Transcripts
1. Course Introduction: Hey everyone, and welcome to this introductory course for those who are exploring the possibilities of moving into the product management field. We all now live in a very unusual world shaped by global pandemic, uncertainty, and accelerated digital transformation in nearly every industry. Product managers are becoming one of the main drivers of innovation, growth and operational success. Product managers salaries and hiring trends are rising giving people in this field, job security and confidence in their career advancement. Research growth and demand for PMs, now is very good moment to consider joining the product management tribe. This video series will help you take the first steps on this journey. My name is Anna and I'll be your instructor throughout the course. I started my journey in product management 15 years back from being an IT and management consultant and then transitioning to a full on startup PM. I've built products from scratch for different industries, commodity trading, logistics, natural language processing, and e-learning, and also for different markets from Europe to Asia. I've already helped my students to successfully transition to the industry from other functions, such as engineering, design, operations, and finance. This course is a summary of the things I usually share with people when they ask me how to start their journey in product management. In the course, we'll go through PMs responsibilities in the end-to-end product development process. Look at different types of product managers, including the merchant ones. Also discuss three strategies for building relevant experience to transition to the role from different backgrounds, either technical or business. The course also includes assessment to find transferable skills that you can immediately apply to the product manager role and those skills a way you need to improve the most. I hope that you're excited to learn more about the product management world and find out if the PM role is right right you. Let's get started.
2. What does a PM do, really?: Hey everyone. Welcome back. In this lecture, we are going to start off by covering the fundamentals first. We will talk about who a Product Manager is and how this role fits within the organization. The role of a product manager, or PM, for short, is one of the most exciting roles in tech teams and startups right now. PMs are in charge of the key ingredients of every successful business, its product. They are directly involved in making core strategic growth-driving decisions, and it's not surprising that they often go on to found their own start-ups or join executive teams. Sounds amazing, doesn't it? If you ask me to give a more formal definition of the role, I'd say that it may be tricky since the PMs' responsibilities and scope of work are not set in stone, and in fact, may vary from company A to company B, or even within one company. How's that even possible? The changes are driven by manufacturers. For example, business life cycle stage. The tasks of the product management function will be different depending on whether we are talking about a startup or an established company. Who will be using the product? Do millions of consumers use it daily for personal or social needs, or do professional users, such as lawyers or educators, need the product to perform their work by their industry or geography? Both factors can demand a lot of specific knowledge from the PM. For example, accounting software that works like magic in country A will require major changes when launch into country B due to the differences in accounting rules and standards. However, regardless of many factors that could influence a PM scope of work, we still can define key pillars that will be common for every PM out there. But before that, let's pause for a second and answer the question. What kind of product will we be talking about? Our course is focused on digital or software-enabled products or services. For example, it can be online shop and marketplaces like Amazon or Shopee, or business applications like HubSpot, CRM, or Intercom messaging platform and of course, consumer apps we all use daily and which don't require any introduction. Now, let's come back to the main topic of the video and define things that are common for every successful PM. First and foremost, the PM is the one who gets things done when it comes to everything and anything related to the product. From prioritizing what individual problems to solve, to making the call about whether their entire product is ready for market launch. The PM is the one in charge. If you work as the PM, you cannot say anymore that something is not your job and shifted to another team. You do whatever it takes to make your product successful. To do their job, PMs work closely with product designers and engineers who together with PM formed the so-called core product management team. Despite what the word manager may suggest, PMs don't have direct authority on their closest team members. The reason behind this is quite obvious. The PM's role is above all about setting the directions and priorities for the team and providing them with necessary information and insights. PMs by no means dictate into engineers or designers how to write code or create user experience. They work hand in hand as partners on the journey to deliver the best possible product out there. Apart from the core product team, PMs collaborate with many other people within and outside the organization; customers and users, executive team, sales, marketing, customer success team, finance, legal. The list of stakeholders every PM is dealing with on a regular basis is long and varies depending on the nature of the business and industry. In the ideal circumstances, stakeholders bring valuable insights to the table to inform product decisions. For instance, customer support team can share the most common questions customers are struggling with, and this in short can inform the PM about improvements that could be introduced to make the user experience better. On the other hand, sometimes, especially with sales and marketing-centric organizational cultures, stakeholders tend to influence PMs decisions and push for specific solutions or features instead of allowing PMs to do so as they're all implies. Moving on. Another important characteristic of the role is that we are always the drivers of change. Everything we do is focused on making customers happier or making the business grow faster. We are always on the lookout for improvements and innovations. That being said, PMs are not necessarily the ones with the longest list of innovative ideas. Our role is to bring inputs from various sources, customers, users and channels stakeholders, product matrix, industry and competitive analysis and prioritize the things that will have the highest impact on business goals and customer satisfaction and that are possible to complete with existing resources and technology. If we were, to sum up, the role in just one picture, it would be this one, which is probably the most popular graphical illustration of the role. To finish with a definition, I'd like to give you the one that I personally like the most out of the many that are out there. It's from Marty Cagan, Product Management Guru and the author of the famous book in the PM community called Inspired. There he gives a brief and concise definition of the role that goes well with the VN diagram we saw earlier, ''Behind every great product there is someone, usually someone behind the scenes working tirelessly, who lead the product team to combine technology and design to solve real customer problems in a way that meet the needs of the business.'' I think it perfectly describes the essence of the PMs job as working at the intersection of the business stack and customer experience. That's it for now, we've just covered the key characteristics of the product manager role. In the upcoming videos, we will talk in details about the end-to-end product management process and the PM responsibilities at every stage of building a product. Stay tuned.
