Advanced Product Management: Vision, Strategy & Metrics
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Try Udemy for Business- The difference between vision and strategy
- How famous leaders use vision to succeed
- How to use a vision framework for your company and product
- How to use OKRs to track progress
- How product development hierarchies work
- How to understand agile roadmapping
- How to tie your metrics to your overall business strategy
- When to use data and when t use intuition
- How to debug metrics with origin source sorting
- How to recognize cohort anomalies
- How to design a cohort analysis
- How to design and run a t-test on cohort data
- The difference between a leading and lagging metric
- How metrics differ in multiple industries, including e-commerce, mobile, & marketplaces
- Familiarity with Product Management concepts is suggested
In this truly modern course, you'll learn all of the advanced skills and techniques that successful product managers use in their day-to-day working lives. From how to implement vision and strategy to getting a better understanding of how to use data, these lectures are designed for for founders, CEOs and, of course, product managers. With real world examples demonstrating exactly how to execute each approach, you'll find out exactly what to do (and what not to do) to build your company up to the level it deserves.
You already know the basics of being a product manager and securing that all-important job. But ensuring the success of your products is an entirely different ball game. You need to know the framework that transforms any product from zero to hero and the metrics measuring techniques that will allow you to figure out a product's successes and pitfalls. After all, there's nothing that can't be improved.
The first section of this course will take you through two hugely important elements of product management: vision and strategy. Whether you're a founder of a company or the product manager at said company, we'll teach you the difference between the two and how to implement them into the development of your products. The second section goes into a lot more detail on metrics. We'll take you through how to figure out what data to measure and how to fully understand the data that you track. There's also a deep dive into three different industries to demonstrate how metrics can change depending on the product that you're working on.
At the end of it all, you'll have the tools needed to make better, and more profitable, decisions in your product manager role.
Your instructors
Cole Mercer has been a Senior Product Manager at Soundcloud, Bonobos, Mass Relevance, and has taught the Product Management course at General Assembly in Manhattan, NYC. He is now a full-time Product Management and Strategy consultant.
Evan Kimbrell is a top rated Udemy instructor with 19 courses on everything Entrepreneurship. His courses have over 300,000 students and over 16,000 five star reviews. For the past few years, he has also been running a digital agency that has produced over 100 web and mobile products.
What you’ll learn
What vision and strategy actually mean.
The importance of vision and strategy in product management.
What makes a great visionary and how to set a clear vision.
How the product development hierarchy works.
The most common types of strategy.
How to set out an effective roadmap.
How to use a more modern and agile form of roadmapping.
What metrics actually are.
The types of metrics you should be monitoring and optimizing.
The various metrics that relate to e-commerce, mobile and marketplace products.
How leading and lagging metrics tie into product management.
How to analyze metrics using cohorts.
Gain an understanding of origin source sorting and how this can skew product metrics.
When to use data versus when to use your intuition.
Real world examples demonstrating all of the above.
Are there any course requirements or prerequisites?
As this is an advanced course, a basic understanding of Product Management would be beneficial.
Who this course is for
Anyone looking to learn advanced Product Management techniques.
Product Managers and CEOs who want to gain more effective decision-making skills.
- Students looking to transition into Product Management
- Existing Product Managers who want to augment their skills & understanding
- Entrepreneurs that want to learn the discipline of Product Management
Whether you already work as a product manager or are simply looking to learn as much about the role as you possibly can, listen up. This course will teach you advanced strategies that will improve your skills in many areas including decision-making and data analytics.
Covered in this lecture:
The topics this course will cover.
How to watch this course in a way that suits you.
The first section of the course is all about two very important things: vision and strategy. Learning those skills may seem impossible but a simple step-by-step guide is all you need to transform into the next Steve Jobs.
Covered in this lecture:
Why vision and strategy are often talked about in product management.
What the following lectures will teach you.
Vision and strategy sound super intimidating but they really don't have to be. Here, we break down everything you need to know about the words and how they play out in the business world.
Covered in this lecture:
Clear definitions of vision and strategy.
Examples of people who embody those qualities.
How the two relate to business.
There are many parts to the product development process and each one requires a specific skillset. The best part is that a product manager doesn't have master each and every one. They simply have to know where the road is taking them.
Covered in this lecture:
How the product development process is split up.
What each part of the process entails.
Real-life examples of each step.
So you know a bit more about what vision is, but you're still confused as to how you can set your big ideas in reality. This little history lesson will show you what to do and what not to do.
Covered in this lecture:
The qualities that make a great visionary.
The two types of vision you need to know about.
What you can learn from the story of Henry Ford's vision.
Being a leader involves leading others, not running around trying to manically do everyone's jobs. When you set your vision, it should be clear enough that others can set their own goals in order to reach it. Here's how to achieve that.
