A list of LinkedIn Learning Courses for Product Managers
Recently I started to use LinkedIn Learning, I was impressed with the number of great courses and content they have. My company makes available its subscription to all employees, and I have been using this tool more and more. You can find an infinite number of great courses. During my research, I found great tools for product managers.
Product managers are a valuable part of the team, we’re the leaders who manage all aspects of the product development from before launch through understanding when it is time for product retirement. Whether you want to become a product manager or simply become a better member of a product team, these courses will help you to understand the process and skills you’ll need to be a stellar product manager.
I’ve created a list of the courses you should consider taking if you want to switch your career to product management or want to improve your skills in product management.
▪️ Product Management First Steps
Course by: Doug Winnie
If you’re not a product manager, I recommend you start with this course. Doug Winnie is the principal staff instructor and a former Adobe principal product manager. He provides a product management overview and explains the six stages of the product lifecycle, which are research, plan, build, release, refine, and retire. Winnie explains the daily product management activities, including introducing you to the product team members, walking you through interactive ways to help define your product, and outlining the skills a product manager needs to make a positive impact in the organization.
Learning Objectives:
- Types of products and industries
- Leading through influence
- Understanding your team
- Using an Agile or Waterfall development cycle
- Managing your product lifecycle
- Researching your market, customers, and ideas
- Planning the product
- Building the product
- Releasing the product
- Refining the product
- Understanding when it’s time to retire the product
▪️ Transitioning to Product Management
Course by: Cole Mercer
I watched a bunch of Cole Mercer courses on LinkedIn Learning. I really enjoy when instructors talk about transitioning to product management without coming from a traditional product management background. Mercer worked as an instructor at General Assembly, Udemy, and also at SoundCloud. In this course, he shares how you can prepare for this new role. There’s a special part about portfolios and online branding. Sometimes when we think about a product manager or even an associate product manager role, we think this is far away and out there, and he gives some tips of how you can leverage your current work to transition to a product manager role. He also provides tips about the interview process and how to be a successful product manager.
Learning Objectives:
- Product management overview
- Skills needed
- Your branding — portfolio and online brand
- Transitioning to associate product manager or product manager in your current company
- Transitioning to product management elsewhere
- Best places to look and apply for a product management job
- How to interview for a product manager role
- How to achieve success as a product manager
▪️ Product Management and Development Foundation
Course by: Cole Mercer
Like anything in life, you need to start. Cole Mercer talks about what you need to do to create your foundation as a product manager and the skills you’ll need to become a successful product manager. Mercer teaches you about the three different types of product manager roles and also discusses what the average product manager’s day looks like. Isn’t it wonderful? In this fast-paced environment it is extremely important to understand the four major phases of the product lifecycle. He also talks about my favorite subject — product management methodologies including Agile, Kanban, Scrum, Waterfall, and their differences. To summarize, Mercer briefly talks about an important part of the process: user experience.
Learning Objectives:
- What is a product manager?
- Product vs. project management
- Life as a product manager
- Product development lifecycle and process
- Types of product development
- Getting ideas
- Getting to the user’s real needs
▪️ Metrics for Product Managers
Course by: Cole Mercer
Using metrics is a critical skill for product managers, and they really need to know how to use and take advantage of metrics to learn more about their product and users. I really believe that if you nail down and learn the key metrics to measure your success, you’re going to be a super badass product manager. In this course, Cole Mercer explains the measurement part of a product manager role and explains how this can help you to launch your career in product development. He introduces the metrics you can use to benchmark and measure your performance, along with some frameworks, and the most important part: how to incorporate metrics into your daily routine.
Learning Objectives:
- Key metrics to measure success
- Benchmark metrics
- Measure your performance
- Framework HEART (stands for Happiness, Engagement, Adoption, Retention, Task Success)
- Framework AARRR (stands for Acquisition, Activation, Retention, Referral, and Revenue)
- Theory to practice
- How to set up yourself to succeed
- Include metrics in your routine
▪️ Product Management: Building a Product Roadmap
Course by: Eldad Persky and Teg Grenager
The product roadmap is basically one of the most important tools for product development. The product roadmap should be strong and as concise as possible, because it will support your product strategy along with the business objectives. It needs to be your guide and what you often reference to make decisions and answer critical questions. This course is developed by Eldad Persky, who is SVP, Global Head of Demand Product at Oath, and Teg Grenager, who is the CEO of Uncommon Co. The course shows you how to build a product roadmap for your business to gain critical stakeholder buy-in. It also shows the tools and techniques necessary to map your organization’s projects to ensure your team is as efficient as possible and working on the right projects at the right time.
Learning Objectives:
- What is a product roadmap?