3. Product Vision & Strategy: Hello everyone, welcome back. Now that you know what a PM's role is all about, let's start talking about phases of the end-to-end product management process and explore the core PM responsibilities. Product development is a lengthy journey with contributors from different teams and departments with the product management functions driving things along. Product management activities go from strategic to tactical. The end-to-end product management process includes the following steps: developing a product vision and strategy, building up a strategic product roadmap, designing and validating the solution, product development, and product launch and subsequent improvements. Let's go through every step one by one. The process starts with developing the product vision and strategy. Wait a second, actually, even before we get here, someone needs to support the business opportunity or problem and come up with a product idea that can probably solve it. Let's imagine a group of entrepreneurial people who came up with an exciting product idea and decided to test it and see if they can make something of it. Usually, we call this people co-founders. They might have an early stage vision for product that can be as simple as a sketch on the back of a napkin. Now let's look at the four stages every company typically go through from then on. Our co-founders are now at the very first stage called the drunken walk. They're focusing on building as many experiments as possible to test if the problem indeed exists, if their product can actually solve it, and if there are customers who are excited enough about that kind of solution to pay for it. The ultimate goal that founders are trying to achieve is finding the product-market fit. What is the product market fit? I think this video explains the idea of product market fit pretty well. But let me give you a more formal definition. You have a product market fit when you can repeatedly and profitably acquire passionate and loyal customers who are your product advocates and cannot live without it. Finding product market fit is a true indicator of startup success. The statistics for failed startups proves the point. Lack of product market fit is the number 1 reason for the failure of almost half of the startups out there according to a survey made by CB Insights. As Marc Andreessen, co-founder of the famous venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz one said, "The only thing that matters is getting to product-market fit." If a company is able to introduce a new product to market and find the product-market fit, which are the two most risky phases of a startup, it's now ready for its growth phase. For example, in terms of the customer base and product offering. Now coming back to where we started, product vision and strategy. In the initial phases of running product experiments and search and for product-market fit, companies co-founders are the ones setting the vision and strategy. They also do all the heavy lifting by playing many roles at once including the PM role. Yes, they could hire a dedicated PM at this stage, but mostly to help with the execution side of things. Product function starts contributing to the founder's vision, strategy, and decisions on the next big idea during the growth phase. What's the product vision? Think of it as the final destination you plan to reach with a product. Usually, refers to a more long-term future, 3-7 years or even 10-year horizon. For instance, the vision of LinkedIn is create economic opportunity for every member of the global workforce. The vision of Zoom is video communications empowering people to accomplish more. Good product vision creates a story about what you're building, who your customer is, and why it matters. Meaning the benefits and needs you address. Strong product vision helps unite teams around the same ambitious and aspirational future. As Jeff Bezos once said, "We are stubborn on vision, we're flexible on details." However, the product vision alone is not concrete enough for the company and product team to act on. We need to understand the main milestones that would bring us to the future described in the vision, and that's when product strategy comes in. Product strategy is a set of activities or milestones we plan to take to achieve the product vision. Developing an effective product strategy takes solid research, including understanding of focus markets such as specific industry verticals, consumer groups, or geographies, understanding of customer needs and problems we are trying to solve, and advantages we can bring. Details of a product were builds an end, what differentiates it from competitors. Of course, trade-offs. It's hardly possible to do everything, so it is important to decide and agree on what is not part of the product strategy. Now let's go through an example of the product strategic moves of Netflix, the world's largest video streaming service. With its original vision of getting beat on DVDs, Netflix experimented with various products strategies, such as next-day DVD delivery, or exclusive DVD content through red envelope studios. However, by 2007, Netflix observed a rapid decline in the DVD market and pivoted its vision to becoming the number 1 in video streaming. The company has experimented with many products strategies to achieve the vision. For instance, developing video streaming technology, and even though this strategy seems like a no-brainer nowadays, it wasn't clear back then when the company should launch the streaming service and how to acquire content, providing high-quality video and sound and constantly improving them. Personalization, including builds in a movie recommendation engine and later on developing the original content series. Today we see that Netflix is experimenting with other products strategies such as launching interactive stories and Teleparty, which is a new way of watching TV with your friends online. These are just some examples of strategic moves Netflix has tested. As Gibson Biddle, a former Netflix VP of Product describes it, they took on about 4-6 strategies each year to test. I'll include the link to the full article from Gibson in the resource section of the video in case you'd like to explore more about product strategy. We're at the end of the video. To recap, product function starts contributing to product vision and strategy from the growth phase. Prior to that, it's founder's responsibility to define and drive both the vision and strategy. We also covered what is a product vision? The final destination you plan to reach with the product, look in 3-10 years ahead. Lastly, we talked about the product strategy, which is a set of actions we plan to take to achieve our product vision. In the next lecture, we will continue covering an end-to-end product management process, and we'll define the role of a product roadmap within the process. I'll see you there.
4. Building up strategic product roadmap: Hey everyone. Welcome back. Let's continue talking about the steps of the product management process. Apart from vision and strategy, there is a third important element that enables it. Product roadmaps. Similar to traditional roadmap, our product roadmap visually shows your product strategy over time as a series of projects you plan to undertake to achieve your product vision. The roadmaps tell the story of a company's priorities and product development with regard to this business goals, as well as how the different projects come together. Let me pause here for a second and emphasize one of the crucial skills expected from a PM here. Prioritization, as a PM you will always have a variety of projects to pursue and many teams will be expecting you to commit to their requests like introducing a new feature or product change. However, your ultimate task is to prioritize the ones that have the highest impact on customers are in line with your team and company goals and are feasible to execute. From my experience, I can tell you that roadmap prioritization and getting buying from stakeholders is tough. You need to master many additional skills to help you get the teams aligned, such as negotiation, diplomacy and the ability to say no. Let's go through one roadmap example. Here is a public roadmap from ProdPad, product management software that supports roadmap development. Even though product roadmaps can be in different formats and structures, there are main components common for all of them. First, is the timeframe. In our example, you can see three columns. Now, with all the tasks the ProdPad team is working on at the moment. Usually it has a period from 1-3 months. Next, including everything the team is playing and for the next 3-6 months out and later for longer-term future projects. Every guard here is a specific project the team is working on. Like, update our Chrome extension to buy serve ProdPad contributors. Every project is linked to a more high level theme or a group of projects. They can ProdPad from good to great or setup our customers for continued success. Usually, every roadmap project is also associated with a specific business goal, but apparently this information is hidden from the public view of the roadmap in our example. Lastly, please pay attention to the descriptions of the projects here. The majority of cases, we see that they are distributed in terms of their problem statements or opportunities the team will be working on. Like, how can we improve user activation to increase conversion and reduce drop-off during trial? But very rarely do we see specific solutions or features that will be delivered. This kind of planning is very important for a good strategic roadmap. As a PM, you will always need to focus on the problem first and then propose ideas for how it can be solved. There is a very good quote that illustrates this. Fall in love with the problem and not with the solution. Product managers bring a focus on the problem to the table, which is super available in development team environments since they by definition, have their full focus on the solutions and are prone to losing sight of and deviating from the main goal. To build a strategic roadmap, PMs use different methods to collect insights on the problem and opportunity space. This may include customer interviews and surveys. Interviews with internal stakeholders like customers support, sales, marketing and other teams. Data analysis or creating an enlightening customer journey maps that visually shows all the steps of customer interaction with your product. Lastly, it is important to understand that roadmap is not set in stone, but rather it's a living document. In the previous lectures, we talked about PMs as drivers of change. It is a PM's responsibility to make sure their product roadmap is always relevant and accounts for changes that may occur, such as changes in business goals and priorities or market dynamics or clients expectations and needs. We've reached the end of the video. To some up, a strategic product roadmap is an important element of their product management process. It shows product strategy over time as a series of projects we need to undertake to achieve a product vision. Your job as a PM is to make sure that your roadmap is structured around key problems or opportunities that stakeholders are running it and that it is always relevant. In the next lecture, we will cover the next step of their product management process, solution design, and validation. I'll see you there.
