Master Product Management by actually building a Product

Let's begin the course by discussing the strategic topics first and defining what a product vision, strategy, and strategic product roadmaps are and their role in product development.

Why every product needs a vision? And why is vision alone not enough for a product team to act on? You will find out after watching this video.

Covered in this lecture:

• Who drives a product vision & strategy at an early stage of a company.

• What is a product/market fit, and why it’s important to find it.

• What is a product vision and strategy with examples.

• When product function starts contributing to product vision and strategy.

Let’s talk about the role of strategic product roadmap in product development.

Covered in this lecture:

• What is a product roadmap? Key components of a roadmap.

• Example of the public roadmap from ProdPad, a product management software that supports roadmap development.

• What a Product Manager needs to pay attention to when creating a strategic roadmap.

You already know that a Product Manager relies on a product roadmap to figure out which projects to work on next.

If a problem is already well understood or we need to fix a product bug, we can start working on the solution right away.

But, on the other hand, if we need to understand a problem more, we can carry on with additional research.

And that's what we will do in this and the upcoming two sections of the course.

For this course, you can select an idea for a product you will be building and launching, following along with the curriculum.

But you will have more constraints on what to work on when you join a company as a product manager (PM).

So let’s review the main sources of product ideas you can rely on as a PM.

Covered in this lecture:

• Source of product ideas #1: Stakeholders (including customers or users and internal product stakeholders).

• Source of product ideas #2: Product analytics.

• Source of product ideas #3: Market research and analysis.

• Source of product ideas #4: Open innovations.

In this lecture, Anna will give her recommendations on choosing an idea for your course project.

You can skip this lecture if you already know what product you want to build or what problem to solve.

Covered in the lecture:

• Three areas to consider when thinking about an idea for your product.

• Industries to avoid when selecting an idea.

• How you can build a product from scratch without coding.

• Should your product be successful so you can include it in your CV/portfolio and speak at job interviews?

• Can you create a non-tech product (e.g., podcast or video course)?

In this video, we will talk about brainstorming.

As a product manager, you’ll need to brainstorm on many occasions, e.g., to decide what product direction to choose or to come up with possible solutions to a problem.

If you haven’t yet decided on what product idea to choose for your course project, do a brainstorming exercise after watching this lecture!

Covered in the lecture:

• How to prepare for a brainstorming session.

• “How Might We” technique to brainstorm ideas.

In this video, Anna will introduce you to a project she will work on herself, following along with the program with you.

Covered in the lecture:

• Introducing the initial idea behind the follow-along project "JustDo".

As a product manager, you will work a lot with your customers since you need to know their needs, wants, obstacles, frustrations, how they make the purchasing decisions, what makes them buy your product, and what will drive them away.

This lecture will introduce you to an important discipline - User research -that helps you to get to know your customers and users better and create products they love.

Covered in the lecture:

• Difference between customers and users.

• Definition of the User research and how it fits into the product development.

• Overview of the steps of the User research process.

In this lecture, we will start talking about the first step of the User research process - defining research goals, objectives, and hypotheses.

We will also define the hypothesis, goals, and objectives for the course follow-along project “JustDo.”

Covered in the lecture:

• Formulating assumptions about a problem.

• How to transform assumptions into problem hypothesis.

• How to define goals and objectives for a research project.

In this lecture, we will go through the most popular methods to conduct research.

Covered in the lecture:

• Ten of the most popular research methods you must be aware of as a PM.

In the lecture, we will talk about how you can select which method to choose for your research project.

Covered in the lecture:

• Difference between qualitative and quantitative research methods.

• How to select a research method based on the stage of product development.

In this lecture, we will select research methods for the problem discovery stage for the course follow-along project.

Covered in the lecture:

• Research methods that will be used for the JustDo project problem discovery.

In this lecture, we will talk about finding target users for a problem you want to solve.

Covered in the lecture:

• How to do user segmentation to find your target group.

• Should you aim to find a broad or narrow user segment?

• How to prioritize target user segments.

Let’s discuss why we need a user persona tool when discovering a problem and solution and how to create it.

Covered in the lecture:

• User persona definition.

• Main segments that make up a user persona.

• If a persona is the same as a user group.

• When to create a user persona, and how many do you need.

• Tools available for developing a persona.

In this video, let's look at how to recruit participants for your user research project.

Covered in the lecture:

• Steps to recruiting research participants.

• When to speak with users and non-users of your product.

• Most common channels for recruiting prospective users.

