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Product Management Course Notes

This document provides an overview of a course on product management. It introduces key concepts that will be covered across 17 sections, including the product development process, agile vs waterfall methodologies, competitive analysis, customer development, metrics, and career preparation. The reader is given options to choose their desired level of learning and shown how to access additional free resources through provided codes and links.

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Marc
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290 views

Product Management Course Notes

This document provides an overview of a course on product management. It introduces key concepts that will be covered across 17 sections, including the product development process, agile vs waterfall methodologies, competitive analysis, customer development, metrics, and career preparation. The reader is given options to choose their desired level of learning and shown how to access additional free resources through provided codes and links.

Uploaded by

Marc
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
Available Formats
Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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SECTION 1 – BEFORE STARTING THE COURSE:

Course overview (1):

Access to free stuff advert code (2):

First thing to do to access free stuff advert (3):

Choose your own adventure (4):

1. I don't want a job as a PM, but I would like to learn the discipline of Product Management
2. I want to learn the essentials. Nothing extra
3. I'm just browsing. Take me to the action!
4. I'm really busy, so give me a really short version of the course

Free stuff advert (5):

Why Product Management is Awesome (6):

SECTION 2 – INTRODUCTION TO PRODUCT MANAGEMENT:


What is a Product Manager (7):

What is a Product? (8):

Activity – Twitter (9):

Product Manager Types (10, 11 & 12):

1. Internal
2. B2B (Business, also SaaS)
3. B2C (Consumer)

Day in the life of a Product Manager (13, 14, 15):

SECTION 3 – INTRODUCTION TO PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT:


Product Lifecycle / Market Stages (16, 17 & 18):

1. Introduction (lose money) - Dreem


2. Growth (accepted, sales growth) - Snapchat
3. Maturity (sales peak, competition rises) - Twitter
4. Decline (sales decrease, irrelevance, phase-out) - Yahoo

Product Development Process (19 & 20):

1. Conceive (collect user problems, brainstorm)


2. Plan (research, business case, customer interviews, roadmaps)
3. Develop (timelines, features, specs)
4. Iterate (MVP, testing, alpha / beta release, user feedback, improve)
5. Launch (legal, PR, marketing, sales)
6. Steady state (collect metrics, maximise return on investment, continued sales)
7. Maintain or kill (collect metrics, spend vs. income, “sunsetting”)
Lean Product Development (21):

1. Cutting out unnecessary steps until the business is moving


2. Don’t commit resources until you know you have to

Agile Product Development (22):

1. Similar to Lean but specific to software


2. PM framework for SW development
3. Iterative approach
4. E.g. 10 features needed – select and develop most important 2 to 5 first

KANBAN & Scrum (23 &24):

1. Both are agile development philosophies


2. SCRUM
a. Sprint planning meeting – product backlog to sprint backlog (to-do list) – tickets
b. The sprint – usually 2 weeks – move tickets from Sprint backlog – In Progress – Done
c. Daily stand-up meetings – share, plan, questions
d. Retrospective meeting – review the sprint (what worked, what didn’t work, questions)
3. KANBAN
a. Less strict, compared to SCRUM, no sprints, no sprint backlog, only product backlog
b. KANBAN board to keep track
c. No specific meeting types
d. Philosophy is that there is a limit to the number of items in progress at one time

Waterfall (25):

1. Agile – most important features first, Waterfall – all features developed and released
simultaneously
2. Can increase time to launch, more time may be invested in unimportant features and vice versa

Agile & Waterfall examples (26):

1. Agile – lean methodology


a. Engineers, designers, product managers – planning & prioritisation, division of work
b. Core features, database, wireframes
c. User feedback, next features
2. Waterfall – when is it useful?
a. Operating Systems – interdependent features
b. Mission or safety-critical software application
c. Hardware or physical structures
d. Geographically dispersed development teams

Review & Recap of Section 3 (27):


SECTION 4 – IDEAS AND USER NEEDS:
Introduction to ideas and user needs (28):

