Do you know that most startups or innovation projects fail not for a lack of great ideas, but for bad execution in bringing their ideas to life?  This course prepares you for the real journey of taking a technology-based product idea into a successful reality that becomes a part of people’s lives.

This course is about bringing up a new technology-based product, launching it into the market, steering it toward success, and managing it effectively throughout its life cycle.

You will learn to become a great product leader (a.k.a., product manager), a role that is a reincarnation of the spirit of the entrepreneur in the more structured form that can collaborate at scale in large organizations. The role was recently popularized by The Big Tech, as well as the companies where technology is the driver — as opposed to a support function — of the businesses, thereby enabling such companies to overcome traditional barriers, attain agility, scale, and drive transformation in their industries. The role of a product manager is strategic in nature, whereas closely related roles such as product owner and technology project manager are more tactical.  As such, Product Strategy is the primary pillar of this course. But there is more to product management than just strategy. A product manager is the CEO of the product, with the ultimate responsibility for the success of the product. Driving toward that success entails strategizing, managing the design and development, managing related operations, launching/shipping, and marketing of it throughout the product’s life cycle.

As a discipline, Product Management represents the state of the art of the efforts to reorient the organizations from function-based (silos) toward empowerment-based (squads), with decision-making power decentralized to the level where the business actually exchanges the most basic units of value with its customers.  That basic unit, with which a business exchanges value with customers, is the product or service.  Designed to arm a company to adapt nimbly against the backdrop of constant disruption, product management integrates the essence of innovation and execution into a coherent practice.  It is something that all thriving startups have learned to do well, and which has become best practice in the modern corporate world where innovation and agility are table stakes.  Product Management encompasses both strategy and operations, as well as spanning from leadership to technicalities for a single product vertical.  As such it is also a great focal point through which to understand how modern tech-based businesses work. 

Whether you’re a startup founder, a corporate intrapreneur, or a technology project manager, the skills you will learn in this course will equip you to innovate more fiercely, execute more productively, and collaborate more effectively to make a real impact to the world through tech-based products and services that not only deliver real benefits but also win the hearts and minds of users.

As a user, the products you have chosen to be a part of your life tells quite a story about who you are.  As a product manager, the product you ultimately ship sums up the myriad decisions you have made to shape it and add it to someone’s life.  If you want to know the joy of having your product make people’s lives better, this course is for you.