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During the first lecture we will go over the differences between a business product manager and a technical product manager. We will cover the schedule, the rules and any of your questions. This is an introductory session.
During the second session we will discuss the video lecture that you watch before the class. This topic covers creation of a product vision and ways to build your product vision in simple steps. We will analyze various existing product visions and create a few product visions ourselves. For the length of the course, you will choose a product to work on (fake or existing) and you will be applying knowledge from class towards building the portfolio for the product.
There are several business strategies a company can implement. Business model canvas is a strategic management tool used to visualize, develop, and refine a business model. We will be building business model canvas as homework as this will be a part of your portfolio when you interview with a startup. During the lecture we will review several famous businesses and go over their business model canvases.
In order to build the right product, one needs to understand well the customers and their needs, interview them, observe their behavior. This is where segmentation and persona profiles help product managers make the right choices while thinking about product MVP and future capabilities. During the session we will go over the steps how to define segmentation and build personas' profiles.
Now that you have identified your customers and niche, it is time to interview the target audience and test out your hypothesis. This is where interviews, reviews, mock websites, surveys come really handy. We start with the research before we even build any functionality. Our goal is to build only something that customers truly need, not what we think they might want. During this class the lecturer will share samples and templates of surviews and interview to use.
Metrics tell you whether you are going the right direction. Before that though, you have to identify the right metrics to track. Deciding what the North Star would be for your product is a major step. In addition to the video lecture, we will go over exercises in class.
As a product manager you will be working in very agile environment. We will introduce you to the scrum rules and daily activities, planning sessions, your roles and responsibilities as a product manager.
This session is recorded as well as we touch on planning iterations/sprints, releases, milestones, quarters and semesters up to annual roadmaps. We will NOT be creating 5-year plans during the course, but rather focus on iterative adaptive planning that suits both startups and corporations.
Product managers usually hold several talents in their tool kit. Marketing, data analytics, and project management are core strengths of a product manager. During this session we go over project management core skills, from planning the project to identifying risks, calculating resourcing and navigating through "unhappy path".
Roadmap planning is easy when everybody agrees with you, and you have a dedicated team of engineers. We will share processes and templates you can take to work right after the class. We will also cover more complicated scenarios, when the teams are cross-functional.
The way you present data can affect your fundraising initiative. During this session we will teach you to use the right visualization tools in order for you to tell a better story and keep your audience engaged. This class will include calculating TAM, SAM and SOM. With the development of ChatGPT we will use Ai tools to quickly process data instead of learning SQL. In addition to the online class, you get access to a video training.
As the theory ends, each student will have a pitch deck which consists of modules built in previous classes. Each student will be required to demo their pitch deck and answer questions from audience (peer students in class). These are several classes planned for all students to have a chance to present.
As a bonus, you will get the session full of tips on how you can improve your resume. This includes a revision of resumes and feedback from the lecturers, a recorded video with several tips. WE ARE NOT A RECRUITING COMPANY. We do not specialize in hiring and resumes, please, keep that in mind. We are simply sharing our experience of what we know worked for us, lecturers in the past.
Those students who successfully went through 2 months of training and bought executive package will be matched with startups. The interview process will start and take several calls. After both the startup and the student agreed to work together, the student gets onboarded and a startup shared the OKRs that a student would need to work on for the next two months. UpskillPM in this case operates as the gatekeeper, ensuring the student doesn't get assigned unrealistic expectations or the goals require more than 10-15 hours a week of work from the student.
The first month of the internship UpskillPM lecturer and teacher's assistant will check in on progress of students with startups and help with questions. At this point the student is meeting weekly with the startup members and working on the assignments.
THE SECOND MONTH of the internship UpskillPM crew is completely out of the loop, and it is between the student and the startup to discuss whether the student will be offered a position.
