Software Product Leadership - Product Management 101

Welcome to Software Product Leadership - Product Management 101, a short course focused on Product Management(PM) as it relates to building Software that customers love and leading Software Developers by influence i.e. without direct or formal authority.

Product Manager may look like a fancy title, but it is serious work. Digital landscape is always changing, user expectations are rising and there is simply immense competition in the marketplace due to rising dominance of incumbents and ever increasing number of startups in the tech space.

As you start your PM journey, we want to share our learnings from being Product Managers in different PM roles at Microsoft and other places and as technology entrepreneurs starting companies .

The course is designed as a crash course to provide you with an overview of important Business, User Experience, Leadership, Execution and Measurement(or Business Analysis) topics and ideas you need to be aware of as you start your journey and to give you more than enough knowledge to decide whether PM is the right career for you or not.

Syllabus Overview

Section 1: Introduction and Business Concepts

• Role of a Product Manager

• An overview of business skills needed to run your products and features.

• A deep dive into performing competitive research.

• How to keep up with prevailing market trends and how to think about what features, apps or products to build next.

Section 2: Leadership and Teamwork

• How to create a pitch for your ideas.

• An overview of how to do estimation of time and resources needed when trying to get your idea funded.

• Understanding the dynamics and the culture of the team that you are in

• Best practices to avoid isolation and mis-alignment for yourself and others.

• Tips on socializing your ideas and seeking feedback on them from others in respectful and non-intrusive ways.

Section 3: User Experience (UX) Design

• Developing user stories and making use of personas to communicate product and feature ideas.

• Basics of visual design and working with designers to come up with alternatives (explorations) to bring the ideas to reality.

• Understanding the non-visual elements of design such as gestures, responsiveness, etc.

• An overview of common methods for performing user research, such as flash feedback, etc.

• What is A/B testing and how and why to A/B test different ideas.

Section 4: Execution and Evaluation (Data Driven-ness)

• Writing functional specifications.

• Unblocking Engineers by taking care of non-technical issues all the way from legal things such as open source licenses to UI strings that could block your team's progress.

• Understanding your role as the person who may be responsible for communication with partners.

• Role of Data - Understand common metrics such as Monthly Active Users, Daily Active Users, Net Promotor Score and so on - What are they about? How to use them to make product decisions!

• Special topic: A day in the life of a PM.

Section 5: Product Management interviews and Career advancement strategies

• Pro-tips for preparing for your Product Management interview.

• References to books, blogs and materials you need to read to get started for your PM interview.

• A peek into career strategies that Dean applied to continuously grow his career for 20+ years.

• A framework for figuring out your career advancement as a PM