The second step in recruiting research participants is to create an interview screener. So let’s figure out how to make it.

Covered in the lecture:

• Why you need an interview screener.

• How to come up with questions for your screener.

• Tools available to create a good interview screener.

The third and final step in recruiting research participants is to send out invitations to participate in your research. Let’s talk about how to organize this process.

Covered in the lecture:

• What channels to use for sending out invitations.

• Whom to invite from your product team.

• How many interviews do you need.

• Should you offer any incentives for people to talk to you?

We are almost ready to begin interviewing users and collecting the first insights regarding the problem we want to solve.

There is one last task we have to take care of before we are all set to meet with users - creating an interview discussion guide.

Covered in the lecture:

• Why you need a discussion guide.

• Discussion guide structure.

• Tips on creating a discussion guide.

In this video, Anna will give her final recommendations for making the most out of your user interviews.

Covered in the lecture:

• Ten things that will help you to conduct an insightful user interview.

In this video, we will learn how to sort through and analyze qualitative feedback collected from user interviews.

Covered in the lecture:

• What is affinity diagramming?

• Steps of the affinity diagramming process.

• Tools available for creating an affinity diagram.

  
  

P.S. This lecture is optional, and you can watch it later to deepen your knowledge of the techniques for organizing and interpreting findings from multiple sources of information. 

In this video, we will learn about another tool to synthesize your observations made while interacting with users - an empathy map.

Covered in the lecture:

• Why you need an empathy map.

• The main use cases for empathy mapping.

• The process of creating an empathy map.

• Tools available for creating an empathy map.

P.S. This lecture is optional, and you can watch it later on to deepen your knowledge of the techniques for organizing and interpreting findings from multiple sources of information. 

In this video, we will begin discussing how you can analyze findings from your research (e.g., user interviews) and uncover insights to help you ideate and design a solution.

Covered in the lecture:

• Why you need to make notes during your interviews.

• What to look for when analyzing your interview notes.

• What a validated hypothesis is.

• What to do if, after more than ten interviews, you are still not getting answers to your research questions?

In this video, we continue discussing techniques that help you analyze your research findings, build empathy with users and communicate your findings to other product team members and stakeholders.

This time we will be talking about Customer Journey Mapping.

Covered in the lecture:

• What is a customer journey map, and when you need one.

• Four main types of customer journey maps, with examples.

In the video, we will continue talking about the Customer Journey Mapping technique. If you missed part one of the lecture - watch it first before starting this one :)

Covered in the lecture:

• Key elements of every Customer Journey map.

• The process of creating a map.

• Tools you need to start developing a map for your product. 

So after you've analyzed interview findings using one or several techniques we covered in the previous videos, it's time to formulate a "problem statement" or "point of view statement."

Covered in the lecture:

• What is a problem statement?

• Templates to write a problem statement.

• Problem statement examples.

So we've reached the final step of our user research project and the "Define" phase of the design thinking process - creating a research report.

Covered in the lecture:

• The purpose of a research report.

• Things to include in your report.

• With whom you should share a report.

In this video, Anna will walk you through the problem discovery interviews for the follow-along project, the interview findings, and the decision she made on if she wants to continue working on the same idea or pivot to something different.

Covered in the lecture:

• The context behind the JustDo project.

• JustDo problem hypotheses, goals & objectives of the research project.

• Target audience.

• Channels used to approach the target users.

• Interview screener questions.

• Insights from the user interviews and what hypotheses have been validated.

• JustDo problem statement.

• Next steps - go/no go for the project.

• Final recommendations on what to pay attention to when doing a research project.

In this video, let's start talking about competitor analysis - a regular activity that you will be doing as a product manager (or entrepreneur).

Competitor analysis helps you identify the opportunities and threats to your product and business.

It also lets you strategize what opportunities to prioritize to serve your customers better and get prospective customers to switch from competing products.

Covered in the lecture:

• Goals of competitor analysis.

• Three types of competitors: direct competitors, secondary (or indirect) competitors, and replacement competitors.

• Where you can find information on your product competitors.

In this video, we will talk about types of competitor analysis.

Covered in the lecture:

• Three types of competitor analysis: value curve analysis, competitive landscape analysis, and feature analysis.

In this lecture, we are going to talk about collecting market insights.

It's important to familiarize yourself as much as possible with what's happening around your products to make a timely and informed decision on what product direction to go.

Covered in the lecture:

• What is secondary market research?

• Free and paid resources available for collecting market insights.

