Video: Nir Eyal on Managing Habits
- Practice Quiz: Practice Quiz on Solving the Right Problem
- Video: User Story Mapping for Product Managers
- Video: Prototyping for Product Managers
- Video: Usability Testing for Product Managers
- Practice Quiz: Practice Quiz on Creating the Right Solution
- Video: Collaborating with Enterprise Customers--Tips 1-4
- Video: Collaborating with Enterprise Customers--Tips 5-9
- Video: David Bland on Avoiding the Product Death Cycle
- Video: Shaping Your Funnel Part 1
- Video: Shaping Your Funnel Part 2
- Video: Managing a Product with Hardware
- Video: Making Time to Do Things Right
- Practice Quiz: Practice Quiz on Applications in Product Management
- Discussion Prompt: What did you learn from this week's guest speakers?
- Video: Week 2 Takeaways
Graded: Week 2 Final Quiz
WEEK 3
Exploring a New Product Idea
Something on the order of 9 out of 10 new products fail. Those sound like daunting odds, but through disciplined exploration an effective PM knows how to make even the improbable probable. This week we’ll show you how to apply your understanding of modern PM methods to exploring new product ideas.
We’ll step through customer discovery, idea testing/validation, early development, and business model design. By the end you’ll have a durable process you can both execute and communicate to your team.
13 videos, 3 practice quizzes
- Video: Ready for Week 3?
- Video: Learning vs. Scaling
- Video: The Importance of Good Enough: "Cooped Up" MVPs
- Video: The Importance of Good Enough: "Greener Air" MVPs
- Video: Non-Titular Product Managers
- Video: David Chait on Non-Titular PMs
- Practice Quiz: Practice Quiz on Learning vs. Scaling
- Video: Horizons of Growth
- Video: Corporate Innovation Pipeline
- Video: Creating a Healthy Innovation Pipeline
- Video: David Bland on New Ventures Inside the Corporation
- Practice Quiz: Practice Quiz on Innovating in the Corporation
- Video: Business Model Design I: Proposition Design
- Video: Business Model Design II: Customer Journeys
- Practice Quiz: Practice Quiz: From Proposition to Business Model
- Video: Week 3 Takeaways
Graded: Week 3 Final Quiz: Exploring a New Product Idea
WEEK 4
Amplifying an Existing Product
If you want a product that does more than make a big splash, you’ll need to apply what you’ve learned here every week, every sprint to keep that product fresh and relevant. It’s not hard to let a great product get sidetracked and become irrelevant to its users--this happens all the time. Some figures show the portion of features on successful products that are regularly used to be well under 50%. Yikes! In this week, we’ll look at how successful product managers keep their products fresh and focused on valuable outcomes for their users. You’ll learn how to put a focused, sustainable, program in place to keep your product competitive.
19 videos, 2 practice quizzes
- Video: Ready for Week 4?
- Video: Identifying Business Model Types
- Video: Business Model Design III: Delivery and Execution
- Video: Tamara Carleton on Strategic Foresight
- Video: The Trouble with New Features
- Video: The Importance of Good Enough: Seedling Features
- Video: Actionable Analytics
- Video: Eric Qi Dong on Disciplined Analytics for the Product Manager
- Video: Kiran Kadambi on Structuring Problems in Product Management
- Video: Applying Data Science
- Video: Andrew Kritzer on Data Science for the MBA
- Video: Jim Rose on Continuous Integration and Delivery
- Video: Jim Rose on Monolithic Architectures and Microservices
- Practice Quiz: Practice Quiz: Focused Tuning and Testing
- Video: Managing a Channel or Modality
- Video: Nastia Root on Being a Growth PM
- Video: It's Not a Meeting l
- Video: It's Not a Meeting II
- Video: Roadmap?
- Practice Quiz: Practice Quiz: Driving Growth through Focus
- Video: Course and week close: Let's Not Make This Good-Bye
Graded: Week 4 Final Quiz
FAQs
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University of Virginia
A premier institution of higher education, The University of Virginia offers outstanding academics, world-class faculty, and an inspiring, supportive environment. Founded by Thomas Jefferson in 1819, the University is guided by his vision of discovery, innovation, and development of the full potential of students from all walks of life. Through these courses, global learners have an opportunity to study with renowned scholars and thought leaders.
Pricing
| Audit | Purchase Course | |
|---|---|---|
| Access to course materials | Available | Available |
| Access to graded materials | Not available | Available |
| Receive a final grade | Not available | Available |
| Earn a shareable Course Certificate | Not available | Available |
Ratings and Reviews
excellent insights from industry, well structured course material
Really helpful and enlightening! Thanks Alex, for everything! I feel that I can start working with my teams and use some of those methodologies from now on. I'm confident that I'm ready to create great successful products!
I want to truly thank Mr. Alex Cowan for carving out such a nice course for all the product managers and aspiring ones as well. The course content is very good and if any one has been in the industry and worked as a product manager then he / she can relate to it very well. The way Alex has explained the concepts and how we need to implement them is of immense importance for any product manager in their daily product management related work activities. I will recommend this course to all the aspiring product managers as well as those who are already practicing product management.
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A really good introductory course to what product managers do and how they can improve.