The Art of Product Management

Connect vision, strategy, roadmap, and delivery to become the CEO of your product.

This product management training immerses students in the art of product management. Via hands-on activities and real-life stories, this course demonstrates how to connect the dots between vision, strategy, roadmap, and delivery. Instructors share success, failures, and practices they have used to enhance their strategic effectiveness while fueling agility from the product manager’s seat at the table.

It all begins with product strategy and solving real market problems. From there we’ll outline the big-picture of being a product manager, so students can relate to the mindset and activities required to be the “CEO of your product.” Traditional product management (or agile product owner) training typically focuses on refining and executing against a backlog, but where does the backlog come from? How do you align product strategies and roadmaps with corporate strategies and drive execution from the highest to the lowest levels of the organization? By the end of this course, you’ll know the answers to these questions.

You’ll leave with an understanding of how to connect the dots between vision, strategy, roadmap, and delivery as well as more appreciation for the role of the Product Manager.

In this one-day class you’ll learn:

• Align product strategy to corporate strategy
• Develop roadmaps and use them to fuel continuous product learning
• Compete in competitive markets and identify opportunities for differentiation
• Maximize inter-departmental interactions and communication to learn and gain alignment
• Conduct market research, capture market problems, and understand the pitfalls of only listening to customers
• Create “go to market” strategies that increase awareness and adoption
• Monitor the value of the product/business line and establish the right KPIs

Course Outline:

Part 1: Aligning product strategy to corporate strategy

1. Importance of knowing the corporate strategy and not just thinking you do
2. Top-down definition of product strategy that supports and clarifies company direction

Part 2: Market research and validation

1. Define the target market and the opportunity
2. Growth in your current market
3. Growth by identifying and executing in other market segments

Part 3: The other “M” in “PM”: Marketing

1. A product that can’t tell its story is unfound
2. Product Marketing and Messaging
3. Marketing deliverable stories
4. Write a press release for your proposed release – before you start

Part 4: Creating roadmaps authored for the audience

1. Thematic business strategy roadmap
2. Partner and distribution roadmap
3. Product feature roadmap
4. Business product strategy

Part 5: Delivering customer value not just features

1. Alignment of training – what have they learned, how do they train
2. Alignment with marketing – what should they update, how do they message
3. Alignment with sales – enable them, what are they pitching

Part 6: How to tell the market your story

1. What business metrics a product manager should be tracking and why no one else is
2. How to work with influencers to gain reputable, 3rd party validation
3. The power of customer testimonials and how that starts with involving them during discovery and delivery
4. Pricing strategies and what to consider when balancing short-term and long-term revenue

Part 7: Monitoring the value of the product

1. Churn
2. CAC
3. NPS
4. Know the counter effects of metrics
5. Know your customer type and their limitations on providing feedback