5. Solution design & validation: Hey everyone. Welcome back. In the previous lecture, we talked about the product vision, strategy, and wiring in the product roadmap. We also covered prioritization, one of the critical skills required for PM when it comes to deciding what problems to focus on, demand the tons of ideas and requests every product team has. In this lecture, we're going to talk about the next phase of the product development process, solution design and validation. At this stage, we are not yet developing anything that can be sold to our customers, but rather we're discovering what to build. I use the word discover here for a reason, since you may come across the term product discovery when talking about problem and solution validation. This term was first introduced by Marty Cagan back in 2007 and since then it has become very popular in the PM world. The PM relies on the roadmap to figure out which projects to work on next. In case where a problem is well understood or when we need to fix the product bug, we can start working on the solution right away. However, if we need to get more understanding of a problem, we can carry on with additional storage. For this step, the PM usually works with the user researcher who focuses on understanding user behaviors, needs, and motivations using different techniques, such as observation, interviewing, doing surveys, and other methods. In case a company doesn't have a dedicated user research team, this rule is usually taken by a product design. Moving on. Once you've nailed down the understanding of the problem part, it's time to start designing the solution. This step includes ideation and prototype in potential solutions with the ultimate goal of selecting a single solution that will be developed and launched to market. Now, you may have a very reasonable question. Why do we need to create prototypes instead of just going directly to the development phase? Well, let's think about it for a bit. Developing a new product or doing product redesign or even introducing a new feature is always risky since so many things can go wrong. Users might not like it or it can be too expensive to build or it can fail to bring the expected investment returns for the company or it can be troublesome to produce due to technology limitations. Your task as a PM will be to eliminate those risks as early as possible before investing the time and resources of an engineering team in actual product development. The goal to approach here is designing solution prototypes and validating them with real customers. Fidelity of the prototype, meaning how close they will be to the real product will depend on your conviction in the real solution. It may be as simple as a landing page where users can sign up for early application access or it can be a full simulation of a product's user experience just without real technology inside. This can be achieved, for example, by having all the background work done by humans in a way that simulates how the product will work. These are just some examples out of many possible approaches to prototyping that can be taken to validate your solution hypothesis. Prototypes are usually created by designers and engineers in case where we need to test whether it's feasible to build the product. It's also very important for a PM to keep stakeholders in the loop when deciding on possible solutions to makes sure that the solutions will work for our business. For example, if you require more engineers to build the solution, we'd like to make sure that we can afford the hiring cost or if our solution relies heavily on a direct sales model, we'd like to confirm up front that our sales team has enough resources. Depending on the industry and product, there may be many constraints you need to validate with your stakeholders before committing to a particular solution. The third and last step after we've built a working prototype and get internal feedback, is to validate whether the solution meets the needs and expectations of our customers and actually solves the problem we set out to solve. To do so, PMs together with product designers, can use different methods. For instance, two of the most popular validation techniques are evaluating the product experience with target customers, known as usability testing and customer interviews, which are usually conducted together with usability testing. These are so-called qualitative validation techniques, which are among the most effective techniques for getting faster insights from your customers. We are almost at the end of the lecture. Thanks for watching this far. There is just one last, but very important point I'd like to get across before we conclude. Remember how I told you earlier that prioritization is one of the crucial skills expected from a PM. Guess what? You will need to apply it a lot when deciding on what and when to build. Let me explain. Now it's considered a standard practice for tech companies to build products in the MVP style. MVP, which stands for minimum viable product, means that we develop the smallest possible solution that brings value to our customers, is viable for our business, and is technologically feasible. An MVP oftentimes, one have a fully developed functionality, but it should always address core user problems. Let's go through an example to illustrate the point. Teachable, now a well-known platform for instructors and educators to host their video courses was first started as a side project. As teachable founder describes it, the very first version of what later became teachable was just an incredibly rudimentary website to sell his mobile marketing course directly to people. However, it was the very first attempt to solve a problem that course creators had back then. Avoiding the cumbersome and time-consuming process of creating a website from scratch to host the course and get direct access to students. Soon after it's launch, the website got it's first paying customers and in a few months, it was clear that the project had taken off. What kind of advantages do we have when we deliver the products incrementally? Well, first, we don't over-engineer the solution, don't overspend our resources, and we get to market faster. Instead of spreading out attention to deliver in multiple benefits, we first focus on solving what we believe is the most urgent and painful problem for our customers. As a result, we get faster validation of whether our beliefs are true and what kind of functionality we need to add over time. The concept of MVP is very important in product management. Please make sure that you understand it well before joining a PM tribe. That's it for now. In the next lecture, we'll be talking about the next step in the product management process, product development. I'll see you there.
6. Product development: Hey everyone, welcome back. As we discussed in the previous video, a PM works on product discovery to get validation of the problem statement and solution hypothesis before any actual development starts. The PM collects all the validated learnings from the discovery stage into a product backlog, a prioritized list of work for their development team to focus on. Similar to the previous stages, the PM works with stakeholders by sharing product development priorities and timelines. Oftentimes stakeholders expect from the product team certain time commitments. It is especially true for major product changes and updates or for launching new products. For example, the marketing team might need those timelines to rely on while planning social media campaigns to spread the news about the product. Sales may need them to keep existing clients informed about upcoming changes and facilitate new contract signing. Leadership wants to see where the company stands in terms of achieving its key business metrics. To keep track of the development timelines and major milestones, the PM creates a release plan. Unlike the product roadmap which illustrates our product strategy and is built around high-level things, the release plan specifies exact solutions and features we plan to build to address specific problems and needs. To sum up, a roadmap helps us to answer the question, what problems I was solving and why. The release plan specifies in detail how we solve those problems. The development team is a major contributor to the release plan. They make sure items are feasible and time estimates are realistic. To build a solid plan, it is important for a PM to spend enough time with engineers and get their buy-in. Speaking about the development part, the PM is not supposed to code anything, and in fact, you won't have time to do this. You don't need to have a technical background either unless this is explicitly stated in the job description, like for technical PM roles, or if you're interviewing for companies like Facebook that historically prefer to hire PMs with engineering background. In fact, many companies nowadays like to engage PMs with non-traditional backgrounds, from teachers to psychologists, or even former art gallery managers. Yes, I know one one manager who managed an art gallery before moving to product management. This helps to create diversity of opinions and bring to the table creative nontrivial ways of solving user problems. However, for a non-technical PM, it is still very important to understand the fundamentals of product development to be able to build productive relationships with the development team and gain their trust. You need to understand what Agile product development is and its main advantages when compared to the waterfall process. You should have a solid knowledge of roles, artifacts, and events of the Scrum framework, which is used by many product companies. Please pay attention to the product owner role in Scrum, since part of your PM duties will be to take on this role during the product development stage. I also strongly recommend that you learn about the steps of the product development process and how to test a product end-to-end to ensure it functions as intended. If you want to expand your technical skills, you may start by taking an introductory course to one of the programming languages and try creating your first line of code. Once again, you're not expected to code as a PM, but this small practice will definitely help you to understand more of how engineers think. That's it for this lecture. We covered several important elements the PM needs to take care of during their product development phase. This includes creating a product release plan which communicates details of the upcoming product features and development timelines. The release plan is a mutual work of the PM and product engineers and it is important to get there buy in of the plan prior to communication into business stakeholders. Lastly, we talked about key concepts the PM needs to be aware of to speak the same language with the development team such as Agile, Scrum, and basic programming skills. In the next video, we will be talking about the last step of the product management process. Stay tuned.
