Complete Intro to Product Management is a course taught by Brian Holt, a product manager at Snowflake. The course provides an introduction to product management and is designed for individuals already working in tech or looking to break into product management.

Introduction

Welcome

Learn about the role of a product manager (PM) and its variations in different companies, including project managers, technical program/product managers (TPM or PMT), program managers, and product marketing managers (PMM). Discover the primary responsibilities of a PM, such as ideation, prioritization, planning, alignment, and filling gaps within the team.

What Does a PM Do

Learn about the challenges and rewards of being a product manager. Discover the difficulties in meetings and email management, adjusting to a different sense of productivity, taking credit for collaborative work, and navigating the uncertainty of deciding what to prioritize. Explore the enjoyable aspects, including influencing what gets built, focusing on people-centered design, embracing learning from mistakes, and experiencing a variety of engaging tasks.

Why You Might Want To Be a PM

What Is Product Management

Learn about the importance of stakeholders in product management and how they extend beyond just end users. Explore the diverse range of stakeholders involved in a product like Google Maps, including end users, business owners, third-party developers, and internal teams.

What Is a Stakeholder

Learn about the considerations involved in making product decisions and their impact on stakeholders using examples from Google Maps, such as increasing sponsored listings and improving the API. Explore the trade-offs between generating more revenue and maintaining a positive user experience.

Learn how Google Maps is working to make it easier for users to order food from local restaurants, with a focus on improving the search and ordering experience.

Google Maps and Ordering Food

Stakeholder Management

Learn about principles of good communication in product management, including written communication and meetings. Understand the importance of knowing your audience and tailoring your communication to get what you need from them. Discover how to leverage opportunities for discovery by highlighting areas of unknown and inviting audience input.

Audience

Learn how to provide the right amount of context in your communication, reduce surface area by focusing on the topic at hand, avoid convincing people who are already sold, prepare extensively but only share a fraction, and adopt a direct and efficient writing style for technical communication.

Say Less

Switching frontend frameworks from Backbone to Solid.js for better performance, easier recruitment, bug fixes, and faster development. Implementing an A/B testing tool (VWO) to test UIs, turn off problematic features, improve user experiences, and experiment faster. Convincing stakeholders to choose a social share button design that is consistent with the existing design system, allows code reuse, and aligns with the site's aesthetics.

Exercise

Communication

Learn how to apply principles of good communication to technical writing, emphasizing the importance of understanding your audience and delivering a focused message. Discover the power of effective writing in influencing people and organizations.

Applying Previous Principles

Learn how to drive understanding in your documents by using formatting effectively. Skim readers can quickly grasp the content through headings, bold and color, while longer documents may benefit from a table of contents. Emojis can also be used strategically to draw attention or add levity.

Use Formatting

The checkout flow redesign project is slightly behind schedule due to unexpected additional research and backend work. The team is incorporating UX feedback by moving the checkout button to the center instead of the right, aiming to alleviate user confusion. Although they will miss the end-of-quarter target, they are only two weeks behind and can work concurrently with UX research to expedite shipping.

Formatting Exercise

Learn how to create diagrams to visually organize and communicate complex ideas, such as explaining an API migration. Tools like Google Drawings and Excalidraw can help you easily create effective diagrams.

Diagrams

Learn how to diagram and visualize the timeline of work using Google Drawings, Excalidraw, or any exercise tool of your choice, to effectively communicate the duration and overlapping nature of tasks in a formatting exercise. Find out how to showcase the timeline to the leadership team and coordinate design, UX research, and coding implementation efficiently.

Diagramming Exercise

Learn how to write effective document summaries that capture the main points and encourage people to read your documents. Discover the concept of BLUF (bottom-line up front) and its benefits in saving time and improving communication. Find out how AI can help with summarization.

Executive Summaries

Status update on the checkout flow project: new UX research findings, changes in button placement, and a minor delay of two weeks.

Executive Summary Exercise

Technical Writing

Learn principles of effective communication in meetings and verbal, synchronous communications. Cater your meetings to the participants, provide the right amount of context, prepare efficiently, and focus on planning instead of convincing those who already agree.

Learn how to make your meetings more effective and productive by setting clear intentions, creating an agenda, timeboxing discussions, making decisions beforehand, and determining when to use slide decks. Improve meeting outcomes with these practical tips.

Meeting Prep

Learn how to run a successful meeting by owning the space, managing tangents effectively, and utilizing inoculation theory to address potential concerns beforehand. These tips apply to both big companies and startups.

Running the Meeting

Plan a one-hour meeting around the formatting exercise memo, involving executives, technical stakeholders, and team members. Address the delay, reasons behind it, and future plans while discussing design, research, and development processes. Expect tension but a shared goal of launching new features.

Meetings

Learn the importance of basic stats for product managers and how it can improve their understanding and storytelling with numbers. Topics covered include sampling, p-values, and effective graphing techniques.

Stats and Graphs

Learn about the importance of metrics in product management, including team/organization metrics and project metrics. Discover key metrics for Netflix, such as sign-ups, retention, revenue, and watch-hours. Understand how CSAT (Customer Satisfaction) is a relative metric that should be tracked but not overemphasized.

Team and Project Metrics

This markdown document discusses various projects and their associated metrics that companies like Nike, Spotify, Delta Airlines, Strava, and PlayStation would track. The projects include improving the add to cart process for Nike, enhancing music recommendations for Spotify, detecting expiring credit cards for Delta Airlines, adding a share to Facebook button for completing bike rides on Strava, and enabling sign-in with QR code and phone for PlayStation.

Metrics

Learn the basics of product management through user stories and prioritizing user needs. Validate user stories through research and keep users in mind throughout the product development process.

User Stories

Learn how to write an effective product specification (spec) that proposes a project and aligns everyone involved. This guide covers the important sections of a spec, including the executive summary, problem statement, goals, key metrics, rollback criteria, timelines, designs, technical concerns, and appendix.

Product Specs

Netflix seeks to add a feature that allows users to watch shows together and engage in synchronized video chats similar to FaceTime. The goal is to provide a true living room chat experience for users while watching their favorite shows, leveraging video-chat-enabled devices.

Example of a Spec

Write a product spec for your own project or idea, utilizing domain knowledge. Includes examples like integrating Spotify with Zoom, live player updates in ESPN's fantasy sports app, and assigning bounties on GitHub.

Product

Learn about effective planning strategies in the tech industry, including the importance of having a plan, aligning with organizational culture, starting the planning process, sourcing ideas from various stakeholders, following themes, and structuring projects for completion. Find tips on milestone setting, prioritization, and communicating future needs through the cutline. Avoid common pitfalls by ensuring research and feasibility before adding projects to the roadmap.

Planning Tips

Learn about prioritization methods for product managers, including the Complexity vs Business Value matrix and the RICE Method. These frameworks help assess the impact, risk, and cost of tasks, allowing you to prioritize effectively.

Prioritizing

Create a prioritized roadmap for the next quarter of a direct-to-consumer e-bike company focused on growth and commuters. Key projects include making bikes compatible with Strava, redesigning onboarding flow, adding racing-mode for circular tracks, implementing dark mode for nighttime commuting, adding child mode for safety, and fixing a timezone bug.

Planning

Congrats on finishing the course! This biased take on how to be a PM provides insights from a Microsoft, Stripe, and Snowflake perspective, acknowledging that there are multiple correct approaches to this role. Whether you're looking to enhance your PM skills or embark on a PM career, this class offers valuable lessons.

Complete Intro to Product Management