- Roadmaps in Agile organizations
- Selecting stakeholders
- Researching customers
- Identifying milestones
- Estimating effort
- Maintaining the roadmap
▪️ Competitive and Market Analysis for Product Managers
Course by: Cole Mercer and Evan Kimbrell
Some people might think, how is that related to product management? I’d say IN EVERY WAY! Competitive and market analysis correlates to product success. The instructors of this course are Cole Mercer and Evan Kimbrell, who is Founder and Director of Sprintkick. As a product manager you need to know everything about your market and your competition. Knowing that helps you understand what features you should build and what features your product is missing. In this course, they give you practical tips for conducting competitive and market analysis and how to find direct, indirect, and potential competitors in your space. They also teach how to build a feature comparison table to analyze your product and identify its gaps.
Learning Objectives:
- Competitive and market analysis
- Product success
- Understand the competition
- Market size
- Practical tips
- How you know if your market is big enough
- Build a feature comparison table
- Analyze product gaps
- Tips for busy product managers
▪️ Wireframing for Product Managers
Course by: Cole Mercer and Evan Kimbrell
In this course, Cole Mercer and Evan Kimbrell teach you how to conceptualize your idea with simple sketches that later will be refined into interactive wireframes. It’s amazing how they demonstrate how to build out ideas for a mobile app or website using only paper and pen, and later on, you can refine it into an interactive mockup and prototypes. They also give some software recommendations for more complex interactions. Finally, Kimbrell reverse-engineers the YouTube website to show how effective a sketch needs to be to translate into a successful product.
Learning Objectives:
- Kickstart the project management process
- Conceptualize ideas
- Simple sketches
- Interactive wireframes
- Interactive mockups
- Interactive sketches
- Prototypes
- How to build ideas using pen and paper
- Software recommendations for complex interactions
- Reverse-engineering popular sites
- How effective a good sketch can be
▪️ UX Foundations: Research
Course by: Amanda Stockwell
Amanda Stockwell is a UX research and strategy consultant, who has worked with Fortune 100 companies and startups since 2008. She mentions that user experience is all about tailoring the design of a product or service to fit the needs of users. In this course, she introduces the principles of user experience. I loved that her goal in this course is to make you integrate UX research into your everyday life in the design and development process. Stockwell talks about how UX research can help you to understand and find the answers about your customers.
Learning Objectives:
- An overview of research methods, including usability testing, interviewing, eye tracking, surveys, and more
- A review of the main types of research, including quantitative and qualitative, behavioral and attitudinal, and moderated vs. unmoderated
- Determining the right methodologies based on organizational environment, client type, and project stage
- Targeting the right research participants
- Crafting the right questions in the right way
- Analyzing and presenting your data
▪️ SQL Essential Training
Course by Bill Weinman
I love data, and I believe a product manager should know how to manipulate data. The most popular language used for creating, retrieving, updating, and deleting data from a database is SQL. In this course, Bill Weinman, a software engineer consultant at The BearHeart Group and owner at BW.org, designed the SQL Essential Training to show you how to retrieve and manage data efficiently. Weinman teaches you to create tables; define relationships; manipulate strings, numbers, and dates using triggers to automate actions; and use subselects and views. He also includes real-world examples of building a simple and complete database application. Hooray!
Learning Objectives:
- Understanding SQL terminology and syntax
- Creating new tables
- Inserting and updating data
- Writing basic SQL queries
- Sorting and filtering
- Accessing related tables with JOIN
- Working with strings
- Understanding numeric types
- Using aggregate functions and transactions
- Automating data with triggers
- Creating views
- Defining functions in PHP
▪️ Customer Development for Product Managers
Course by: Jay Clouse
Yup, you need to understand your customer needs to create successful products. One of the product manager responsibilities is identifying your customers’ needs to create better products for them. In this course, Jay Clouse, the founder of Unreal Collective and co-host and producer of upside.fm, talks about how to leverage the customer development process to validate your learnings and assumptions before designing or developing the entire product. Clouse teaches how to craft your own problem hypothesis, develop surveys, analyze the results, perform UX research, and conduct effective user interviews.
Learning Objectives:
- Four stages of customer development (Customer Discovery, Customer Validation, Customer Creation, and Company Building)
- Creating a problem hypothesis
- Performing user research
- Defining your target market
- Creating effective surveys
- Conducting effective user interviews
- Analyzing interview results
▪️ Product Innovation for Product Managers
Course by: Karen Holst
We all know how important innovation is in the market in which we work. Innovation might define how successful your product will be and grow. Karen Holst is a mentor for the Stanford Latino Entrepreneur Leaders Program and worked as product manager and director of platform & operations at IDEO. It’s extremely important for a product manager to understand how to approach each stage of the product innovation process, starting with identifying the right problem to launching and scaling or retiring. In this course, Holst shares practical strategies along with tools you can use to facilitate the creation of innovative products. She mentions how important it is to understand your company culture and how to navigate in different phases of your product.
Learning Objectives:
- What product innovation is and isn’t
- Mapping your product innovation portfolio
- How business objectives set the stage for innovation
- Identifying the right problems
- Human-centered and data-centered innovation
- Exploring the ideation phase
- Effective testing and prototyping
- Launching and scaling
I hope you enjoyed this post. I really enjoyed these courses. How about you? Do you have a favorite? I’d love to hear your recommendations!
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