7. Product launch & improvement: Hey everyone, welcome back. Finally, we are close to launching our product to market. It's one of the major milestones in every PM's career. First of all, it's incredibly rewarding to see all your and your team's hard work go live. Second of all, your PM experience will be assessed, among other things, by the number of successful launches. To become a product manager and grow your expertise in the field, you have to launch. There is no way to escape that. What does it mean to launch a product? Well, product launch is an introduction of a new product or a product change, like a new product feature to the market for target customers and partners to find out about it and start using it. Planning and executing a successful launch is a complex process involving different teams, not only product management, but sales and marketing, customer support, business development, and others. As a rule of thumb, all teams that you can see there as business stakeholders must be aware of and prepared for the upcoming launch. As the PM, you drive and coordinate the whole process. What does the product launch process look like? We can divide the whole process into three phases common for every launch, pre-launch tasks, launch execution tasks, and guess what? Activities done after the launch. Let's go over the specifics of each phase. While preparing for product launch, the PM sets up the process by preparing a launch checklist. It is a strategic planning document that contains key activities to enable a successful launch. The list of activities differs depending on the goals set forth for the launch. For instance, we could plan to generate a lot of buzz around the product and attract as many prospective customers as possible, or you may want to launch first in a private mode to just a few invited customers to be able to control the launch and promptly react and fix possible product issues. However, regardless of the goals, there are several core activities you will take care of. First and foremost, you need to ensure that your product is ready. This includes first finishing up all tests and fixing critical bugs. Oftentimes, companies do Alpha and Beta testing programs before launching the product to the general public. Alpha testing is an end-to-end product testing done by companies' employees who played the role of the very first product users. After Alpha testing is completed and bugs are fixed, Beta testing starts. This is when the product is introduced to a selected group of external users, so-called by the customers. The benefit of a Beta testing program is that it helps to get early feedback from real users outside of your company and assess if a product is ready for an official launch to a bigger audience. Apart from the readiness of the product itself, you need to ensure that product documentation, such as product guides, release notes, technical documentation is ready for the launch date. The second key item on the launch checklist is deciding on how you will assess if it is successful or not, and where you stand with it overall. This includes tracking certain metrics, such as the number of active users or their conversion rate from free to paid subscriptions, or retention rate. These are just some examples, since the specific metrics you track will depend on the launch goals. However, metrics alone won't be enough for you to assess the launch progress since they can only give you clues about what has happened with the product and not why this has happened. You need to plan in advance how you will supplement metrics with qualitative feedback, like interviews with selected early users. Having a solid plan of how you will track the launch progress will help you greatly to decide on the next steps after the launch. The third key item in the launch checklist is marketing strategy readiness. This is where you work closely with the product marketing manager to decide and agree on the following topics. What are the key messages that will be used to communicate the product vision and strategy? What channels will be used to acquire the customers? Acquisition channels may include, among others, organic search, email marketing, referral programs, and event marketing. Who are the key competitors, and how will the product be positioned among them to attract target customers? What is the pricing strategy for the product? For example, I'm going to use a freemium model where the product will be delivered for free in its basic functionality, but users need to pay a premium for more advanced features, or are you going to rely on a paid subscription model? Next, we need to decide on the distribution channels, meaning how we are going to sell the product. For instance, through our own channels, like a company website or an app, or both, or through third-party platforms. Let's move on to the fourth element of the launch checklist. It includes planning of how we are going to enable sales and customer support teams to effectively do their job, selling and supporting the product. This may include conducting a series of trainings for both teams, preparing collateral documents such as sales guides, help center information, and articles, as well as guidance for the support team. It may also include helping the sales team to prepare and conduct product demonstrations. Lastly, to ensure the successful launch, a product manager needs to think about other teams that need to be informed about the upcoming launch. For example, their leadership team who need to give a go-ahead for the launch or the legal team who have to confirm that we are good to go with the launch from a legal standpoint. We've just covered all the essential activities related to the preparation for the launch. What happens next? On the launch day, we're finally ready to release the product. How does this technically happen? Well, your engineering team may need to enable a piece of code in the production environment or remove a flag or press a release button. After a successful launch, the PM usually announces the launch to the rest of the company, celebrates with the team, and then prepares to do it all over again. Yes, you heard me right, launching the product is definitely not the end of the journey, but rather just the start of the next product iteration. In the post-launch phase, the PM closely monitors product metrics and user feedback from one-on-one interviews, app reviews, surveys, or social media. All of the data collected is used by the PM to look for common patterns and themes, identify the lying problems, and start validating the problems and potential solutions. That's all for the lecture and congrats for covering the product management process end-to-end. Let's briefly recap what we just learned. A product launch is a significant milestone in every PM's career, since your experience will be assessed, among other things, by the number of successful launches you accomplish. Every launch process goes through three phases. Preparation for the launch, launch execution and after launch activities. In the preparation phase, the PM takes care of the strategic launch checklist, which includes the following key elements; product readiness, deciding on the metrics that will be used to measure the success of the launch, readiness of the marketing strategy, enabling sales and customer support team to do the job, and lastly, informing other teams about the upcoming launch. After the launch day, the PM monitors the product metrics and then decides which direction to go next with the product. The process starts all over again. In the next several lectures we'll be shifting towards a different topic and we'll talk about types of the product managers. I'll see you in the next lecture.
8. B2B Product Manager: Hey, everyone. Welcome back. As you saw from our first lecture on the role of a product manager. PMs are the center of every product organization, connecting business, technology, and user experience. We talked about the things common for every successful PM. Also we said that the role may vary from company to company, depending on factors such as business lifecycle stage, industry, and who's using the product. To adapt to these factors, different types of PM roles have emerged. Going through job boards, you'll notice a multitude of new PM types: AIPM, growth PM, data PM, technical PM, business PM, etc. All these are basically an industry way of telling you what special skills and experience you should possess on top of a basic product manager skill set. Don't be alarmed or discouraged when you see yet another PM type emerging, you won't have to start from scratch to become one. Let me sum up the most common approaches to how PMs can be differentiated by type. The first approach is to divide PMs by type of customer. Here we have three types, business to business PM, business to consumer PM, and internal PM. Let's go through each type one-by-one. Business to business or enterprise PM is responsible for products created for other businesses. To illustrate, let's take the example of People.ai. A sales management platform that provides sales and marketing teams with personalized, actionable revenue insights. The software automatically capture sales activities from emails, calendar, CRM systems, and it generates recommendations on the best strategies to close a deal. The company works with such clients as Zoom, Zendesk, Lyft, and others. What are the specifics of B2B product manager work? First, in the case of B2B products buyers, so those who make purchasing decisions, and users are usually different. B2B PM needs to account for both of them when developing a product. For People.ai, buyer persona could be executive leaders of sales and marketing departments, such as the Chief Marketing Officer or the head of revenue operations department. Or if such kinds of purchasing decisions take place on the level of procurement or digital transformation departments, their leaders will represent a buyer persona in our case. On the other hand, the users of People.ai platform are those who are in charge of the day to day sales and marketing operations; like account managers, sales representatives, marketing managers, and other members of sales and marketing teams. Second, an effective B2B PM must have expertise in the target industry. Coming back to our example of People.ai platform, since their main target customer groups are sales and marketing teams, their PMs should have a good understanding of how sales and marketing organization works, as well as what are the industry trends, regulations, and what the competitors are up to. All of these will help B2B PM better understand the ambitious and needs of their biggest and most important customers. Third, in B2B we don't deal with individuals, but with organizations. Products have a relatively small user base. Hundreds or at most thousands of clients, of course, unless PMs work with such the giants as Microsoft or Amazon. Forth, B2B buyers are often ready to invest sizable sums of money only in products that are able to cover large business processes, end-to-end. Such products will inevitably be more complex and therefore more expensive and challenging to sell. A great deal of special treatment on many different levels is vital here, starting from extra effort to meet special product requirements of a client to having dedicated clients sales and account manager with 24/7 customer support. Speaking about sales, the relationship between PM and sales is very special in B2B, since salespeople spend so much time with customers, they become one of the most valuable partners of the product team. They bring insights about customers problems and expectations to the table. However, sometimes sales tend to push PMs to include certain customer requests to the product under the risk of losing a deal. In order to do the job, the PM should take this request with a grain of salt and always validate it with customers and overall product directions.