1. All products start somewhere (idea or need)


2. Managing, filtering, prioritising & scheduling the ideas and needs

Where ideas come from as a PM? (29):

1. PM is not the idea generator – ideas come from everywhere


a. Employees
b. Metrics
c. Users (forums, feedback forms)
d. Clients (mostly B2B)
2. For internal PM – Stakeholders (mostly employees)
3. For B2C PM – Users, metrics & employees
4. For B2B PM – Employees & clients

Getting to the real user needs (30):

1. Not all user problem statements describe the actual problem


2. Beware of unintended side effects
a. e.g. filtering out twitter retweets
b. e.g. sticking plasters to patch an underlying real problem
3. Search for the real pain behind the request
4. Technique – ask Why? – at least 3 times

Separating the Signal from the Noise (31):

1. User feedback exercise

Users Vs. Customers (32):

1. “sign-the-cheque” customers – e.g. CEO, FD or marketing director feeback on the business


effectiveness of the product
2. “users” – experiencing the product itself (features, limitations)

Review & Recap of Section 4 (33):

SECTION 5 – COMPETITIVE & MARKET ANALYSIS:


Market Research – Sizing the Market (34):

1. Top-down – establish total market size & target share – assumption is market penetration
(optimistic)
2. Bottom-up – look at current sales patterns for similar products – the better way, closer to reality
3. Tools & tips – Google industry reports, Competitor websites, compete.com, Google adwords
keyword tool, search Twitter & Reddit for comments
Introduction to Finding Competitors (35):

1. Establish who is also out there, what they’re doing and how they’re doing it
2. Feature triage – more users, happy users, enhance your brand

Finding Competitors (36):

1. Build a list – capture using Excel or other means


2. List the known competitors
3. Search for unknown – use Google to search for the subject / problem solved by the product /
feature and also for the typical target market
4. Techniques
a. Channel the type of user (e.g. complaints about the problem – “DSLR too big for action
shots”)
i. You’ll find companies using the same verbage
ii. Individual complaints
iii. Google also connects the dots
iv. Use search term “Site: xxxx.com” to restrict (reddit.com, cora.com, etc.)
b. Describe what the product feature actually does
i. You’ll find companies using literal descriptions
ii. Ads at the top of your search list
iii. Google’s Input
iv. Play around with quotation marks
c. Figure out how you would pitch it (tag-lines)

Direct / Indirect / Competitors and their Impact (37):

1. 4 types of competitors
a. Direct – very similar solutions – we must be able to compete with these
b. Indirect – solve the same problem in a different way / for a different customer group –
we must not lose too many customers to these
c. Potential – offer something else to the same / similar customer group – we must be sure
that they cannot do it easily
d. Substitute – completely different product that solves the same core problem – our
offering must at least be better / more attractive
2. Rank your competitors in the above order

The Five Criteria for Understanding Competitors (38):

SECTION 6 – CUSTOMER DEVELOPMENT:


SECTION 7 – DESIGNING & RUNNING EXPERIMENTS:
SECTION 8 – CONCEPTUALISING THE SOLUTION:
SECTION 9 – METRICS FOR PRODUCT MANAGERS – DEFINING SUCCESS & MEASURING
RESULTS:
SECTION 10 – BUILDING THE PRODUCT – PROJECT MANAGEMENT FOR PMs:
SECTION 11 – WORKING WITH PEOPLE & STAKEHOLDERS:
SECTION 12 – TECHNOLOGY FOR PRODUCT MANAGERS:
SECTION 13 – WHAT YOU SHOULD DO TO PREPARE YOURSELF FOR THE JOB:
SECTION 14 – HOW TO LOOK FOR A JOB IN PROJECT MANAGEMENT:
SECTION 15 – HOW TO GET THE JOB IN PROJECT MANAGEMENT:
SECTION 16 – AFTER YOU’VE GOT THE JOB:
SECTION 17 – EXTENDED INTERVIEWS WITH CURRENT PRODUCT MANAGERS:

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