An overview of RMIT Online’s Product Management short course

I recently completed RMIT Online’s short course in Product Management. A few people have asked me about the experience, so here is my week-by-week breakdown of the course. I hope it’s useful to anyone considering the course for themselves.

About me and why I took the course

I’m a Product Designer with Product Manager envy. There is a lot of overlap between the two roles, and my interest has increasingly been piqued by the work that exists in that shared space.

I wanted to widen my knowledge of the product space and use my learnings to enhance my current skillset. I also wanted to “try out” Product Management and see if it was an area I enjoyed working in.

How the course is delivered

• Slack — Everyone taking the same round of the class is added to a dedicated Slack room. In this room, you will communicate with the mentors and other students, and give and receive feedback on milestone documents.
• LMS content — The course covers about three themes each week, and the primary source of information is the LMS. Each topic generally has a few (3–5) pages to read, examples of any output, and links for further reading.
• Weekly webinars — Each week there is a mentor-led webinar about the week’s topics. For me, this was easily the best part of the course. The mentors covered the content in the LMS but they added context to it, gave real-world examples, and talked about anything they felt was missing. Having live sessions where students can ask questions was a huge advantage over some other courses I have taken that reply on prerecorded video content.
• 1:1 mentor session — Each student is assigned to a mentor and you are able to book a single 1:1 video conferencing session with your mentor during the course. This is most useful in the final weeks of the course when you are getting your milestone document ready for submission.

How you will be assessed

In week one you will select a product idea which you will work on throughout the course. You can come up with your own idea or select one from a list.

Throughout the course you will flesh out your product idea in a milestones document. This is essentially a workbook in PowerPoint format that you fill in over time. Each week you are given new tasks to complete related to the weeks milestones.

There is a criteria sheet that spells out what is required to achieve “mastery” of the individual milestones. At the end of the course you submit your completed milestone document to be reviewed by your mentor. You get two attempts at submission, so if you haven’t mastered the criteria the first time around, you should be able to use the mentors feedback to achieve mastery.

My completed milestone document

What you can expect week by week

• Week 1:
  This week is all about introducing you to Product Management. You will look at what the Product Manager does, the different phases of product management, the different types of products, and the product lifecycle.
  In this first week, you are also going to select your product idea. Once you have that you are going to define a product vision and begin your first initiative canvas considering things like the problem, the opportunity, the customers, solutions. You really are going in blind on this first canvas but you will have the opportunity to revisit it later once you understand the concepts better.
• Week 2:
  Week two is about defining the value your product delivers. It’s about understanding your customer’s needs and turning those problems into features. For this weeks milestone task you will return to the initiative canvas you started last week and complete the business readiness, value and effort sections. You will also complete a value framework canvas.
• Week 3:
  Week three is where things start to ramp up. This week you will be introduced to methods for performing market analysis and analysing your competitors. You will complete a competitor analysis framework. This week also looks at go to market strategy where you will consider (at a very high level) things like who your market is, customers, delivery channels, price and positioning. This week you also need to complete an additional two initiative canvases that solve your problem in different ways.
• Week 4:
  Week four covers a lot of ground. It starts with content that touches on lean product development and talks about using a test and learn approach. Next up is an introduction to roadmap planning. There is just enough content here to support you in creating a very basic roadmap in your milestone document. The week closes with an introduction the idea of using data to make decisions before walking you through some common prioritisation frameworks. To put your learning to good use, there is a milestone task that has you select a framework and evaluate your 3 initiative canvases against each other. The canvas you prioritise here is the one you will work with going forward.
• Week 5:
  Now that you have selected your winning initiative canvas you have a more concrete idea of what you are working with. First up we are going to learn how to define success metrics. This section looks at our product goals, the types of things you might want your product achieve, different kinds of success (it isn’t always about the money). We then run through a bunch of example metrics and finish off with a look at NPS and other frameworks for measuring customer satisfaction. Next, we are introduced to the concept of an MVP - What it is and what it isn’t. At this point, you will define the MVP for your project. Finally, we kick off a whirlwind introduction to Agile which will be covered in further detail next week. You will break your MVP down into epics and stories and then jump into Jira to plan a development sprint. It seems basic, but it’s probably a good introduction for anyone who has not been part of it before.
• Week 6:
  In week six we continue planning our development sprint with an introduction to workload estimation. This section also introduces the concept of working with your wider development team to review your plans and assumptions. We revisit agile and talk more about its methodologies. The meat of week 6 is a section on design sprints. You will be introduced to the design sprint process and plan a design sprint for your own MVP.
• Week 7:
  Week seven starts with a very brief introduction to UX and UI and the differences between them. We then look at the product launch. This mostly consists of checklists, ways of receiving feedback on your product, and reminders to go back and look at your go-to market strategy.
• Week 8:
  The final week is all about reflection and working on your milestone document.

What worked well

• Having the milestone document to help you navigate the course and put the theory of the webinars and LMS into practice was a huge plus.
• Both mentors in my round were friendly, helpful and had extensive real world experience.
• The breadth of the content was great. It felt like we were touching on all aspects of the discipline.
• Having the class in a Slack room together was actually kind of cool. There was a decent amount of interaction and lots of support from peers and mentors for people who had questions.
• RMIT Online has student support staff in Slack, and they were very responsive.

What could have been improved

• This one is on me I guess, but it was tough to stay on top of the volume of content that is being presented. You really need a full day each week to dedicate to this course.
• There were a few points in the course where the mentors noted oddities in the LMS notes. For example, using a prioritisation framework to evaluate the initiative canvases seemed like an odd choice vs using the framework to evaluate features to include in the MVP. In cases like this it was great to have the mentors to clarify how some of these tools might be used differently in the real world.
• Maybe it was because I am from a design background, but it was unclear how we could ever really understand our MVP properly and break it down into epics and user stories without considering the user journey in some form.