Do you need to take Product Management training courses?

No, you don’t need to take a Product Management course. It’s not a prerequisite or a necessity; you can definitely make it as a killer Product Manager without one. But what you may find is that a Product Management training course can speed up your progression. 

Many of the best Product Leaders wished they had access to these courses back when they were first starting. Without the second-hand experience and practical knowledge these courses offer, many PMs had to learn on the job, making mistakes along the way. 

Now we have nothing against making mistakes. Failing and adapting from that experience is a great way to learn and get better – it just takes so much more time. 

After studying a Product Management training course, especially a good one backed by case studies and real-world examples, you’re going to be loaded up on new frameworks, ideas, and processes that you can adopt when you face a problem in your role.

See, every Product Manager carries a figurative toolbox with them. When you’re new and inexperienced, you may only have a screwdriver, a couple of nails, and a hammer in there. When you come across a problem that’s best tackled with a drill, you’ll be ill-equipped, swinging wildly with your hammer unable to overcome that challenge efficiently. Only afterward will you realize that you’ll need to add a drill to your toolbox for when that problem shows up again.

Product Management courses give you more tools to stash in your toolbox early on. So now, when a challenge pops up that needs a drill to fix it, you already know this, have the equipment you need, and can get through the task better. 

Product Management courses are a good way to learn the Product Management best practices without having to experience hardships and failures firsthand. It gives you the vocabulary and understanding needed to be better.

What makes good Product Management courses?

Let’s start with what makes a bad one. A bad course will take your money and leave you with a qualification that’s not worth the paper it’s written on. You should avoid courses that teach you basic glossary definitions and call it a day, especially if you can easily find those definitions yourself with a quick Google search or a read of our Product Management Glossary. 

You also don’t want ones that promote one way of doing things as the only way to do things. That can turn you into a narrow-minded PM, where you’re trying to plug these ‘miracle’ frameworks and processes into problems that it doesn’t suit. Yes, there are best practices, but being taught a certain way leaves you rigid, and unable to be agile. You can end up in a situation where you’re backed up in a corner, unequipped with the wide knowledge base to get you out of it. 

When selecting the best Product Management courses for you, you want it to be based on real-life examples, case studies, and success stories that you can implement into your Product Management life. A course that’s just theory after theory may not be effective, as you’ll be missing insight on where and how to apply that theory. 

Good Product Management courses are rooted in the real world, feeding you second-hand experiences that you can draw upon. At the end of the day, Product Management comes down to applying the right solutions at the right time. To do this well, you need to know a lot of ways to tackle a problem and identify the best ones to apply. A good Product Management course will help you acquire this bank of solutions. 

What topics should I focus on in a Product Management course?

The material you decide to learn from a training course is all down to you. It depends on what you need to know. You should look at where you suck the most. 

Of course, if you’re new to Product Management (hello and welcome btw), then foundational, Product Management 101 courses will be a great place to start and get a foothold. But if you’ve been doing this for a fair bit, start thinking about the skill gaps you have that your role needs. 

Are you already amazing at connecting with users but struggle with the development scrum process? Enroll on  a course for that. Good at stakeholder management but hopeless at leading a product team? Start learning. The role of a Product Manager is so wide-ranging, there’s a lot you can level up on. 

The best Product Management courses

Here’s our list of Product training courses you should consider. We’ve gone for a varied list that covers multiple areas of Product Management, helping you to choose the course that’s right for you. Without further ado, let’s get training!

1. ProdPad Product Roadmapping Course 

Did you know we offer Product Management courses right here at ProdPad? Not only that, we think they’re pretty awesome. 

In fact, we’ve actually got three awesome courses to choose from – lucky you – but if you’re pressed for time, our Product Roadmapping course is a great place to start. See we’re nuts about getting the best out of your product roadmaps and believe getting them right can single-handedly turn you from a good Product Manager to a great one. 

Our course is made up of five concise lessons, each delivered to your inbox once you sign up. We know you’re busy, so we built this educational resource to be convenient for you. The course may be small, but it’s mighty, packed full of insight to help you to uncover the roadmapping best practices, avoid common pitfalls, and empower you to create transparency for your team. 

As you should expect from us by now, the course is focused on the Now-Next-Later roadmap, our favorite and one that CEO Janna Bastow introduced. If you’re new to time horizon roadmaps and want to explore this effective way of organizing your development, this is the course for you. Plus, did we mention that this course is FREE? Get yourself on board.

2. King’s College Product Management Career Accelerator

If you’re at the dawn of your career looking to get a leg up over other new starters, the Product Management Career Accelerator is a fantastic foundational course if you’re able to commit to long-term study. 

Built in partnership with FourthRev, this course uses insight from multiple industry experts (including our very own Janna Bastow), to offer a Product Management course that blends traditional academic study with real-world practical skills. You’ll get the core theory every Product Manager needs to know, and the knowledge of where to apply it. Sweet.