9. B2C and Internal Product Manager: Let's move to the second PM type. It is business to consumer PM. B2C PMs are responsible for consumer products that are used every day by millions of people. I'm sure that these products don't need an introduction. All of us use social media, e-commerce, [inaudible] apps, and websites. All of these are classified as B2B products. Let's see how B2B and B2C product managers are different. The first major difference is the user base. B2C PMs work with an audience of millions. Since the pocket of a potential customer is usually not as deep as that of even the smallest company in B2B. This means that thousands of customers are needed to make a business viable, but successful user acquisition comes with many challenges. For example, how to figure out what users like and dislike the most in product, what will drive them to renew their subscription and turn into loyal customers, and what will push them away, or will the new product design make their experience better? To answer all of these questions, B2C PMs should have a deep understanding of their customers, their behaviors, needs, and wants. Doing that for such a large user base requires special techniques. For instance, collecting and analyzing user behavior data at a bigger scale, as well as running experiments and testing ideas on real audiences. In fact, the ability to analyze and visualize data is a must-have skill for B2C PMs. The second difference is that for B2C, the buyer and the user are the same persona in most cases. However, some exceptions do exist. Apps for children are one of such example. While children are the main users of the apps, the parents are those who pay the bills. In this case, B2C PM will need to consider both parents and children when building a product. Third, B2C products are distributed without help from a dedicated sales team, they mostly count on marketing, advertising, or word of mouth. Fourth, B2C PMs tend to be more careful about delivering and fascinating experiences for their users, since in most cases, they can easily switch to competitors at no additional cost. On the other hand, for B2B buyers and users, doing that is way harder. Plus in most cases, more priority is placed on the product's ability to cover all processes end-to-end. Nice user experience comes after the coordinates are covered. This tendency is slowly changing though. For example, I used to create B2B products for commodity traders, and they were extremely picky about everything related to the experience when capturing a deal or looking at the financial reports. Let's move next. The third type of product managers are those who create internal products for their companies. As the word-internal implies, those products are not designed for sales for others, but to support the diverse business activities that every company has. Let me give you an example, Tesla, the famous US-based electric vehicle and clean energy company didn't want to go the conventional route of implementing trusted enterprise resource planning systems like SAP. Instead, they choose to develop their own in-house. The system called Warp was built in just four months with a small development team. Now Warp centralizes, integrates, and streamlines business processes in supply chain product planning, inventory, sales or the management, asset and finance, throughout the entire company. What you should expect from being an internal PM. First, you'll work in close proximity with customers who are your co-workers. This gives you more opportunities to get customer insights and feedback. You can observe them working and using certain tools and technologies, and you can expect detailed and open feedback about problems they have in their business function, as well as improvements they would love to see. On the other hand, if you fail to deliver something, internal customers would know where you seat. Second, being an internal PM could be a very rewarding experience. You have the chance to transform and enhance everyday processes for hundreds or even thousands of internal users, and it can be very fulfilling to be in the same boat with your customers and see how their work in life improves. We've just covered three most common PM types, B2B, B2C, and internal PM. How to decide which type of PM are you? Or maybe you can be a PM of all kinds and can switch roles easily. From my observations, it's relatively straightforward to switch among the roles in the first several years, when you are mostly focusing on mastering fundamentals common for all types of PMs. However, with the growth of your seniority and skills, you inevitably become more experienced in specific, domain, industry, and product type. All that makes the transition more challenging. To make a choice, think about any unfair advantages you might already have if you start any of the roles, any skills or experiences that are relevant and can make you more of an expert. For example, I never plan to become a B2B product manager, but with a background in management consulting and IT projects implementation for big enterprise customers, transition into B2B product management was relatively easier for me. I took this chance and ended up liking being a B2B PM a lot. But no worries, you don't need to make the selection right now and you have plenty of time to try yourself out in all the roles and then decide what works best for you. That's it for now. In the next two lectures, we'll be talking about some types of PM roles that are emerging nowadays. I'll see you there.
10. Emerging PM type: AI Product Manager: Hi everyone. Welcome back. In the previous lecture, we talked about an approach to classify PMs by customer type. But now this is an industry-standard understood by all. Now let's peek into some trends of today and take a closer look at a couple of the hardest emergent PM roles. In this video, we will be talking about AI Product Managers. The AI PM has emerged in response to increase in adoption of Artificial Intelligence by companies in literally every industry. To speak the same language with AI engineers and being able to deliver accurate product specifications conventional PM roles were extended to include the specifics of this new deck. Before we go deeper into the details of the role, let's first establish how AI products differ from traditional software. In fact, many differences do exist but the biggest one is in the way these products are created. For a traditional software to work, it needs to have a code written as a well-defined series of steps or commands that always behave in a predictable way. If you go to academic terms, this is what computer scientists call a deterministic approach to software engineering. However, this approach doesn't work for all tasks. Think of the situation when, for example, we need to understand what's written in a document. There are so many variables we need to account for to solve the task. For instance, what type of document is it? Is it a payslip or a bank statement? What is the language of the document? What is the type of text? Printed or handwritten? It's hard to imagine how this task can be solved with traditional deterministic methods. AI algorithms, on the other hand have the ability to learn by being trained on a large set of data. In other words, they're designed to find patterns in training data. In high terms, all patterns found are called a Model of Training Data. After some patterns are found, we can check if any of the same patterns are present in new data never seen before. Let's put it this way. This is how AI can make predictions or provide other results. The better the patterns your AI algorithms are able to find in the training data the better and more accurate the results that will produce on unseen data. That was rather long but much-needed opinion that logically brings us to the introduction of the specifics of the AI PM role. Every AI product initiative starts with the question of whether it's possible to find a path for data acquisition, so that this data can be used by AI engineers to iterate on the problem and in the end to create a solution with a certain degree of accuracy. The first task of AI PM is to collect the data set that represents the problem space and make sure that this data is representative enough of the problem at hand and its volume is big enough to be useful to the engineers. Think of this as a cycle that starts with collecting data which is then used to first build and train and then test and refine the model until it starts performing with the expected accuracy. Next, users start interacting with a product and from this interaction, we can collect even more data which can be used again to iterate on the problem. Let me give you an example from my past experience of working on AI products. We've been developing a technology to extract information from complex business documents which traditionally only humans can read. The ultimate goal we have been working towards was to allow organizations to reduce document processing time and cost while making the procession process more accurate. One of the high priority tasks that I've been involved in as an AI PM, was to ensure that we have a variety of data representing the multiple use cases we wanted to support. For instance, different types of documents like contracts, insurance claims and bank statements and different languages like English, Chinese, Arabic and so on. My team and I worked with our existing clients and external data providers to make sure that we had enough data to build, train and then test the extraction models. Without having the data in the first place, our entire project of building the extraction technology would be at risk. I hope that this example gave you a more clarity on the importance of data when working on AI initiatives. Now, let's go through some other examples of how the AI PM rule expands in comparison to traditional PM roles. First, AI PMs need to be ready to work with uncertain development timelines and without guaranteed final performance or accuracy of a model. With AI projects, you oftentimes don't know if something is feasible until you make an experiment. Your team can spend weeks or months iterating on a model to arrive at only a slight improvement in performance. Oftentimes, it's hard to say if the next major advancement will come from whether a model design or better training data. All of these makes the work of an AI PM especially challenging when communicating with stakeholders and executives who are always looking for specific deadlines and product release dates. This brings us to another important aspect of the AI PM job, communication with stakeholders. Yes, of course, stakeholder management and communication is a major task for any PM out there. However, for the AI PM, it includes additional responsibilities, especially when dealing with business-oriented teams and those new to AI. AI Product Managers oftentimes may need to play the role of AI evangelists, helping that organization to build the culture needed to get ahead with AI initiatives. Since implementing AI is so different from traditional software development where results and risks are known and predictable, AI projects have a far better chance to succeed in companies with experimental cultures and their readiness to take calculated risks. The AI PM educates many teams in their organization on the AI fundamentals and nurtures the right right towards the risks and expectations of AI projects. One last but important point I want to mention before we close the communication topic. Remember that before we talked about the core product team which includes software engineers and designers. When working on AI projects, this team extends to also include data scientists who are responsible for AI models as well as for advanced data analysis and Data Engineers who focus on building and maintaining data infrastructure. That was a long lecture. How should we go about this role? Well in my view, with the future development of AI and the maturity of the AI technologies effectively, every PM will eventually become an AI PM and understanding of the AI fundamentals will be MA prerequisite. However, today having an AI skill set is still a relatively unique characteristic for a PM. If you're looking for an opportunity to stand out and are keen to learn and explore the AI field, this can be a very good strategy for you to think of. That's it for now. I'll see you in the next lecture.
