Being a good Product Manager can be difficult - the complexity and diversity of all the tasks is quite high. And with all the resources available, it’s even more difficult to understand if you’re progressing towards a good level.
With this in mind, we created a complete Product Management course by partnering with world-class experts, to deliver an impressive 28 hours of live interactive workshops and Ask-Me-Anything sessions. This course helps junior & middle PMs to achieve the skills and become efficient faster.
What you'll learn
Understand and talk with your customers
Identify your customer problems and build products they can hire
Write effective OKRs and align them with the business demands
Define your product vision and write roadmaps that deliver
Identify the essential key metrics and make decisions that move your product on the right direction
Summary
May 17 - July 16
25 limited seats
28 hours of live educational experience
Practically apply all the learning in a project
Course handbook
Graduation certificate
Course Structure
Introduction
Being a Product Manager is not a simple feat. A PM should be an expert in a lot of fields and master an impressive volume of knowledge to do her job the right way.
We grouped all this knowledge around 5 essential themes that will be addressed in the 5 parts of the course, proceeding in a natural order in which most of the products naturally evolve.
On the other hand, all these topics interact and are linked in complex ways that you’ll need to master in your day-to-day job, so we will simulate this in a practical way with a project you'll work throughout the course.
Opening event: What it takes to be a Product Manager
We will start with a short walk-through about what it means to be a Product Manager. This will help you understand how all the pieces come together and what is expected from you as a PM.
We will continue with a short orientation session, in which we will get to know each other better and organize the project teams.
Get to know each other
Project assignment
Introduction to Product Management
1 live sessions, 1 hour
May 17
Part 1: Know your Customer
Your journey as a Product Manager starts with understanding and perfectly identifying your customer. Without a customer, there is no product. Without a product, there is no business.
In this section, you will learn how to identify & interview your customers based on the Jobs-To-Be-Done framework.
Workshop 1: Customer Discovery interview techniques based On Jobs-To-Be-Done theory with Bob Moesta
Understanding your users can make the difference between the success or failure of your product. Well-conducted interviews can reveal the reasons users “hire” your product to advance in their lives and the timeline that got them there. Jobs-to-be-Done theory provides an excellent framework that helps you leverage the force of your customers’ behaviour, in order to drive your product improvement.
Bob Moesta, co-architect of the Jobs-to-be-Done theory, will teach you how to effectively plan, conduct, and process an interview based on the Jobs-to-be-Done theory.
AMA 1: About how to talk to customers with Rob Fitzpatrick
Odds are high that you’re wasting huge amounts of time sitting in pointless meetings and building unnecessary features. The Mom Test skips all that and gets to the hands-on challenges. How to avoid biased feedback? How to convince people to talk to you? How to figure out whether someone is really going to buy?
Rob can answer all these questions and more. Join this interactive Q&A session and have an interview with the interview expert.
User interviews
Interview management
1 live sessions, 1 hour
May 27
Part 2: Discover the Market
Knowing everything about your customers is not enough. You have to really understand their problems and discover the solution that solves them.
Continuing the work you did in the first part with the JTBD framework, you will proceed to discover how you can define your product so it will match the jobs of your clients.
Workshop 2: Uncover the problems users have and build better products using The Innovator’s Gift approach with Ash Maurya
Your awesome new product, once launched, will spew out problems of its own. The key to staying relevant to your customers and defending/growing your business model does not come from throwing more features (solutions) at them, but rather continuously uncovering problems and addressing them — before your competitors do.
Ash Maurya, customer development and lean startup expert, creator of the Lean Canvas and best-selling author, will teach you a systematic approach for uncovering problems worth solving and turning them into solutions your customers cannot refuse.
Product development
Lean methodology
Product discovery
2 live sessions, 4 hours
June 2 & 8
AMA 2: About building products that users love with a scientific approach with Dragos Manescu
Knowing what to build is an essential first step, but then, we all saw a lot of cases of products that don’t click with the user, or are too complicated to be used. Here, we enter in the world of product design, where UX is not just an abstract concept born in the designer’s head, but a carefully assembled product in which the customer and engineering team are also well represented.