P.S. This lecture is optional. You can watch it if you need to collect more insights about your product idea (problem) or whenever you want to deepen your knowledge of the resources available for gathering market insights.

In this lecture, let's talk about how to estimate your product's market size.

You'll need this analysis to understand the size of the product opportunity and if there will be enough demand for your product.

Covered in the lecture:

• Three parameters to size up a market.

• Top-down, bottom-up, and value theory approaches to calculate the market size.

So far, we've spent quite a lot of time focusing on understanding our product's users.

However, we cannot skip conversations about other important stakeholders - your internal teams.

Covered in the lecture:

• Who is your product stakeholders inside a company?

• Why stakeholders' alignment is important?

Let's start our conversation about the stakeholders' alignment by discussing how tech teams create an alignment regarding the company's strategic objectives and how they measure progress toward achieving them.

Covered in the lecture:

• Why do companies plan and set product goals?

• OKRs technique for planning and setting goals.

• Examples of OKRs.

In this and the following several lectures, we will do a deep dive into the techniques for building up stakeholders' alignment.

Covered in the lecture:

• Intro to the Impact Mapping framework.

• Other use-cases when you can benefit from this framework, apart from stakeholders alignment.

In this lecture, we will go through the steps of Impact mapping and see how to create a map using the example of the JustDo project.

Covered in the lecture:

• Impact mapping step 1 - define Why.

• How to set up SMART goals.

• Impact mapping step 2 - define Who.

• Impact mapping step 3 - define How.

Apart from the Impact Mapping framework, you can use other techniques in addition to or instead of it. One such technique is the Business Model canvas which we will learn about in this lecture.

Covered in the lecture:

• Introduction of a Business Model canvas.

• Nine components of the canvas, with examples.

• Overview of the most common pricing strategies.

• When and how the canvas can be helpful.

Welcome to the lecture, where we will talk about companies' business models.

If you have a business-related background, you know this topic already, so feel free to skip this lecture.

However, please continue watching if you are from tech or other non-business backgrounds since you may learn new things here.

Covered in the lecture:

• What is a business model?

• Why you need to understand your company's business model.

• Five business model types commonly used by tech companies today.

This video will briefly cover other alignment techniques you can benefit from when building products.

Consider them more advanced techniques you need to know while growing your career and deepening your knowledge.

Covered in the lecture:

• Lean Canvas method.

• Opportunity Canvas.

• Working backwards process from Amazon.

Now we are ready to go ahead with the next step of product development and begin designing and validating our solution.

First, we will kick off the process by doing a solution ideation exercise where we will brainstorm all possible solutions to the problem.

And then, we will prioritize the most promising solutions and ideas to meet the real world as prototypes.

In this video, we will discuss how to brainstorm solutions that might solve a problem you've been discovering in the previous sections of the course.

Covered in the lecture:

• Recap on the steps of the brainstorming process.

• "Crazy 8" technique to visualize solution ideas.

• Tips and tricks on organizing and handling productive brainstorming sessions.

In this video, we will be practicing creating How Might We questions that we need as a seed for the solution ideation process.

As always, Anna will use her follow-along project as an example.

In this video, we will define the last level of the impact map.

Anna will also show you the results of the solution ideation workshop she ran for the JustDo project and explain how she envisions each solution could work. 

Covered in the lecture:

• Intro to step 4 of the impact mapping process.

• Overview of five possible solutions for JustDo and their pros and cons.

In this and the following two lectures, we will discuss prioritization techniques.

Covered in the lecture:

• Why and when do you need to make prioritization calls.

• What frameworks you can use.

• What are some typical yet bad prioritization practices still in place in some companies?

In this lecture, we will be covering the RICE prioritization framework.

This lecture is important since you need at least one prioritization framework in your toolkit to do your job as a product manager, and it’s a good idea to start with RICE.

Covered in the lecture:

• Intro to RICE prioritization.

• Overview of four factors included in the framework: reach, impact, confidence, effort.

• Bonus: Two additional criteria you can include in the framework.

In this video, we will continue discussing different frameworks used in product management to prioritize product opportunities.

This lecture is optional, and you can certainly begin working as a PM knowing how to use just the RICE prioritization framework we covered in the previous video.

However, please continue watching if you feel ready and curious to try other prioritization methods and see how they can complement or replace the first framework.

Covered in the lecture:

• Critical path prioritization.

• KANO model.

• Moscow method.

• "Buy a feature" technique.

