Why I’m Taking Udacity’s Digital Marketing Nanodegree Program
A few months ago, I made the switch from engineering to technical product management at Udacity, and am now responsible for one of our core learning products, our Android Nanodegree courses and programs. My role as Product Lead spans everything from user acquisition to product development to hiring, and profit and loss. One area where I’m looking to grow is in digital marketing — specifically, knowing who my user is, and how best to reach and engage with them.
Luckily for me, the Digital Marketing Nanodegree program launched shortly after I accepted this role, and it seemed like a perfect opportunity to expand my skills, while also dogfooding one of our company’s hottest new products. One of the many wonderful things about working at Udacity is having access to some of the best educational content in the world, and being encouraged to learn on the job.
I just finished the first set of lessons on marketing fundamentals and submitted my first project last week. I was pleasantly surprised by how quickly I received feedback on the project (within an hour). After making the requested changes, I passed (yay!), and moved on to learn about content marketing strategies.
It’s still early in my journey (I have 9 more projects to do!), but I can say that just learning the vernacular of digital marketing has made me feel more confident and capable when communicating with our marketing team, and when talking about marketing in general. Whenever you’re exposed to a new functional skill — whether it’s programming or marketing or finance — there’s alway a learning curve around simply knowing what words to use when. I already feel more at ease with marketing syntax, which, from my experience learning to code, I recognize as one of the earliest hurdles to overcome in my learning path.
On to the next lesson! Wish me luck!
