Learn Product Management
December 30, 2017
This 25-part course consists of tutorials on Product Management. Product Managers sit at the intersection of Business, Technology, and Design and are expected to wear many hats. This course intends to get you to a point where you’ll feel comfortable describing the various roles that you’d be expected to take on as a Product Manager.
Once done, you should have a good understanding of what a Product Manager does on a day-to-day basis, how to think about Market Research, User Research, Customer Development, as well as the business and people side of the job.
The primary objective of this course are:
- Understand what Product Management means.
- Understand the Product Lifecycle — including the Product Development Process and the Methodologies involved.
- Be able to conduct good market research. Understand how to evaluate competition and how to monitor it.
- Understand how to go about User Research and Customer Development: how to conduct user interviews, and how to build user personas off those interviews.
- How to go about running Minimum Viable Product (MVP) experiments — understanding this is one of the core skills that Product Managers need to have.
- Learn a bit about UX Design side of things: what is Rapid Prototyping, and how should you work with your UX Designers.
- Learn about the business side of the job: Metrics, Pricing, and Financial Modeling.
- How to keep everyone in sync with epics, users stories, acceptance criteria and making effective roadmaps for your team.
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Introduction
The Product Lifecycle
In this section, we’ll look into the different phases products go through over their lifetime, and an overview of the product development process and methodologies.
- The Four Major Phases of the Product Lifecycle
- The Product Development Process
- Product Development Methodologies
Market Research
As a Product Manager, you have to be good at finding what we call “Product-Market Fit”. This requires you to be good at sizing a market, and evaluating it in terms of competition — so that you can focus on building something that the market wants.
- Sizing the market and finding competitors
- Project: Size the market and find competitors for Commonlounge
- Types of competitors
- How to evaluate competitors
- Making a Feature Table
- Project: Make a feature table of Commonlounge and its competitors
- Monitoring Competitors
User Research and Customer Development
In this section, we will learn about how to go about doing your User Research — which is how we learn what it is that the users really want, so that we can build the right thing for them. At the end of this section, you should be able to find interviewees to interview, and be able to write User Personas that you can use in the product building process.
- User Research
- Customer Development
- Finding Interviewees
- Writing Cold Emails
- Conducting an Interview
- Building User Personas off your User Interviews
- Project: Create User Journey Maps for Commonlounge
- Project: Create User Personas for Commonlounge
Minimum Viable Products
In this section, we will look at how to go about building an MVP, so that we can quickly validate our assumptions and hypotheses, and decide whether to invest more resources into what we have so far.
- What is an MVP?
- How do you run an MVP experiment - Part 1
- How do you run an MVP experiment - Part 2
- Types of MVPs: Part 1
- Types of MVPs: Part 2
- Project: Run your own MVP experiment
The product side: UX Design
UX Design goes hand-in-hand with Product Management, especially for Product Managers at Business to Consumer (B2C) startups working on the product itself. To dive deeper into UX, check out our UX Design List after this section.
- What is Rapid Prototyping?
- What is fidelity of a prototype?
- Digital Design tools: Sketch, Figma, Adobe XD and Photoshop
The business side: Metrics, Pricing and Financial Modeling
Knowing how your product is performing is one of the key responsibilities of a Product Manager. In this section, we will learn about a few different frameworks for thinking about metrics, as well as a few tools that PMs at real companies use on a daily basis.
- Introduction to Metrics
- Google Ventures’ HEART Framework for metrics
- AARRR Framework for metrics
- Tracking Growth with Growth Accounting & Triangle Heatmaps
- What is Retention and how do you measure it?
- Tools for tracking your metrics
- Project: What metrics should the Commonlounge team measure?
- Pricing your product
- Project: Pricing for Commonlounge Pro and Plus Plans
The People Side: How to keep everyone in sync
Finally, Product Managers also have to play the role of a Project Manager — they have to make sure that their team is working will like a well-oiled machine. In this section, we will go over some key tools that you can use to manage a project better.