The Essence of Product Management by career.pm

Planning and delivering product releases is what keeps most PMs busy most of the time. In this lecture, we'll define what a release is, talk about release types and governance, discuss scope in terms of an MVP (minimum viable product) and more.

Value propositions are an expression of the value you promise to deliver to the market with your product. In this lecture, we'll talk about the concept of customer value, discuss how to capture value propositions, and explore how they are used to create marketing messages. You can learn more about the first template we describe in the Positioning Statement section of this article (note that we don't cover the last sentence {positioning}) of the template described there.

In this lecture, we'll address requirements management. For those more comfortable with Agile/Scrum-like terms, think of it as capturing user stories. We first define what a requirement is and contrast it with the term "feature". We then discuss types of requirements, the sources of requirements, and what makes a good requirement.

In this lecture, we'll talk about a critical accountability of all PMs: defining your product's strategy. We will define strategy as part of a broader "business motivation" as defined in the Object Management Group's Business Motivation Model. You should first define the "ends" you would like to achieve, i.e., how you'll measure the success of your product, and then define how you'll get there. You can read more about the Business Motivation Model in the OMG spec: https://www.omg.org/spec/BMM/About-BMM/

In this lecture, we explore "market segments", which are cohorts within a market that share similar requirements or priorities. Most product managers do an insufficient job of segmenting the market they serve and are thus unable to optimally focus engineering investment and sales and marketing spend. Understanding segments and their criticality to your product is one of the traits that separates average PMs from the greats!

In this lecture, we define a critical concept to product development: the market we build products for. We'll talk about how to do market analysis and contrast the term "market" with the term "customer".

The term "enterprise" is often used to describe businesses selling to other businesses (B2B). Over time, it has also come to connote notions of scale and even complexity. This course covers the essence of product management but also addresses some topics that are relevant in the enterprise. In this lecture, we'll define the enterprise and discuss how B2B differs from B2C (business to customer) from a product management perspective.

In this lecture, we'll define product management formally and talk about they best ways to position its value with various audiences. You'll learn about the key accountabililies that separate a PMs work from the activities performed by other disciplines. You'll also learn why product management is a science, not a mysterious dark art! At the end of this lecture, you'll be able to compare the work you do with "canonical" product management and help explain the value of this role to others, including senior leadership.

In this episode, we'll describe what a product is and define the concept of product development. We all use these terms but in my experience, few organizations have a precise, consistent definition for it. If you're going to manage something, you should have a good definition for it!

In this lecture, we'll discuss the criticality of understanding the market problems you'd like to solve before beginning to design your product. We discuss separating the problem and solutions spaces, how to capture problem statements, and validating problems.

This lecture covers critical concept that underlie the product management foundations that will be described in this course. In it, we'll discuss the Functional and Technical Perspective and "The Why, What, and How".

In this lecture, Greg Prickril, Co-founder of career.pm, describes the course's goals and structure.