Product Management

Course Number 1765

Senior Lecturer Sara McKinley Torti

Spring; Q3; 1.5 credits

Career Focus:

This half course provides an introduction to product management, focused primarily on improving and scaling existing products at technology companies. It is designed for three types of students:

Those who aspire to be Product Managers, or are broadly interested in Product Management.
Those who will join larger established technology companies.
Aspiring founders that are interested in learning how to grow technology products after finding product-market fit.

Educational Objectives:

A Product Manager is obsessed with the problem their product tries to solve and works to both define the product’s functional requirements and lead cross-functional teams to develop, launch and improve their product over time. Taught by an experienced former Google product executive, this course aims to provide an introduction to product management and expose students to key product development and growth strategies so they can build, optimize and scale products following graduation.

Product examples cover a range of technology products but most are focused on consumer facing software products in the internet, mobile and marketplace sectors. In the 2024-2025 academic year, cases and exercises will be grounded in products from: Uber, Spotify, Ancestry, Amazon, YouTube, Netflix, Slack, Redfin, Xero, Duolingo, Peloton and more. No prior knowledge of Product Management, design, engineering, or computer science required. Those interested in career transitions are especially welcome.

The final deliverable for the course will be a 4 hour case-based take home exam.

Please note, this course is focused on improving and scaling existing products that have already achieved product market fit at technology companies. While the course also addresses how to generate new product ideas and how to find initial product market fit, these topics are not a primary focus.

This course is a natural companion to Launching Technology Ventures and Startup Operations, both of which focus on early stage ventures searching for initial product market fit. It also complements Scaling Technology Ventures, which has a cross-functional perspective and focuses on overall organization design.

Course Content

In this half course, students will take the perspective of a Product Manager at a technology company tasked with improving and growing a product. Through case studies, individual exercises, assigned readings, and conversations with product leaders, students will examine different management opportunities and challenges related to building and growing technology products and practice applying key product strategies to real current situations that PMs at leading technology companies face. We will explore three different modules:

Improving Existing Product Functionality.
How to determine which user pain points should be fixed and fix them? How to attract new users to a core product? How to optimize a conversion funnel? How to winback churned customers?
Adding New Product Features.
How to prioritize new features? How to respond to the competition? How to price a new product feature? Which country to launch a new product in? How to reinvigorate a product with a new vision?
Pursuing Adjacent Products.
How to find a new product adjacency? How to develop a MVP for a new product adjacency? How to shut down a poor performing product and reallocate the team to a new growth opportunity?

Course Pedagogy

The PM class leverages two core pedagogies: (1) cases and (2) exercises. Usually there are two classes per week, one that is case-based and the other that is exercise-based. Cases you are familiar with. Exercises are formatted in a similar way to cases except they require students to submit their answers (1pg / roughly 2hrs of work) in advance of class for a grade. These exercises are modeled after PM in-person or take-home interview questions. These may require students to do work/research that extends beyond the information provided. Most importantly, they give students an opportunity to create a key PM artifact and get feedback on their submission. Class discussion of exercises mirrors a traditional case discussion, but also includes the characteristics and components of a good exercise answer. Examples of previous year’s exercises: wireframing, churn analysis, user interviews and drafting a PR/FAQ.