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Product Management Fundamentals in 4 Weeks

Published by O'Reilly Media, Inc.

Beginner content levelBeginner

Key concepts, frameworks, and tools for building products users love

This event will be presented in a new format that brings the audience into the action. The first 50 people to join get optional camera and mic access for the opportunity to ask questions and interact directly with your trainer and peers. You can turn your camera off at any time and you can always interact through chat. Please read the O’Reilly learning platform code of conduct

Course outcomes

  • Understand the product management lifecycle
  • Learn how to create a strategic road map
  • Explore metrics and analytics for product management
  • Understand the PM interview process step-by-step and participate in mock interviews

Join expert Marily Nika to take a deep dive into the fundamentals of the role of the product manager as you create your own product end-to-end. You’ll learn how to construct user personas, craft user stories and use cases, come up with creative solutions for users’ pain points, and create an impactful, strategic road map. You’ll also explore analytics and metrics in product management, understanding how to measure success and how to choose the metrics that matter the most. At the end of each week, you’ll be given an interactive scenario-based challenge that will help you determine whether you’ve mastered the skills taught that week.

Week 1: The Product Management Role, Product Lifecycle, and Skill Set

Week 2: Use Cases, User Personas, Solving User Pain Points

Week 3: Creating Strategic Road Maps, Prioritizing Features

Week 4: Product Strategy, Pitching, Storytelling, Interviews Step-by-Step

What you’ll learn and how you can apply it

  • Come up with impactful ideas for products
  • Identify user pain points
  • Effectively present your ideas to stakeholders
  • Avoid common pitfalls

This live event is for you because...

  • You’re an aspiring/current product manager who wants to level up your skills.
  • You’re a company founder who wants to create a product strategy.
  • You want to staff your company with product managers.

Prerequisites

Recommended preparation:

Recommended follow-up::

Schedule

The time frames are only estimates and may vary according to how the class is progressing.

Week 1: The Product Management Role, Product Lifecycle, and Skill Set

Introduction to the product development lifecycle (65 minutes)

  • Presentation: The emergence of product management; the product management lifecycle; how the role and skill set change across the cycle; obtaining and polishing the required skills; the product management triad (PM, engineering, and UX); working with each partner in the process; differences between product managers, program managers, and technical program managers
  • Break

Ideation and creativity for product managers (65 minutes)

  • Presentation: Case studies of popular products (Tesla, Fitbit, Amazon, Airbnb); frameworks and strategies for coming up with impactful ideas; common pitfalls
  • Hands-on exercise
  • Break

Road mapping and tracking progress (35 minutes)

  • Presentation: Sample Road maps and tools to track progress

Wrap-up and Q&A (15 minutes)

Week 2: Use Cases, User Personas, Solving User Pain Points

User personas and segmentation (60 minutes)

  • Presentation: Figuring out who your users are; creating user segments/personas; crafting use cases and user stories; frameworks and tools; case studies of popular products (TikTok, Skype, Venmo)
  • Hands-on exercise: Explore user personas
  • Break

Identifying user pain points (60 minutes)

  • Presentation and demos: Empathy map; understanding pain points; crafting journey maps; prioritizing pain points; common pitfalls
  • Break

Minimum viable products (50 minutes)

  • Presentation: Crafting MVPs; case studies from popular products/MVPs; tools and frameworks used for MVPs; common pitfalls
  • Hands-on exercise: Explore MVPs

Wrap-up and Q&A (10 minutes)

Week 3: Creating Strategic Road Maps, Prioritizing Features

Road mapping (80 minutes)

  • Presentation and demo: Case studies (Oura Ring, Tesla, Google); tools used for road mapping; frameworks for prioritizing features
  • Hands-on exercise: Explore road mapping
  • Break

Defining and quantifying user impact (90 minutes)

  • Presentation: Metrics and analytics for product management; the user acquisition funnel

Wrap-up and Q&A (15 minutes)

Week 4: Product Strategy, Pitching, Leadership, Storytelling

Strategy for product managers (60 minutes)

  • Presentation: Convincing stakeholders; pitching; storytelling
  • Hands-on exercise
  • PM interviews step-by-step
  • Break

Wrap-up and Q&A (30 minutes)

Your Instructor

Marily Nika

Dr. Marily Nika is an award-winning GenAI product leader with over 13 years of experience building AI products at Google and Meta. She’s also one of the world’s foremost AI educators, as well as an author, TED AI speaker, Harvard Business School fellow, and founder of the AI Product Academy, which offers AI product management certifications. Dr. Nika holds a PhD in machine learning and writes about AI at https://marily.substack.com.

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Skill covered

Product Management