Product Management: Building Great Products

Course details

Overview

This course presents an introduction to product management - the process and skills necessary to develop a new idea and bring it to market. This training will help you better think about how to bring innovative new products to market. The course is structured around three main themes: 

1. Defining market opportunities, or arriving at insight 
2. Positioning solutions, and learning to articulate value
3. Structuring delivery by constraining and prioritizing capabilities 

Through a mix of lecture and hands-on exploration, participants gain familiarity and competency with the tools used by product managers to think strategically and execute effectively. 

Audience

• Engineers and designers, who work with product managers and need to better understand how to communicate with them effectively
• Product managers, looking to expand their skillset to think about their job through a design lens
• Business leaders, interested in bringing new forms of creative problem solving and design thinking into their groups in order to change and direct the organizational culture

Learning objectives
As a result of taking this training in product management, participants should be able to:

1. Identify latent needs in qualitative research. This provides participants with the ability to identify important insights that can become foundational elements. 
2. Think critically about what people want, need, and desire. This provides participants with the ability to be keen observers of behavior and identify hidden or non-obvious opportunities. 
3. Speak confidently about complex and ill-defined ideas. This gives participants the ability to compel and persuade their peers to follow them in a particular strategic direction. 
4. Describe the value of a new product. This provides participants with the language necessary to convince a team - and themselves - that an idea is worth pursuing. 
5. Identify the sequence and pacing of developing and releasing new features. This provides participants with the ability to work in a resource constrained environment and to show how small ideas build to big results. 
6. Produce visual artifacts that simplify complex ideas. This gives participants the ability to synthesize complexity so that other people can understand and support a new idea.

Skills Developed

• Product insight identification.  Successful product ideas come from an understanding of human needs and desires, and meaningful empathy with the people being served. Participants will learn to develop product insights based on a process of qualitative research, translation, and synthesis. 
• Product brainstorming.  At the heart of a product is a story - an optimistic view of how the future will be different if a particular product exists. Participants will learn how to create multiple visions of the future through forced provocation, in order to support an emergent story of value.
• Product roadmapping. Creating a product is a long and winding road, and development pacing is always resource constrained. A product roadmap describes how features and value will be added incrementally in order to build to a cohesive and larger whole. Participants will learn how to develop a cohesive product roadmap.
• Downselection and positioning. Developing a new product requires understanding the context in which that product will be considered. Positioning methods, like a 2x2 and a Box on the Shelf are used to evaluate the relative context of a product against other ideas. Participants will learn how to leverage a 2x2 as a filter for ideas, and a Box on the Shelf exercise to develop the externally facing positioning statements for the product.