11. Emerging PM type: Growth Product Manager: Hey everyone, welcome back. In this video, we'll be looking at another type of PMs gaining more and more popularity nowadays, Growth Product Manager. An interesting fact, a recent analysis of Google Trends revealed an increase in 425 percent in the average monthly interest in growth product management over the last five years. [inaudible] let's figure out what this role is about. The job title growth product manager is still relatively new, so there is no common definition of the job requirements, but in most cases, growth PMs will be hired by company when there is already a good quality product available in the market and the business needs to scale. A growth PM's task will be to improve certain business metrics in the areas that have a direct impact on growth, such as user acquisition, retention, engagement, and optimization of monetization flows. I like the following definition of growth given by Casey Winters, former growth lead at Pinterest. "Most product teams are built to create value or improve value provided to customers. Growth is connecting more people to the existing value of a product." Growth PMs don't create a new value, but they make sure that people experience the value that's already been created. To do so, they rely on data and qualitative research like user interviews to first figure out what stops more users from discovering the value in the product, and then growth PMs run multiple experiments to test which solution gives better results. Depending on them, product and business goals, the outcome of growth PM work may be enhancing of customers sign-up and onboarding experience or increase in conversion rate from free to paid subscribers, or increase in product referrals and virality. You might also notice that a lot of what I've just mentioned are also called PM responsibilities. After all, a core PM takes care of improving metrics and driving the growth as well. Any decent PM will have an idea of what to do if they happened to find themselves in growth PM shoes. What companies are really looking for when hiring growth PM is not just some idea, but deep focus and proven track record specifically in growth as opposed to hiring a PM that might be good in a little bit of everything. Usually, such growth PMs have a much stronger background in marketing tool. Let's illustrate what the growth PM does with an example. Here is a company Photomath that offers an application which reads and solves mathematical problems instantly by using the camera of your mobile device. The company recently launched Plus the first pay subscription service in Photomath. The goal of the company now is to promote the growth of Plus. As part of this goal, they are looking to hire a growth product manager to increase access to their subscription offering. Let's see what are the job requirements of the role. From the [inaudible], we see that the business goal is driving monetization and revenue growth. To do this, a growth PM is expected to build and ship new functionality that increases success to Photomath Plus, and then the [inaudible], we see one specific example of how this can be done by introducing the subscription sharing feature. This feature allows paid users to invite their friends to use the app. Another initiative that Photomath growth PM could do is to run experiments with features available in free and paid versions and figure out the most valuable services their users are ready to pay for. How about Photomath core PM tasks? Well, the growth product manager is responsible for improving the core product functionality, its actions like, for example, developing solutions and answers to the math problems that are not yet available in the application. All right, I hope that by now you have a pretty good understanding of what the growth product manager role is all about. I'd like to emphasize one more time that core product management skills are still the most important drivers of success for all of the roles we just covered. Regardless of the PM types, 90 percent of what any PM is doing on a day-to-day basis will still include problem definition and prioritization, communications, stakeholder management, product design, launch, and improvement. Focus on answering these fundamental skills first before shifting into any of the emerging roles we have covered. In the next lecture, we will start talking about how you can build up these fundamental skills. Stay tuned, and I'll see you there.
12. Getting the right experience: Internal Transfer: Hey, everyone. Welcome back. Now that we've covered the fundamental product management definitions such as, who is a product manager? What are the phases of the end-to-end product management process? What types of PM roles do exist. Let's go ahead with the most interesting part and talk about how you can get there. Product management, as in most fields, really, you need a mix of theory and practice. During job interviews, you're expected to demonstrate theoretical knowledge and skills, and you need both to make a good quality decisions on the job. Without practice and without proof that you can make things happen, people won't take you seriously and won't trust even your sound as theoretical judgments. Sometime ago, I did a survey with a community of almost 60,000 PMs. I asked them a simple question. What was the main challenge for you when looking for a product manager role for the first time? Most surprisingly, most of the replies were about like and relevant product experience as the main obstacle to start a PM career. We have a classical chicken and egg problem here. To land a job, you need relevant work experience, but to get this experience, you need to get the job first. What options do we have to solve the problem? The good news is that you're already better over than most other candidates since you're watching this course. In the following part, we'll look at three real-world validated strategies for you to explore that can bring you the relevant experience. Let's first talk about the strategy of building product expertise within your current company. Well, if you're in the process of changing jobs and you're not working right now, or if you work as an independent consultant or a freelancer, please feel free to skip this video and move directly to the second and third strategy, which will be more relevant for you. What options do you have to grow PM skills within your current company? Thankfully, doing so is easier than for other roles. By its nature, product function is the one that connects other functions together. Likely you're already working with PMs and you're already part of the product development process. You just need to become a slightly bigger part. You don't need to build and sell your experience from complete scratch since you already have skills that are transferable to the PM role. For instance, if you're a software engineer, you already know the product development process and you most likely work closely with product managers. In order to transition to product manager role, you can focus more on the product discovery part. For example, try to get more exposure to customers through customer interviews, feedback sessions, product testing sessions, and other activities. Consider the business goals and expectations from customers and internal stakeholders, and think critically on prioritizing what to build. Spend as much time with your product manager as you can to understand the discovery part and see how you can contribute. Or let's say you work in sales, or technical sales, or customer support, it means that you work with customers' LO. You most likely know their needs, wants, and expectations. You're probably the one who also works closely with the product team, sharing customer requests and feedback. As a next step, you can analyze how your product team prioritizes this request and why not all of them eventually go to the product roadmap. Try to participate in the meetings with your product team to learn and give feedback based on your customer knowledge. There are plenty of opportunities for you to start contributing to the product development process. The best way to discover them is to speak directly and openly with your product team. Let's take another scenario. What if you work in internal function such as finance, legal, or HR? Is there any opportunity for you to gain products skills? Yes, of course, even though it's going to be a little bit more trickier than in the first two examples, since you have less direct communication with the product team. You can think about internal product initiatives that you can be part of. For example, some teams shares their products with internal users before releasing new versions for the public. Remember we call it alpha testing. You can volunteer to be part of the testing room. This will allow you to get to know your company's products in detail and contribute to report and box for improvement opportunities you discover. It is an excellent start to grow your product thinking and expertise. I hope that the examples we just went through give you a very good perspective on how you can start acquiring products skills. In short, you need to find an opportunity to be closer to the PMs work in your organization and take the initiative, and rest assured that kind of initiative will be well received. From my experience, I guarantee you that PMs always have tons of things to investigate and research. They would gladly use the opportunity to delegate to someone who is eager. But what if your company doesn't have a product team? No worries, because even in this case, you have options. I suggest you think about internal processes within your company that you could improve. Think about your team or department. Is there anything you could change in the existing methods to increase the efficiency? For example, imagine that you work in a back-office department of a trading company. Could you spot an improvement opportunity to change a complex multi-step process of suppliers and versus registration to just a simple two-step procedure. If your idea is solid and you can put together a brief proposal on how to make the change, try to prove it with your managers and other teams who need to be involved. If your idea is accepted, you can get an excellent chance to develop products skills and include the first product case in your portfolio. Of course, don't be shy to participate in the implementation of the idea yourself. Yes, I know this option is tricky. It involves a lot of uncertainty. You can be certain if you would be able to support an improvement or if your company will be willing to go ahead with its implementation. There are many pieces that need to stick together for the whole plan to work. However, try this option before eliminating it. If you will be able to make any progress at all, the story might become your killer selling point on an interview. I'm going to tell you a secret. Often a PM is the driver of change in the company and faces issues with people understanding and getting on board. Any story where you try it and make progress despite obstacles would strongly resonate with your interviewer. Other path you can consider is to check if your company has a business transformation department or team. This groups are in charge of introducing a new digital technologies through changing existing business processes. Now these teams exist in many companies. For example, this change could include replace in a time-consuming manual process of suppliers and voices registration with an automated one where a special software type called RPA will read an invoice and extract the data. This digital transformation groups the tasks very similar to what product teams are doing. They create new products or services to delight their customers. In this case, company's internal users. This products or services need to be technologically possible and help the business to thrive. You can think of a digital transformation team as an insurance product team within an organization. By the way, the team structure somewhat resembles the structure for a traditional product team. It is cross-functional and consists of solution architects, business expert, sigil coaches, product designers, and software implementation teams. If your company has this digital transformation team, try to create an opportunity for you to work with them since it can move you ahead with your product career. You've just gone through the first strategy of how you can get product management expertise within your current company. To recap, you have two options here. The first is when your current firm already has a product team, in which case, high chances that you already work with product managers in some capacity. The next step for you is to create more opportunities to work together and contribute to what they're doing. PM teams are usually short of hands, so talk to them openly and volunteer to help. Option two is when your company doesn't have a product team. That's unfortunate, but you still have a decent chance to grow your PM expertise. Look for an opportunity to improve existing business processes within your firm and get other teams on board with this change. You can also consider other scenarios like joining the digital transformation team if it exists in your company and driving the introduction of new internal processes and products. That's all for now. In the next lecture, we'll discuss the second strategy of how you can grow your product expertise by joining the business incubation program. I'll see you there.
