Data-driven product management
Published by O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Using data to diagnose, plan, and prioritize
Product managers have to work with the goals provided by senior leadership, but they must also influence organizational goal setting themselves. Join expert product manager Matt LeMay to learn how to use quantitative and qualitative data to diagnose potential problems, plan product launches and strategies, and prioritize feature ideas and requests. Through a combination of lecture and hands-on exercises, you'll understand the importance of data as a driver of action, get a feel for both the power and the limitations of data, and gain experience with strategies to help you make, document, and communicate data-driven decisions, regardless of your technical knowledge and formal data analysis skills.
What you’ll learn and how you can apply it
By the end of this live online course, you’ll understand:
- How to use qualitative and quantitative data to inform decisions and priorities
- The limitations of data-driven decision making
- The importance of documenting and testing assumptions that cannot immediately be validated by available data
And you’ll be able to:
- Speak more confidently to what a data-driven approach might mean for your work and your organization
- Document the assumptions in your data-driven decision making to enable intelligent course correction
- Set clear and actionable goals against which to prioritize product features and requests
This live event is for you because...
- You're a product manager who wants to better leverage data in your decision-making process.
- You're a product manager in an organization that has provided a mandate to be data-driven, but you're not sure how to activate this in your day-to-day work.
- You work with product managers and are struggling to communicate about (and make decisions based on) data.
Prerequisites
None
Assignments to be completed prior to the training:
- Watch Dan McKinley’s talk, Data-Driven Products Now!
Recommended Preparation:
- Getting Started with Project Management (live online training)
- Connecting and Aligning Stakeholders (live online training)
Recommended follow-up:
Schedule
The time frames are only estimates and may vary according to how the class is progressing.
What does "data-driven product management" mean? (50 minutes)
- Lecture: Three steps to truly data-driven product management—have a strong point of view about which metrics matter and why, document assumptions and ambiguities, and uncover the “why” behind bad news and good news
- Hands-on exercise: Explore strategies for common analytics scenarios
Break (10 minutes)
Using data to make go-to-market decisions (50 minutes)
- Lecture: Seeking out and synthesizing publicly available data to make important decisions about product development and go-to-market strategy
- Hands-on exercise: Use publicly available data to make an important decision about where a new product might launch, documenting ambiguities and assumptions rather than ignoring them
Break (10 minutes)
Data-driven prioritization (50 minutes)
- Lecture: A goals-first approach to prioritization
- Hands-on exercise: Prioritize a set of feature requests against two different sets of goals—one with clear quantitative success metrics and one without; discuss how the Objectives and Key Results (OKR) framework can be used to set goals that combine quantitative specificity with qualitative inspiration
Wrap-up and Q&A (10 minutes)
Your Instructor
Matt LeMay
Matt LeMay is an internationally recognized product leader, author, and consultant. He is the author of Agile for Everybody (O’Reilly Media, 2018) and Product Management in Practice (Second Edition O'Reilly Media, 2022), and has helped build and scale product management practices at companies ranging from early-stage startups to Fortune 500 enterprises. Matt is co-founder and partner at Sudden Compass, a consultancy that has helped organizations like Spotify, Google, Clorox, and Procter & Gamble put customer centricity into practice. Previously, Matt worked as Senior Product Manager at music startup Songza (acquired by Google), and Head of Consumer Product at Bitly. Matt is also a musician, recording engineer, and the author of a book about singer-songwriter Elliott Smith. He lives in London, England.