It will be a follow-along video where Anna will show you her process behind prioritizing solutions for the JustDo project.

Covered in the lecture:

• Prioritizing five possible solutions for JustDo with the RICE framework.

Let’s begin a new chapter of the course and learn about creating solution prototypes.

Covered in the lecture:

• Overview of what we’ve done so far.

• Why do we need to create solution prototypes?

• Steps of the solution prototyping process.

Let's kick off the prototyping phase by finding the riskiest assumptions about our solution.

Covered in the lecture:

• Overview of solution risks relative to the lifecycle stage of a company.

• An alternative way of thinking about the riskiest assumptions through your business model canvas.

Before we define the riskiest assumptions for JustDo, Anna needs to give you an overview of how she envisions the first version of the solution to the problem:

“people who want to start their educational side project to learn new skills struggle to find project ideas or participants.”

Covered in the lecture:

• Customer Journey Map for the no-code application Anna will build for the JustDo project.

• Business Model Canvas for JustDo.

Now that you know details about the JustDo solution and business model, let's list the assumptions about the solution.

Covered in the lecture:

• Overview of the major assumptions for the JustDo solution.

The next question we have to answer after we define assumptions about our solution is what assumptions need further testing. Yes, you don't need to test all assumptions from your list!

Covered in the lecture:

• What is a "leap-of-faith" assumption?

• How to identify assumptions that need further testing.

Now it's time to discuss what prototypes you can build to test your assumptions.

Covered in the lecture:

• Feature stub or fake door prototype.

• 404 test.

• Storyboard.

• Paper prototype.

• Explainer video.

In this video, we continue talking about prototyping techniques.

Covered in the lecture:

• Landing page prototype experiment.

Welcome back to the series of videos where we talk about prototypes you can create to validate your product ideas.

Covered in the lecture:

• Clickable Prototype.

• Extreme Programming Spike.

• Wizard of Oz.

Welcome to the last lecture of the series of videos, where we talk about solution prototyping techniques.

Covered in the lecture:

• The mashup or No code prototype experiment.

So far, we have done a great job defining solution assumptions, finding the riskiest ones, and learning about solution prototyping techniques.

Now it's time to combine these pieces and design our prototype experiment.

Covered in the lecture:

• Why do we need to run a prototype experiment?

• What is a Minimum Viable Experiment?

• Three components of every experiment.

• How to define solution hypotheses.

Welcome to the second part of the lecture, where we will continue talking about planning your prototype experiments.

Covered in the lecture:

• Deciding what tests we will run to validate/invalidate hypotheses.

• Defining success metrics for every experiment.

In this video, And will show you how she describes experiments for JustDo. So if you follow along, please continue watching the video.

Covered in the lecture:

• Planning prototype experiments for JustDo.

If you have doubts about creating your prototype using no-code tools - this lecture is for you!

Covered in the lecture:

• What is no-code?

• Why we will use Glideapps for this course.

• Why do we skip other, less expensive prototyping techniques?

• How having a no-code app can benefit your job application.

• How knowing no-code helps you at your job.

Before building our prototype with Glide, let's define what experience we want to create for the app's first version.

Covered in the lecture:

• Main functions of the first version of the JustDo app.

In this short video, let’s learn about the steps of building a prototype in the Glide no-code software we are about to start.

Covered in the lecture:

• Four-step process of creating a prototype with Glide.

Let's begin with creating our data structures.

Covered in the lecture:

• How data is stored in a no-code app.

• How to define your data structure.

• Rules on creating data structures in Google sheets.

• Creating data structures for JustDo.

The next step we have to do after setting up our data structure in Google sheets is to connect the file with our application in Glide. Let’s see how to do this.

Covered in the lecture:

• How to connect Google sheets file with your application.

• How to navigate in Glide: an overview of the main screens.

Your app isn't limited to just displaying static rows and columns from a spreadsheet.

Depending on what functionality you need, you might want to use the Data editor provided by Glide for every application.

We will learn about the Data editor in this tutorial.

Covered in the lecture:

• Why you need Data Editor.

• Manipulating your data via Data Editor.

• What is a row ID column?

• What is a relation column?

Now it's time to bring our app to life with layout and navigation.

Covered in the lecture:

• Overview of the three main levels of every app: Tabs, Top-level screens, and Detail screens.

• Setting up Tabs for JustDo.

In this tutorial, let's begin customizing the top-level and detailed screens for our application.