13. Skills Assessment: Hey everyone. Welcome back. Before we continue with the second strategy of building your product expertise, let's switch gears a little bit and do one practical exercise. I invite you to assess what skills you already have and can leverage in product management, and what skills you still need to acquire in order to transition to the role as smoothly as possible. We already know that you don't need to build and sell your experience from scratch since no matter what your current role is and whether you work in product organization role, you definitely have at least some of the skills that are transferable to the PM role. This is because of the variety of things that we product managers do on a daily basis. How to do an assessment. First, you need to download an assessment file from the resources section of this video. In the file, you will see PM tasks and activities divided by stages of the product management process we've covered in the previous videos. You'll also see a separate section with people skills applicable for all the stages of the process. For every pair of activity or task, you'll see a skill level graded from 0-5 with description of what's expected for every level. The goal of this assignment is to compare the experiences and skills you already have with those needed for the PM role. If the task is clear for you, please go ahead with the assessment. In case you need more examples on how to find your transferable skills and skill gaps, please continue watching the video until the end. Now, for the purpose of our example, let's take the number 1 role people have been into before they transfer into a product role. Do you have any guesses? Well, this is a project manager role, at least according to the survey conducted by their product management festival in 2019. Now let's figure out what transferable skills a project manager might have when thinking of moving to product management. For instance, let's take project manager, Alex, who is managing implementation projects of Enterprise Resource Planning Software. His projects usually include several stages. Gathering clients' requirements and preparing solution blueprints, solution implementation, solution testing phase, and project go-live and post-go life support. Alex is in charge of managing the project end-to-end including planning project timelines and milestones, planning and allocation of resources, monitoring of tasks execution, addressing project risks, developing project documentation, and communicating progress to stakeholders. Now let's see how we can relate his current expertise to the one expected from the product manager. If we look at the end-to-end product management process, I'd said that his strongest transferable skills belong to the last stages of the process, development and launch. This is where we mostly focus on the execution part rather than on discovery and experimentation. Product releases produced at this stage can be treated as projects that need to be planned, prioritized, monitored, and documented. Also, project progress needs to be communicated to the stakeholders. From his people skills, I think he can easily score high for the majority, if not all skills from the assessment file. Since these are the skills that good project managers usually have. How can we use these insights? Well, now I'll access two clues regarding his next steps. The first clue is that he is in fact not just a person who's changing his career but has very strong transferable skills and he knows how to apply them to the new role. He has support and examples of his previous projects, which could speak for these skills. The second clue is that Alex knows his weakest areas or those where he needs to improve the most. For the sake of our example, let's assume that Alex didn't work in any other roles but project manager. Given this, he needs to focus on researching problems and product opportunities instead of focusing on clients' requests, he needs to practice developing and testing creative out-of-the-box solutions rather than implementing something predefined by other vendors. Finally, he needs to be more driven by the business strategy and goals rather than focusing on operational tasks. I hope that this example helped you to understand the assessment process better and that you are ready to do it now. I'll see you in the next lecture.
14. Getting the right experience: Business incubation program: Hey everyone. Welcome back. You've looked at your current company and possibly even managed to find ways to extract a bit of PM-relevant experience out of it. You also put some points on your PM profiles scoreboard in the previous lecture. Where do we go from here? Is there something else you can do to get ahead of the job competition? Of course, you can. Let's look at a couple of options you can try yourself that are always available even without any special preconditions as the ones we explored before. One of them was to join a business incubation program. For those of you who are not very familiar with what it is, let me quickly explain. Business incubators are specially designed programs that help young entrepreneurs find co-founders, come up with business ideas, and validate initial ideas. Oftentimes business incubation programs are organized by universities and only accept students or fresh graduates. Also, some major capital firms run incubators as a way of finding investment opportunities. If they believe in the team of co-founders and in the problem they're tackling, VCs may invest in exchange for equity stake. Business incubators do not require participants to have any working prototype or first version of a product. They help to incubate an idea from the first brainstorming session through problem validation to building an MVP. I hope that you already remember this term from our previous lectures. They also help in acquiring the first customers. Now you're probably getting a bit frustrated and thinking how these programs can be relevant for you. You want to become a product manager, after all. Well, I understand your confusion, but please bear with me a bit more and let me go through the main advantages. Programs like that can bring you as a future PM. I will also speak from my personal experience since I participated in one of such programs just recently and have an insider view on its pros and cons. First, and the greatest advantage is that such a program effectively prompts you to do product discovery and design, which are essential parts of a PM's job. Together with other participants, you will be asked to come up with a problem that you believe exists for a certain industry or market. You will need to do a thorough research of the problem space to assess how big it is, including interviewing those who may experience the problem firsthand. Next, you'll come up with possible ways to solve the problem and even go as far as designing and testing earlier prototypes of your product. Your team presents the result of your work during regular meetings with program coaches, who also give you feedback and advice on the directions you can take next. Essentially, such programs allow you to get an almost real-life experience of being a PM of an early-stage startup and quickly iterate on the problem and product. But do it in a safe learning environment. The second advantage of the program is that you can work on different problem statements with multiple teams and have a portfolio of several products by the end of the program. This is because business incubators invite not just teams but solo participants as well. They will form small teams of 3-4 people to work on the problem and product for a short period of time, maybe one week or so. Then they can either form another team or continue working together. For those who are lucky enough to find an ideal team and thrilling enough problem statement, it becomes possible to pitch the problem and solution to the coaches and even get funding for the first several months of building a product. The third important advantage is that apart from the teamwork on validating and building the product, the program includes a series of masterclasses from startup coaches who operates with startup founders and product leaders themselves. These masterclasses may include topics on how to brainstorm product ideas? How to validate ideas and do user research? How to iterate quickly on solutions and build product prototypes? Even how to find the product-market fit? The beauty of the program is that you have the chance to immediately apply the knowledge in the project. So you don't just learn some theory but immediately put it into practice. The fourth advantage is that you'll work with a diverse team of people coming from different backgrounds and industries. Some of them will have PM expertise. Startup incubators are looking to balance the skills of their participants to have both business-oriented people, for instance, from sales or marketing, and product builders who have strong product management, software engineering, and design experience. I think these four points should be impressive enough for you to start considering this option, right? But as a trusted advisor, I need to talk about some downsides this option can bring. The first is that to join, incubators require going through quite a rigorous application process. You'll need to compete with others for the place. You also need to pay participation fees and commit to invest in a specific amount of time every week to work with your team and contribute to projects. If you have a full-time job, you can search for an incubation program with part-time participation. But in this case, you may need to juggle between your work and the program's projects. Prepare yourself to the hard work and be ready to work late evenings or during the weekends. The second downside is that because such programs are primarily designed to help future startup founders overcome the first challenges of building a product. It may be an overkill for people who don't see themselves as a startup founders at any point in the future. If you ask me about my recommendations, I would definitely say go for it. If you are considering starting your own business at some point after your product career. Despite the downsides I have just mentioned, the program will help you to quickly upgrade your skills and graduate with a portfolio of validated projects. Lastly, before we finish this video, let me answer the equation I often receive from my students. They asked me if it is worthwhile to volunteer in helping a startup to build the product in exchange for the opportunity to learn and practice? Well, it is definitely a better option than just basically reading books or watching videos but your takeaways will be quite limited. Startups by their nature have very unstructured ad hoc processes and without previous experience of being a PM, you'll be struggling to grasp your end-to-end responsibilities and expectations from the role. Also in a startup, you're oftentimes playing multiple roles at a time and more there's between the roles [inaudible]. If we compare this option with going into an incubation program. I'd say that generally, the former asks you for more commitment and gives you less structure, whereas the latter provides more organized process and learning opportunities. Unless you have to volunteer to build something truly groundbreaking, I'd recommend you to consider and try out other options first. That's it for now. In the next video, we will be talking about the third strategy of getting relevant product management expertise. I'll see you there.