Discuss with Dragos Manescu, Senior Product Manager at Adobe, with more than 10 years of product experience, about how to build products with the right mix of customer empathy with market knowledge, good UX and strong engineering.
Product discovery
UI/UX
MVPs
1 live session, 1 hour
June 10
Part 3: Understand your Business
The product you're building should also align with the business strategy of your company. Each product is guided by a product vision that provides clarity for your company, it helps you prioritize your product roadmap and improves your team’s tactical decisions.
Workshop 3: Align high-performing cross-functional teams around Objectives And Key Results (OKRs) with Bruce McCarthy
Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) are particularly suited to driving the alignment necessary for a high-performing cross-functional product team, helping to drive the success of organizations like Google, Zynga, Oracle, Twitter, and many more. But if not handled correctly, OKRs can quickly lead to silos, unethical behavior, and demotivation.
During this workshop, the legendary product leader Bruce McCarthy, author of bestseller Product Roadmaps Relaunched: How to Set Direction while Embracing Uncertainty, will teach you how to create and use OKRs throughout a simulated quarter-in-the-life of a product team, handling what goes wrong, adjusting course, and managing expectations.
Business objectives / OKRs
Team Dynamics
Stakeholders management
2 live sessions, 4 hours
June 14 & 16
AMA 3: Discuss about pricing strategy with Patrick Campbell
How much money to ask is not an easy question to answer. Should we go freemium, have more than a subscription level, offer trial periods or not? Are we asking too much or too little? Fortunately, there are dozens of pricing models and strategies that can help you better understand how to set the right prices for your audience and revenue goals.
Join Patrick Campbell, the CEO of ProfitWell (formerly Price Intelligently), the software for helping subscription companies with their monetization and retention strategies, to discuss pricing strategies, ways to improve your monetization, and how subscription financial metrics work.
From the business objectives you defined in the previous part, now you should derive strategic themes and place them on your roadmap. Those large and complex objectives must be broke down into actionable tasks. The roadmap is the blueprint of your product.
Workshop 4: Develop Product Roadmaps that work with Bruce McCarthy
A good product roadmap is one of the most important and influential documents an organization can develop, publish, and continuously update. In fact, this one document can steer an entire organization when it comes to delivering on company strategy.
Join Bruce McCarthy, legendary product leader, co-author of "Product Roadmaps Relaunched: How to Set Direction while Embracing Uncertainty" and learn why this approach to roadmapping works and how you can improve product roadmapping in your organization.
Roadmaps
Product Vision
Feature management
2 live sessions, 4 hours
June 24 & 29
AMA 4: Discuss about Product Vision and Product Communities with Chris Massey
User narratives are becoming more popular as a tool for experience design. They offer more than user stories, by linking activities in a seamless flow, presenting a “day in the life of…” view of user experience, and provide more context. This narrative is the first step in designing an experience, serving as a framework for creating the flow and the screens that support that flow.
With his background in technical editing, community building and product marketing, Chris’s approach to product management is inherently centered around user narratives. He spent the first few years of his career working with the B2B developer products, prototyped an experimental technical publishing platform along the way, and then kick-started the Mind the Product platform.
Product Vision
Product Community
Better product decisions
User narratives
1 live sessions, 1 hour
July 1
Part 5: Act on your Data
Besides interviews, the data you acquire from your product usage is essential for the understanding of your client's behavior. You use the metrics to align your whole team and focus on the most impactful work that needs to be done. But not all metrics are equal.
In this part, you will learn how to identify the essential metrics that are actionable and put your product development in the right direction.
Workshop 5: Turn data into truly actionable insights using the Metrics That Matter Framework with Matt Lerner
The most common mistake is aligning your whole team around a revenue target. Maybe that doesn’t sound like a mistake to you, but revenue is an output, and most of the confusion regards the inputs that drive it. What if we told you the answer to all your metric problems is a 16-row spreadsheet? Amazon, Google, Facebook, PayPal, Twitter - all the great Silicon Valley companies align around a North Star Metric and 3 “key drivers” because this simple framework has incredible power to align and focus the team.
