What do online product management classes really teach in their courses?

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Professionals with certification from leading online product management classes are seen as the problem solvers. These trained product managers are hired to develop, analyze and market some of the most innovative software and solutions that not just make business easy, but also ensure these businesses stay competitive, sustainable, and innovative in the long run.

With the help of this article, let’s understand how online product management classes train and orient product managers for the growing market.

Goal 1: Turning DevOps Executives into Product Management People

Product management is gaining massive popularity among IT and software developers. In India, software development has always been a leading domain for computer science and embedded application developers passing from B.Sc., BE, and B Tech colleges. However, in recent years, students and professionals from non-science backgrounds are also pursuing product management careers, and with some reasonably good success rates.

The starting point for any product management professional more or less starts in a similar manner. Coding, software development, and analytics are key skills that are coming among product managers. You could say that online product management classes identify these skills and break down the topics based on particular sub-specialties, such as Data Analytics, Programming and computing, DevOps engineering, Machine Learning, Market research and marketing strategy, sales forecasting, and so on. In short, the product managers pass out from these online classes with refined skill sets that allow them to take on a wide variety of tasks and jobs. Therefore, to become truly well rounded product management personnel, you have to be a student, a trainer, and a coder for a lifetime – something that most executives never get until they are stuck with their career and stagnate in the role.

Goal 2: Nudge the Marketing Aspect of Product

Product management executives seldom think of their product as an object or a non-living entity. The best product officers and DevOps leaders that we have interviewed often tell us that the product they innovate and market are “personalized” experiences, and often have a personality of their own. This is reflected in the way they are simulated during the A/B tests and experiments, providing the Product Management teams with an opportunity to tweak the features based on customer feedback. It is not an easy hard skill to acquire – organizations expect their managers to be well versed in Product development, Project management, and Product Marketing, and maybe even in business intelligence, data analytics, and scrum.

These skills can be acquired during the stints with top trainers in product management. 

Goal 3: Wrap the Head around Industry Jargons

Organizations throw in a lot of conceptual, theoretical, and corporate level jargon into product management life cycles. These are sometimes part of the product management team’s intellectual maturity in addition to how much value they put into adapting to the current and emerging trends in the product DevOps ecosystem. From engineering terms (Agile, Scrum, Kaizen, Just in time / JIT), to honing in skills related to UI/UX and designing, to mastering keywords involved in data analysis and product testing – the documentation of product management life cycle would be full of industry jargons that you are expected to be aware of. The best online product management courses ensure the students enrolled with them are able to understand and dutifully apply various jargon in their activities and strategies. 

Here are the top 20 buzzwords you should learn and scientifically experiment with, as a Product Management executive or analyst.

  1. Lean product
  2. Agile family; Agile product development, ART
  3. Alpha testing
  4. Business model canvas (BMC)
  5. Minimum Viable Product (MVP)
  6. Unique Selling Proposition (USP) / Value Proposition 
  7. Centres of Excellence (COE)/ Centre of Innovations (CoI)
  8. API, Connectors, and SDKs
  9. Product experience management (PEM)
  10. GTM strategy
  11. Jobs to be done (JTBD tracking)
  12. Customer Lifetime Value (LTV)
  13. MOSCOW Prioritization 
  14. Net promoter Score (NPS)
  15. Need gap analysis (NGA)
  16. OKRs and Opportunity Scores
  17. Quality Function Development (QFD)
  18. Usability testing
  19. UI / UX Management
  20. User story mapping / Voice of the Customer (VOC)

We will evaluate these keywords associated with the entire product management and after-sales activities in our following articles.

Goal 4: Mentoring individuals to become product heads/ business leaders

In large companies like Apple, you would find a Chief Product Officer leading a team of 50-60 product managers and product developers. So, the final milestone in the academic course comprises of developing leadership skills that prepare the product managers to become business leaders in the agile organization. These skills are hardwired into product owners so that they can climb the hierarchical ranks very quickly and take on senior management roles to manage the entire life cycle of one product or group of products.