The goal of this course is to give you a practical introduction to product management and provide tools that will help you in your career. We will use an entrepreneurial based product management framework to structure the course.  Course lectures and assignments will be tied to this framework.  The course framework will guide


the course lectures, homework, and exams.  The goal is to give you practical advice and tools that will make you a skilled product manager.

Course Topics

  • Role of a Product Manager-  What does a project manager do each day?  How much do they make?  What makes a successful product manager?
  • Product Market Fit- What do you sell and who is the buyers?  Nothing else matters if you don’t get this right.
  • Development-  Defines who builds the product and how you interact with the team.  This is not a class on project management, but we will talk about how to most efficiently work with the people who are building your product.
  • Influence-  What type of person do you need to be?  What are the roles in the company?  What are their needs?  What is your personal brand?  How will you manage that brand by helping others?
  • Finance-  We will build a product specific P&L.  You must know how your product is contributing to the business.  We will talk about how to manage and win over the team that will pay for your product.
  • Sales-  You will need to be the chief salesperson for your product.  You will also need to train and support the sales organization.
  • Marketing-  You must learn how to develop a lead generating machine for your product.
  • Operations-  Each day you will interact with the customer support and account support teams that service your product.  These teams trouble shoot customer support problems, fix bugs and renew and upsell customers.

This approach assumes that you are the CEO of your product (the product manager), but you must govern by influence and not authority.

We are taking a reflexive approach to this class, which means that we might change the content that is taught and how it’s taught and graded.  We reserve the right to adapt the class to the students and to opportunities that present themselves.  This is an AI native class. AI will be used in every aspect of the class.