Covered in the lecture:

• Customizing top-level and detailed screens for the People tab of the JustDo app.

In this tutorial, let’s customize top-level and detailed screens for the Projects tab of the JustDo app.

Covered in the lecture:

• Steps to customize top-level and detailed screens for the Projects tab.

• How to customize project-specific comments.

This tutorial will cover how to customize the Chat tab in Glide.

Covered in the lecture:

• Difference between Chat and Comments.

• How Glide stores Chat data.

• How to delete messages in Chat.

In this tutorial, Anna will show you how to customize the About Tab for an application.

Covered in the lecture:

• Steps to customize the About Tab for the JustDo app.

In this quick tutorial, we will go through Glide's functionality called "Row Owners,” which you may need to restrict user access to data.

Covered in the lecture:

• When you need Row Owners.

• How to activate Row Owners for your app.

We have done a great job since we have already completed two of the four steps of creating our application.

We set up data structures with Google sheets and Glide data editor and customized our app's layouts and navigation.

Now let's do the third step - add actions to our application.

Covered in the lecture:

• What actions exist in Glide.

• Actions we will implement for the JustDo app.

In this tutorial, Anna will show how to customize an onboarding flow for a new user.

Covered in the lecture:

• Building up a new user onboarding process for JustDo.

In this video, Anna will show how to display data your users entered through the Choice component.

It's a bit tricky for the case when users provide multiple entries, and you'll need to do a bit of customization to display these values nicely.

Covered in the lecture:

• Steps to show data entered through the multiple-choice component.

In this tutorial, Anna will show how to allow users to change their profile information.

Covered in the lecture:

• Customizing user profile changes in Glide.

In this tutorial, we will cover how to set up a process of adding a new project.

Covered in the lecture:

• Implementing a new project registration process in Glide.

• How to check that entered data is unique, e.g., to ensure that no two projects have the same name.

In this tutorial, Anna will show how project owners can change information about their existing projects.

Anna will be talking about projects since that's an object relevant to the follow-along project for the course.

However, you can apply this logic to any other objects of your application that users must first register and then modify.

Covered in the lecture:

• Two options for how you can modify data in Glide.

• Demonstration of how to implement one of the options.

In this tutorial, Anna will show how you can collect users' feedback through your application.

Covered in the lecture:

• Four questions to assess if users are interested in your solution.

• How to customize the survey form in Glide.

In this tutorial, Anna will show how you can customize the Home tab for your application.

Covered in the lecture:

• Why your app needs a Home tab.

• Customizing the JustDo Home tab using the Inline list component.

To start testing and using your application, you must publish it first and install it on your phone. We will cover both of these steps in this tutorial.

Covered in the lecture:

• How to Publish an app built with Glide.

• How to install an app on your phone.

In this video, Anna will give an overview of the first version of the JustDo app.

Covered in the lecture:

• Overview of the main functionality of JustDo.

In this video, we will discuss how to test solution usability.

Covered in the video:

• Why test usability.

• Goals of the usability testing.

• Four types of usability testing.

In this video, we will continue talking about usability testing.

Covered in the video:

• How to prepare for the testing.

• How to conduct the test to get the maximum insights from your target users.

Welcome back to the series of lectures where we talk about usability testing.

This time we will discuss how to select participants for your usability tests.

Covered in the video:

• How many participants do you need for each test.

• How to recruit your target users.

This video will cover how to collect feedback on solution desirability.

Covered in the video:

• Why you need to run desirability tests.

• Examples of questions you can ask during the test.

• How desirability testing fits into the solution validation process.

In this video, we will cover how to get solution feedback from your internal teams.

Covered in the video:

• How to validate solution feasibility.

• How to make sure that your solution is business viable.

In this video, Anna will share the first test results for JustDo and the decisions she made on the second iteration of prototype development.

Covered in the video:

• Walk-through the JustDo application testing process and its results.

• Assumptions that have been validated.

In this follow-along video, Anna will go through the second version of the user journey map to understand the changes she wants to make to improve the user experience.

Covered in the video:

• Overview of the main issues uncovered during testing.

• Walk-through the second version of the Customer Journey Map for JustDo.

In this tutorial, Anna will go through the changes to the app she made to fix the main problems discovered after the first round of testing.

Covered in the video:

• Main changes made in the second version of the JustDo app.

In this video, Anna will talk about how she sees the development of the JustDo app.

Covered in the video:

• Plans for the second iteration of product tests.

• Must-have features that will transform the prototype into a fully functional product.