Product Manager

In many organizations, enormous resources are spent on development without necessarily creating any real value. Teams work according to plans rather than problems, and the distance from strategy to execution is often substantial.

In this intensive two-day course, you’ll gain a clear understanding of what product-driven development is and how you and your team can create more value with the resources you already have.
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What will you be able to do after the course?

• You have a solid understanding of what it means to be product-driven
• You know how to organize around value creation
• You know how to work with hypothesis-driven development through Product Discovery
• You understand the link between strategy, outcome-based goals, and real value creation
• You can ask the right questions in your own organization to help drive change
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Who is the course for?

This course is for those who already work as a Product Manager and want to strengthen their foundation, or for those who are new to the role and want a solid start. It is also relevant if you are about to step into a Product Manager role and want to be prepared from the get-go.
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What’s included in the course?

In this course, we start with a fundamental understanding of product-driven development as the foundation for building products that create real value for customers and users.

The course alternates between theory and practice and covers themes you can apply directly in your day-to-day.

Moving from a project mindset to a product mindset

You will learn to distinguish between a project mindset and a product mindset and get a simple model for explaining the differences in goals, success criteria, and decision making. This gives you a language to help teams and leaders understand what it takes to work in a more product-oriented way, even within a project-driven environment.

• What does it mean in practice to work in a product-oriented way?
• How can you identify which mindset an organization is actually operating from?
• How can you move toward a product mindset within a traditionally project-based structure?
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Value creation

You will gain a clear understanding of what it means to create value, seen from both the customer’s and the company’s perspective. We introduce models (including ones from Melissa Perri and Bain) that help you distinguish between outputs and the value actually experienced by users, and use this as a foundation for product decisions and prioritization.

• What does value creation look like from both the customer’s and the company’s perspective?
• What types of value can we deliver — and how do we prioritize between them?
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Outcomes and objectives

You will gain a simple model for understanding how the key roles in a modern product team collaborate, and how responsibilities can be distributed so decisions are made closer to the customer and the problem. This strengthens collaboration across product, design, and technology.

• Who decides what in an empowered team?
• How do the three roles work together to discover and solve problems?
• How do you ensure that decisions are made close to the problem and the customer?
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Product Discovery and hypothesis-driven development

You will gain tools and models for working systematically with hypotheses and experiments (including “Build — Measure — Learn” and “Dual Track Agile”), enabling your team to continuously learn what creates value for users. We introduce a way of working where discovery and delivery happen in parallel, and you will learn how to balance the two tracks in practice.

• How do we form hypotheses and test them effectively?
• How do we balance product discovery and delivery in practice?
• What types of experiments and tests can we use — and when?

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