Course recap: Becoming a Product Manager

Martin Muehl
Nov 7 · 5 min read

I am currently a Full-stack Developer in Vienna looking to transition into Product Management. Besides enrolling in the Digital Product Management course at the Boston University (BUx), I also completed this course on LinkedIn Learning.

Photo by You X Ventures on Unsplash

About the instructors:

Cole Mercer is a product management & strategy consultant who worked at Soundcloud, General Assembly and Udemy.

Evan Kimbrell is Managing Director at Sprintkick.


1) Introduction to Product Management

The first part basically sets the stage and brings you up to speed on the most important definitions and aspects of product management. What is a product manager, what’s the difference to a project manager and what types of product managers are there — those are all questions that are answered in part one.

As someone starting on this topic, the difference between a product manager and a project manager or a program manager was really not clear to me. That difference might vary because responsibilities are different in every company. In general a Product Manager has to reach a goal or metric and is free in deciding how to do so. A Project Manager on the other hand has to fulfill a project on time and on budget within several constraints.


2) Introduction to Product Development

Here you will learn more about the product lifecycle and different product development methodologies (Lean, Agile, Scrum, Kanban and Waterfall).

The best one? It depends (of course). Even waterfall has it’s merits, but for software development more flexible systems that allow faster iterations are generally preferred.


3) Ideas and user needs

What a user needs might not always be as obvious as it sounds, even if you ask the users themselves. Cole gives the example of someone who is walking in the rain — that person might tell you she needs a towel to dry herself but what she really needs is an umbrella to not get wet. It’s always important to find out what is behind user requests, and get to the real problems that need to be solved.

Ideas can come from everywhere — users, customers, employees, competition, and from watching metrics— a PM’s job then is to gather those ideas and prioritize them.


4) Competitive and Market Analysis

A thorough analysis of the current market and competition should be part of every product development process. You get some creative ideas how to find competitors and compare their products and features.

An important aspect is to also monitor existing competitors — did they get new funding, did they acquire other teams or are the releasing new features? All important questions you have to keep an eye on.


5) Customer development

Talking to customers is an important aspect of a PM’s job. You will get a lot of ideas about how to find internal and external customers and how to talk to them. There’s also a lot of useful information about running user interviews and what questions to ask. It’s always important to keep in mind that your job as a PM is not to be a note taker and just record feature requests, but to analyse those requests and find out the underlying problems that you can solve for your users.


6) Designing an running experiments (MVP)

I think this is the longest section of the course and definitely one of the most interesting ones. It is about designing, running and analyzing MVP experiments. The idea is to come up with a hypothesis and then create and run tests to validate your assumptions.

Evan walks you through the steps to run an experiment:

  1. Figure out the problem you want to solve
  2. Identify your assumptions and find the riskiest
  3. Build a testable hypothesis around them
  4. Set minimum criteria for success
  5. Pick the strategy and type of test
  6. Execute the test and evaluate results
  7. Iterate the test and run again if necessary

He also goes through some really clever and easy to set up tests that can be really helpful in testing ideas.


7) Conceptualizing the solution

This is all about wireframing and how to best communicate complex features and product ideas.

  1. Wireframes are low fidelity and show the structure
  2. Mockups add graphics, color, and fonts
  3. Prototypes include the usability, let you interact with it, and can be used for user testing

You also get multiple software recommendations (Balsamiq, Axure and Hotgloo for wireframes. Photoshop, Sketch, Illustrator, Axure, and UXPin for mockups. Invision, Keynote, Pop, Axure, and Proto.io for prototypes).


8) Metrics for Product Managers

What gets measured, gets managed.

That quote from Peter Drucker is still true.

The metrics that will be measured are unique for every company, but can in general be put in several categories:

  1. Growth & Activation
  2. Engagement
  3. Retention
  4. User happiness
  5. Revenue

It’s important to pick the right metrics that fit the company’s overall strategy.

Cole also explains two frameworks:

  1. The HEART framework (Happiness, Engagement, Adaption, Retention, Task success)
  2. The AARRR framework (Acquisition, Activation, Retention, Referral, Revenue)

9) Project Management for Product Managers

Very detailed explanations of important terms that PM’s deal with all the time (Epics, user stories, backlogs, velocity and roadmaps). Prioritization is also an important part of a PM’s daily work and he goes into detail on the BUC and MOSCOW methods that help you do that.


10) Working with stakeholders

Good communication is essential for a good Product Manager. You will get many tips on how to communicate effectively and some particular tips on how to deal with engineers, designers, and executives.


11) Prepare yourself for the job

Experience on the job is always nice of course, but even if you don’t have that, you can build side projects on your own to build your portfolio and show your skills. It’s also important to realize that even if in your current position you don’t have a PM title, you might still have similar experiences that relate to the work of a PM.


12) How to look for a job as a Product Manager

The easiest place would be to look inside your current company. Other than that you will get some more ideas of where to look for.


13) How to get the job

This sections gives you plenty of tips for your resume, how to prepare for interviews and how to answer interview questions the right way. For that it’s important to realize that it’s not necessarily important to come up with the “right” answer — questions are most likely just designed for the company to find out how you got about solving a problem.


14) After you’ve got the job

In the end you will also get a lot of useful tips on how to best start your new job as a PM. Get familiar with team members, users, and executives. Read up on internal documents, look at available metrics that are related to your work.


15) Interviews

Interviews with Daniel Demetri (product lead at Earnest, now Founder at Trellis)and David Lifson (VP of product at Homepolish, now VP product at The Knot) round up the course and give you more insight into life as a Product Manager.

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