Matt Lerner, Ex-Growth Director at PayPal, ex partner and manager of 500 Startups Europe's growth marketing program, lecturer at Stanford Business School, will help you define your key customer behavior metrics, so your whole team can align and focus on the most impactful work.
KPIs
Metrics that matter
North Star Metric
2 live sessions, 4 hours
July 6 & 8
AMA 5: About Data-Driven Growth with Andy Young
Companies and product teams now have access to more data than ever before. But what happens to this data, do you acquire it and let it grow old or are you using it to fuel business growth? And yes, leveraging your data to drive decision-making, you can gain a competitive advantage, reduce business costs and increase profit. But, how?
Discuss about analytics techniques that will fuel your product growth, about common analytics fails, with Andy Young, ex UK Country Lead at Stripe, Entrepreneur in Residence at 500 Startups and Seedcamp, Growth Marketer at Facebook, VP of Growth & Marketing at Entrepreneur First.
Data analytics
Product growth
Growth marketing
1 live sessions, 1 hour
July 13
Closing
Closing & Graduation
We'll talk about lessons learned during the course, and what's next on your Product Management career path.
Project presentations
Moderated discussions
1 live sessions, 1 hour
July 16
This course also includes
Opening session/orientation
Get to know each other session and course orientation presentation.
Work on a red-line project throughout the course
Work on your own project or choose from a list of fictional projects (multiple business models and domains, to accommodate all our participants).
Online course materials & references
Workshop handbooks, articles, books, references.
Registered sessions
You can view recordings for a missed session (maximum 1 week after the session).
Help & private support from our course assistants
Support and orientation during all the course - an assistant will always take care that all participants have the best experience.
Closing event
Lessons learned during the course and final project presentations.
Who is course for?
Junior or medium-level product managers (less than 2 years of experience)
Project managers transitioning in product management roles
Product managers starting new jobs - get up-to-date with the team
Self-taught PM that wants to better structure their knowledge
The How to Web online workshops are a great tool to become more product savvy. You get practical advice right from the experts, on how to validate and grow.
Taner Baubec
Product Manager @ Amber
These workshops are a a great learning experience for product managers. You get the chance to meet industry experts, and get practical advices that you can apply right away.
Your world-class instructors
Bob Moesta
Co-architect of the Jobs-to-be-Done theory, bestselling author, ex-product advisor to Basecamp, Intercom
Ash Maurya
Customer development and lean startup expert, creator of the Lean Canvas, best-selling author of "Running Lean" and "Scaling Lean"
Bruce McCarthy
Product Roadmap expert, founder of Product Culture, co-author of "Product Roadmaps Relaunched"
Matt Lerner
Ex-Growth Director at PayPal, ran 500 Startups Europe's growth marketing program, lectured at Stanford Business School
Rob Fitzpatrick
Expert in Customer Development, author of the best-selling handbook "he Mom Test: How to talk to customers and figure out if your business is a good idea when everyone is lying to you"
Dragos Manescu
Product Leader, Senior Product Manager at Adobe, with a special interest in mixing customer empathy with market knowledge, good UX and strong engineering
Patrick Cambell
Expert in monetization and retention strategies, ex-lead at Strategic Initiatives for Boston based Gemvara, CEO of ProfitWel
Chris Massey
Marketing B2B software products to developers for 8 years, ex Product Lead at Mind the Product, with interest in user narratives
Andy Young
Ex UK Country Lead at Stripe, Entrepreneur in Residence at 500 Startups and Seedcamp, Growth Marketer at Facebook
The content of this course is delivered in live online events where you can interact directly with the instructors and ask them to clarify certain topics.
That's why, we limit the number of participants to a maximum of 25, so everybody can participate directly and get the maximum of value from this educational event.
We know Product Managers have busy schedules, and we designed the course with this in mind. Still, we're talking about a lot of know-how you need
to absorb. So to get most out of the program, we recommend that besides the 3-4 hours of live interactions each week, you put aside at least 2 more hours for recaps and other assignments.
The full price for the course is €2333 (+ 19% VAT). We offer a 10% Early bird discount until May 1st and an additional 5% team discount. For group discounts contact us at team [at] htwinstitute.com.