Released
6/4/2019- What is a product manager?
- Different types of product manager roles
- Differences between product and project managers
- The major phases of the product lifecycle
- Lean, agile, scrum, and kanban
- Finding and monitoring competitors
- What is customer development?
- Designing and running experiments
- Wireframing
- Working with engineers, designers, and executives
Skill Level Beginner
Duration
Views
- [Narrator] The ambiguity of the product management role is near to its essence. - Welcome back, I hope you're excited about starting this course. Let's go ahead and dive right in. In this lecture, we're going to talk about what product management actually is, and by the end of this lecture, you'll have a really solid understanding of the role, and hopefully be even more excited about the rest of the course. Does that excite you? If it doesn't, you can't be a product manager. You should probably leave. I'm kidding, but this Venn diagram pretty much sums up my entire existence. I also love graphs. So, product management is actually a pretty difficult role to define, which is why you don't really find any concrete, concise, good explanations just by googling it. Try googling it right now and I challenge you to find a really good description. In fact, the role of a product manager and their exact responsibilities change across different industries in different companies. If at one company, you're a product manager, and you have one set of responsibilities, you might have a completely different set of responsibilities at another company depending on the company, the industry, and the size. What we'll focus on here are the core tenets that make up product management. The first, and most important thing to know about product management is that you're actually not a manager of anybody. No one reports to you, you're nobody's boss, and you definitely can't fire anyone. This is actually by design because a product manager needs to continuously interact with a number of different people, get maximum collaboration from their engineers, and also the designers they work with. Think about it for a second. If you wanted honest feedback from engineers and designers that you work with, but you're also their boss, do you think they're going to tell you if they have any disagreements with what you have to say? Probably not. So you want them to tell you every single time that they disagree with you. A product manager is someone that sits in between multiple areas of a company and acts as a communications hub, organizer, and enabler for everyone else. So, here's kind of a funny story. We once had a new engineer join our company, and he asked, "What do you do?" He hadn't worked with a product manager before. And before I could answer, the other engineer said, "That's the person that stops sales and legal from emailing you!" (canned laughter) As a product manager, you're kind of a blocker slash enabler for engineers and designers. The communication and enabling aspect of product management is a very important one. Engineers are very good at engineering, and designers are very good at designing. So, it's best if these people spend their time doing what they're best at. While engineers focus on solving hard technical challenges, product managers are talking to various stakeholders, users, receiving feedback, and looking at metrics to decide what things can be built next, and which of those things is most important, and the best use of time. Have you ever used a product, either software or something physical, where many things about that product are really good, but then there's one small piece that's just really terrible? If there's something wrong with any product, you can blame the product manager. Basically, a product manager is someone who's responsible for that product being successful or not. To recap, the product manager is many things, a communications hub, a prioritizer, a researcher, a presenter, but most importantly, they're responsible for the ultimate success of the product. So, your next question is probably, "All right, so what's a product?" Well, I'm glad you asked because that's what we're going to talk in the next lecture.
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1. Introduction to Product Management
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What is a product manager?3m 17s
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What is a product?2m 54s
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A day in the life4m 27s
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Hooray for free stuff1m 54s
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2. Introduction to Product Development
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Product development process3m 18s
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What is Agile?1m 37s
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3. Ideas and User Needs
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Users vs. Customers1m 41s
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4. Competitive and Market Analysis
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Monitor competitors11m 3s
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What is a feature table?2m 3s
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5. Customer Development
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The four types of interviews10m 22s
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Who you should talk to9m 56s
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Find interviewees externally11m 37s
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Find interviewees internally9m 19s
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How to get them to talk9m 20s
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Practice writing emails9m 15s
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6. Designing and Running Experiments
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What is an MVP?6m 37s
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Identify your assumptions7m 17s
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What is a hypothesis?3m 41s
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Put together a hypothesis7m 56s
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Email based MVPs3m 27s
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Shadow buttons2m 31s
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404 and coming soon MVPs3m 42s
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Explainer videos5m 22s
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Piecemeal MVPs4m 35s
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Concierge service MVPs4m 20s
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7. Conceptualizing the Solution
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Introduction to Wireframing5m 36s
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Wireframe, Mockup, Prototype11m 2s
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Jump into Sketching9m 1s
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Sketching out a mobile app7m 30s
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Using POP8m 57s
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Intro to Balsamiq11m 7s
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Building YouTube in Balsamiq8m 15s
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8. Metrics for Product Managers: Defining Success and Measuring Results
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Introduction to metrics7m 10s
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Metrics of all kinds14m 46s
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How to pick good metrics11m 36s
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9. Building the Product: Project Management for PMs
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Introduction to epics5m 11s
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Let's get into epic specs4m 49s
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Estimations and velocity9m 20s
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Roadmapping5m 18s
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Prioritization7m 20s
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10. Working with People and Stakeholders
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General communication skills2m 18s
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Working with designers3m 20s
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11. What You Should Do to Prepare Yourself for the Job
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Get relevant experience4m 31s
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Brand yourself2m 43s
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12. How to Look for a Job in Product Management
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13. How to Get the Job in Product Management
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Resumes3m 46s
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14. After You've Got the Job
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The first things to do5m 45s
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Summary of the course2m 6s
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15. Extended Interviews with Current Product Managers
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Video: What is a product manager?