Not so long ago, the job of product manager was about assessing market data, creating requirements, and managing the hand-off to sales/marketing. Maybe you’d talk to a customer somewhere in there and they’d tell you what features they wanted. But companies that manage product that way are dying. Being a product person today is a new game, and product managers are at the center of it. Today, particularly if your product is mostly digital, you might update it several times a day. Massive troves of data are available for making decisions and powering AI's . At the same time, deep insights into customer motivation and experience are more important than ever. The job of the modern product manager is to charter a direction and create a successful working environment for all the actors involved in product success. It’s not a simple job or an easy job, but it is a meaningful job where you’ll be learning all the time. This course will help you along your learning journey and prepare you with the skills and perspective you need to: Create the actionable focus to successfully manage your product (week 1) Focus your work using modern product management methods (week 2) Manage new products and explore new product ideas (week 3) Manage and amplify existing products (week 4) This course is ideal for current product or general managers interested in today's modern product management methods. Please note that there are new additions to this course and subtitles for these videos will soon be available. This course was developed with the generous support of the Batten Institute at UVA’s Darden School of Business. The Batten Institute’s mission is to improve the world through entrepreneurship and innovation: www.batteninstitute.org.
KB
The instructor was successful in explaining concepts, as if his listeners are at a basic level of background and understanding of digital product management, while doing it on a steady pacing.
MT
Very well structured course with a meaningful overview of methods and approaches to digital product management. I will certainly implement some if not all of what I learned in my own organization.
JB
I liked the course content, even though i do not work - yet - with product. It gave me a good overview of what to expect in the near future, when i expect to be able to put the knowledge into action.
MP
Well designed content covering all important aspects of the Digital Product Management. Loved the fact that the content was delivered by industry experts who are actually practicing what they teach.
JW
I really enjoyed this course! The content was interesting and relevant and excellently delivered by Alex Cowan in the videos. I'm looking forward to working through the rest of this Specialization
PV
Very informative and well structured. Alex is very knowledgeable and he is capable of transfer his experience into practicable real business examples. Well done guys, I enjoyed taking this course!
SG
It was a really wonderful and structured course for Product Managers. There are many techniques which I didn't know and can use now to my product. Recommended course for all type of Product Managers.
JW
I'm totally a Newbie about Digital Product Management. I learn a lot of New Things. I hope this Certificate will advance my career. Thank you Professor Alex Cowan for teaching me a lot of things.
LK
I enjoyed this course very much! This course helped me ground myself in some of the core principles of product management and I'm confident that I will take what I've learned and put it into practice.
AL
Weeks 2-4 were great; week 1 was more tedious (I found). The class does provide useful tools throughout the weeks and also equips the learner with appropriate terminology tp use with management.
MR
I was looking into getting into PM, I think it s a great overview of the role with practical tools to keep in mind. Loved the course, will make more confident in my next role and interviews.
HS
Very insightful course for people trying to learn what product management is, in fact it is equally good for product managers to review and reflect on their current practices and focus areas.
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it was mentioned that the course is for free but later after completion they are asking for money for certificate
I felt like I went from only a vague understanding of what it means to be a product manager to a much more focussed view of what this role entails, common best practices, experiences from other product managers, etc. This course was great for helping me decide if I wanted to pursue Product Management as the next stage in my career seriously or not, and I am glad to say that I am hooked and when I become a successful product manager this course would have been instrumental in retrospect.
The course is interesting indeed, but lot of reviews here are right in pointing out that there are also some problems that could be addressed. TO be more specific 1) Lot of content and not enough depth, so lot of topics get only surfaced and not fully explained and understood: 2) This idea of the teacher to scribble/write on top of the slides while explaining is not the best, at least for me. The final slides are very hard to read, and the original slides are not enough cause they missed annotations; 3) More practical examples would have been beneficials
I liked the course content, even though i do not work - yet - with product. It gave me a good overview of what to expect in the near future, when i expect to be able to put the knowledge into action.