Covered in this lecture:
How to set a clear vision.
How to use the skills of your team.
How this vision fits into the overall product development hierarchy.
Sometimes it's hard to see how a framework works in real life without looking at some companies who are using it to great victory. SpaceX and Facebook are two supremely successful businesses with visionary leaders. Here's how each have used their visions to inform their company goals.
Covered in this lecture:
How two real companies use the product development hierarchy.
How global and company visions lead to goals and initiatives.
If you thought vision was confusing, I can't wait to see your face when you realize that there is no true way to describe strategy. Luckily, there are a few points to remember that will serve you well.
Covered in this lecture:
What strategy is.
Three common types.
How strategy fits into the product development framework.
Still not sure how to come up with a genius strategy or how to even use that strategy to your advantage? Well, here are a few real life successes from huge companies like Amazon and Airbnb as well as from a personal friend.
Covered in this lecture:
How four real companies used strategies successfully.
What you can learn from each story.
Weaving all of the lessons from the previous lectures together is simple. All you need to remember is that a vision is of paramount importance, whether you're a CEO or a product manager.
Covered in this lecture:
How to apply everything you've learned.
Why a product-specific vision is just as important as an overall company vision.
You may be used to dealing with traditional roadmaps. If so, you've probably come up against the pitfalls of that particular method. Here's how to swap the old-fashioned version for a more modern strategy that really works.
Covered in this lecture:
What agile or OKR roadmapping is.
How to execute it.
How it relates to the product development framework.
Data is a huge part of our lives but all of those numbers mean very little if you don't know how to interpret them correctly. The following lectures will teach you how.
Covered in this lecture:
What metrics are.
Types of metrics that relate to product management.
A brief introduction as to how to use this data effectively.
Bringing metrics and strategy together seems simple but you have to look a little deeper if you really want to make your data as useful as it could be. Here's how to do that in the simplest way possible.
Covered in this lecture:
Real life examples of how metrics can assist strategy.
The types of metrics to monitor and optimize.
When it comes to choosing which metric to track, you don't want something that's too complicated. This process will show you how to pick an easy-to-follow metric that will serve you well.
Covered in this lecture:
All of the things that make up a good metric.
The difference between exploratory and reporting metrics.
Prepare for some more buzzwords. Leading and lagging metrics are vital to figure out. Being aware of what both are and how they work can help your business move faster and avoid potentially fatal mistakes.
Covered in this lecture:
The definitions of leading and lagging metrics.
How the two relate in product management.
Examples of each.
In order to analyze your metrics correctly, you may need to split your users up. After all, every one of your users is likely to behave differently depending when they started to use your product.
Covered in this lecture:
What a cohort is and why they're important.
How to use cohorts to effectively analyze your metrics.
Convinced that cohorts are important? Good. Now you need to know how to set one up and how to analyze all of that data that you'll be collecting.
Covered in this lecture:
The three things you need to run a cohort analysis.
Changes that could affect a particular cohort.
Different types of cohort analyses.
There are certain pitfalls to avoid when dealing with metrics. One of the biggest is origin source sorting. No idea what that is? Have no fear for I'm about to explain all.
Covered in this lecture:
What origin sources are.
How origin sources can skew metrics.
How to avoid the various problems that origin source sorting can create.
If you're still flummoxed by the idea of origin source sorting, I'm going to show you an example to explain how metrics can change over time despite a product remaining the same. Bonus: this example uses my very own products.
Covered in this lecture:
A real-life example of how origin source sorting works.
How I decided on the metrics for my products.
How I used customer data to explain the change in these metrics.
A great proportion of products fall into the e-commerce category, so understanding that domain's many metrics may be crucial for your role. If you have no idea what the likes of funnel abandonment and retention mean, listen up.
Covered in this lecture:
The many types of e-commerce metrics.
Why each metric is important.
How to break each metric down to inform strategy.
So many metrics make up the e-commerce world that I couldn't fit them all into one lecture. Here's a deep dive into several more metrics you need to be aware of and what exactly they all mean.
Covered in this lecture:
Further e-commerce metrics.
How to understand some of the more complicated ones.
Tracking metrics for a product that is centered around a mobile app can be a little trickier. But follow the AARRR framework (in other words, the pirate sound) and you're set.
Covered in this lecture:
How to track mobile app metrics using the AARRR framework.
How each of these groups are broken down into smaller and more specific metrics.
Just as with any other category, marketplace businesses have a unique set of metrics to track. Here's an overview of what those are and how to use them to help calculate other factors like margins.
Covered in this lecture:
What a marketplace is.
The three metrics that marketplaces should prioritize.
How to break these broad metrics down into smaller ones.