15. Getting the right experience: Side project: Hey everyone, welcome back. So far we've covered those strategies of how you can get relevant PM skills. The first is to build an expertise within your current company, either by working more closely with the product team and contributing to their daily tasks or by driving the project where you can introduce process improvement or a change. The second strategy is to join the business incubation program and grow your PM muzzle by discovering and validating business ideas together with other participants and program cautious. Now, the third completely self-sufficient strategy to get actual product experience is building a side project. This strategy works incredibly well on its own or in addition to other strategies. It's a great option to strengthen your profile even further. A side project is the perfect opportunity to showcase your skills and creativity without committing anything apart from your time. You can put theoretical things you've learned into practice by launching something real from scratch and go through all stages of its development, from brainstorming of a product idea through its validation with potential customers, up to product design, and maybe even development. This is a unique opportunity if you think about it. Often it takes juniors years of doing small pieces here and there before they can be entrusted with creation of the product end to end. Want to see what it's like when you're way ahead in your product career, driving more ambitious product initiatives. A side project is [inaudible]. Trying this is super important for another reason too. It will help you make an informed career decision if you really should go into product management. It will help you do a reality check and avoid the hype trap of getting into a tragic career that doesn't suit you and that you end up hating eventually. The PM role requires a lot of work, dedication, commitment, and knowledge. This is not one of the roles where you can spend eight hours per day and switch off your brain afterward. You need to at least like it in order to excel. How do you pick up an idea for the side project? From my own experience and observations I made talking to people managing their own side hustles, the idea of a project usually lies in the intersection of three areas. First is your passion. Something you don't make money off at the moment, but really enjoy doing in your spare time. Your side project will definitely take time and once built, you'll need to talk about it a lot during your job interviews. You'll be better off selecting something that you are really excited about doing and explaining. Second is your daily life. Oftentimes side project ideas come from the problems you are facing every day, either at work or at home. Think of everything that bothers you and you want to improve from managing your personal to-do list to keeping track of new books and films you don't want to miss out. Third is everything new you want to learn. Let's call it future. This can be something that could help you advance professionally, like getting a better understanding of a new industry or technology. Now, let's switch gears and go through some specific examples of the side projects. The variety of ideas you can consider is limited only by your creativity and interests. You can create a blog or YouTube channel and regularly produce content on topics related to product management. For example, anything from reviews of the latest products, technology, proposals on how to improve existing products, how to create by their user experience, book reviews, you name it. Next, you can push this idea further and create a mini course, building on the initial content with some modifications and additions. You can use such online learning marketplaces like Udemy or Skillshare to launch the course to the market and get your first students. In case you don't feel too comfortable creating videos, switching to emails is quite a popular option nowadays. What else? You can create an app to solve a problem of a certain group of users, from marketplace of service providers, like tutors or career coaches to app to support your day to day activities, to-do and ideas tracker, books to read before you die, checklists and directory, food recipes directory, app to learn a foreign language with images, etc. I could take the whole lecture just to go through all possibilities. But I think you get the idea. For those of you who need more inspiration, I'll include links to other examples in the resource section of this lecture. This was a lot of information so far. I think I know what you might be thinking now, how am I supposed to build all of this without technical skills and knowing how to code? Well, I understand your concern, but the truth is that in the majority of cases, you will be able to build at least an MVP without writing a single line of code yourself. I'm not even offering you any kind of outsource into some computer science school students. How is this possible then? The fact is that with the help of modern no-code tools, building a side project has never been easier. This is a popular and promising alternative to traditional software development for non-tech people to build their own applications. We call them citizen developers to emphasize that nowadays, literally everyone can build and launch an app without coding. Well, truth be told, building itself is still done with code, but people simply don't have to do any coding themselves. No good platforms have pre-built drag and drop building blocks that have been coded to perform certain tasks. Citizen developers use these building blocks like linger parts to design new web or mobile apps. I hope that you are super excited now. Of course, there is a learning curve here and you need to invest time in making yourself comfortable using the tools. But this time is nowhere near them, investment of going through a full-on coding course. As someone who does not code, I have to say that such removal of barriers for side projects by the no-code community is groundbreaking. No more excuses for not starting. Another question that I often get from my students is, should my side project be successful for me to be able to speak about it during my job interviews? By project success, we imply that it has achieved certain metrics, like certain number of customers who are using your product or sales revenue. The answer here is no, building a successful business is not your end goal. Of course, it's good to aim for ambitious targets and growth key product metrics like the number of active users or paid customers. But don't forget about the primary purpose of this project. The side project is just a testbed for you to go through all the stages of building a product to learn by doing, and then to showcase your skills to hiring managers together at PM job. If the project fails, think of it as a successful case anyway, as long as you can reflect on the experience and explain why this fellow happened and what you would do differently next time. That's it for now. We've just covered the third strategy of how you can build up your product expertise by launching your side project. Yes, you can do this without any technical background, thanks to no-code tools. I'll see you in the next lecture.
16. Final words & Next steps: Hey everyone, welcome back. We are at the end of this introductory course. I hope that by now you're even more excited about all the opportunities that the product management world can bring and that this course will be just the beginning of a journey for you. I know the change in careers is a challenging and lengthy project. I did so myself when I moved from IT and management consultant to product manager. You may still have a ton of questions, concerns, and uncertainty on what's the right move for you. But I hope that right now you're at least one step closer to one of the most exciting roles out there and that you have several proven strategies that I personally tested out that can help you kick-start your journey. Of course, I'll be glad if you share feedback about the course as well as any progress you make towards the PM career. I'm also open to clarify things for you and also the most common and interesting questions. Please feel free to reach out to me. I'll leave a link to a feedback form, as well as the forum where you can post your questions through the resources section of this video. All right. I hope to talk to you soon, and good bye for now.
Anna Kolenkina, Product Builder, Entrepreneur