Too much subjective information. Little info about tools, models and techniques. Overall ok
I understand that this is a multiple choice type assessment course, however many of the questions were created based on the professor's definitions, and quite often they used trickery around what is very grey lines between the choices. I felt in many cases many of the answers were highly subjective and could depend on multiple variables, that were left out. A better course would be like the Gamification one I did, wherein I explained my rationale given scenarios. I feel overall this would be a more reinforcing method of learning these theories.
The course is just amazing. Thanks Alex for a great course. I am now motivated to learn more about PM roles. If you are interested in this course you can go through the course review -
1. Course is addictive and contains a comprehensive introduction to core principles and exciting frameworks/methods used in Product Management.
2. Most interesting part is when the real Product Managers- Nir Eyal , David Chait, David Bland, Tamara Carleton, Ph.D., Eric Qi Dong ,Kiran Kadambi, Andrew Kritzer, Jim Rose , Greg Cohen and Nastia Root, talk about how they applied those core principles and frameworks in their use cases. Thanks everyone.
3. The major part of this course focusses on the importance of achieving customer desirability through agile methodologies.
4. Teaches some great frameworks such as Business Model Canvas, Hook Framework and many others. I really loved the idea of Hook Framework, Lean Startup and Corporate Innovation Pipeline.
5. Touches upon the importance of Design Thinking in developing great processes for identifying personas, problems, and alternatives.
It was a really wonderful and structured course for Product Managers. There are many techniques which I didn't know and can use now to my product. Recommended course for all type of Product Managers.
I enjoyed this course very much! This course helped me ground myself in some of the core principles of product management and I'm confident that I will take what I've learned and put it into practice.
Well designed content covering all important aspects of the Digital Product Management. Loved the fact that the content was delivered by industry experts who are actually practicing what they teach.
I've been a Product Manager for a little over a year now, and have been working in the digital sector for over two. This is a really great course, consolidated much of my existing Product Management knowledge and built on other areas where I was lacking. I have taken notes to use as my 'cheat sheets' in my day to day Product Management to ensure I don't forget to implement things from it. Recommend!
The course was very practical in its approach with a lot of good sessions with industry practitioners. Also, I learnt a lot of industry & function-specific lingo, tools and frameworks that will help with a structures approach to product management. Alex as a faculty comes across as very friendly and humorous. However, I felt he could have made his lectures a little more structured rather than impromptu. All in all, the course serves as a great primer to product management and one needs to apply the concepts learnt in practice to gain fully from the course.
I'm not satisfied with this course. The content is interesting but explained in a very unprofessional way.
frustration course, too much empty thoughts and little specificity. It was very difficult to listen and assimilate the information at the speed with which the teacher read it. Wasted time
Great course, very educational and full of helpful information. The only thing that would benefit me would be some sort of step by step example of running a project from beginning to end. There are plenty of examples in the course on how to perform specific methodologies, but by the end I was really hoping for a big picture example of one project going through the whole process and using each tool along the way. Aside from that, an amazing course!
Overall it was a great course, even as an experienced technologist I liked reviewing some of these topics or hearing different takes on them. It's very hard to give due diligence to data science and analytics topics in 5 minute videos. I found the first part of week 4 hard to get through, it was just not as engaging as week 1 and week 2.
Pros: Perfectly set and aligned.
Alex Cowan's way of presentation is engaging and does end up bringing a smile.
Guest Lectures, industry experts sessions are lit.
Cons: Quizzes have answer options which are ambiguous.
Highly Theoretical at some parts.
I wish there was an exercise and not just quizzes.
The first module was great, from there on a lot of the meat of the course is similar to Agile, but just packaged differently. They are a few noisy question in the MCQ too. It would be better value for money at a lower price point
The slides were not informative enough, and the fact that the professor was constantly circling and underlining things on them was distracting and dirty. In addition, I found the division of videos into such small increments and dividing videos into parts was unnecessary.