The course covers key areas within Product Management, giving you a wider understanding of the industry and the demands of the position. You’ll learn:

• Product design
• Prototyping and testing
• Agile methodologies
• Launch strategies
• Product growth and analysis
• Product & business strategy
• Communication and influencing skills
• Stakeholder management
• Prioritization

A great plus of the Product Management Accelerator is that it’s project-based learning. This means that when you finish, you’ll have a professional portfolio bursting with examples to showcase your ability. Something that other PMs at the junior level may struggle to put together. 

Once completed, you’ll get a genuine certification from Kings College London, a respected institution in the UK, and one that we believe is alongside the best Product Management certifications that you can get. You can check out our full list below. 

The course is pretty full-on, running for six months, and requires a commitment of 12 hours per week to complete. It’s available entirely online, but it’s a semester-based educational program with defined start and end times. This isn’t something you can jump into at any point in the year.

Once in, it also provides a good networking opportunity, helping you to connect with the Product Management community. To further help with that, you can also join some of these Slack groups for Product Managers. 

3. ProductSide – Digital Product Management Training

The Digital Product Management Training Course from ProductSide is a great option for more experienced Product Managers. ProductSide offers a whole host of great courses, prioritizing practical education that’s in-depth and specialized for PMs at various stages in their career. 

This course is focused on SaaS topics, making it perfect for Product Managers working in a digital industry. Among other modules, you’ll gain deeper insight into data analysis techniques, OKR setting, and digital product discovery. You’ll also learn how to apply dual-track agile to your Product Management with a focus on continuous discovery. 

With an emphasis on digital Product Management, you’ll learn key concepts such as Flywheel, product-led growth, and the different SaaS pricing models. 

When enrolled with ProductSide, you’ll get an entire year of access to the course materials and exams, making it a flexible option for those who may need time to balance the course alongside their work commitments. 

It’s also worth pointing out that ProductSide are a certified ProdPad Partner, so if you’re looking for detailed guidance on how to use ProdPad to support your growth as a PM, these folks are ideally placed to help.

 4. Product HQ – Certified Technical Product Manager

Product HQ is one of the premier training platforms for Product Managers, offering a wide range of courses that you can sink your teeth into to improve. For those looking to tailor their knowledge to technical roles, the Certified Technical Product Course is a great option. 

The course offers over 30 hours of content, including over 140 lectures, templates to download and follow, and interviews with technical Product Managers who have succeeded in the industry. From the course, you’ll get a better understanding of how to manage high-performing software products, tips to nail the technical PM interview, and methods to stand out in the recruiting process, to name just a few. 

This course is designed to take you from being a layman in technical Product Management to a position where you can excel in this specialized role. It’s highly valuable to those without a formal background in computer science or tech, giving you a structured pathway to follow to become a technical PM. 

The course should take around 10 weeks to complete depending on how much time you put in, so is comprehensive and should help you succeed. It’s led by David Bhatt, a Product Leader with over 16 years of experience who’s also an instructor at the University of California Berkeley, so you’ll be in good hands.

5. Mind the Product – Metrics for Product Managers (Team Training)

Mind the Product is a stellar resource for PMs looking to learn. We should know, our CEO Janna Bastow co-founded it. It’s bursting with blog posts, on-demand talks and conferences, and of course Product Management training. It’s one of, if not the biggest, Product Management communities in the world and we recommend all the training courses available on the platform. 

That said, we believe one of the hardest parts of being a Product Manager is figuring out the best metrics and KPIs to follow. So much so that we’ve created a downloadable eBook to help you pick yours. 

There are so many to choose from that it can be a bit of a minefield when tracking performance and success. The Metrics for Product Managers team training course from Mind the Product can help here. 

This course gives your entire team the skills needed to pick, track, and leverage the appropriate metrics for you throughout the entire product lifecycle. Among many things, you’ll learn more about the difference between vanity and actionable metrics, and how to determine what’s important for you to track.

This is a team-focused training course, meaning that you can get your entire development team on board to ensure that everyone is aligned and singing off the same song sheet. All participants will learn the best tools for tracking metrics and the best practices, making them far more effective. This course has a practical approach and operates as a workshop to help PMs develop a human-centered approach to measurement. 

By the end of the two-day workshop, you come out with your own, custom metrics plan based on your product and work. 

6. Exponent PM Interview Training Course 

Compared to other roles, Product Management interviews can be particularly challenging. It’s common to be asked odd questions that test your rational, problem-solving, and critical thinking. If you’re not prepared, this environment can throw off your mojo. 

This Product Management Interview Training Course from Exponent is designed to help you smash your next interview. The course provides insight and tips to help you excel at all stages of the interview process, from screening to the final rounds, giving you the tools to stand out among the crowd. 

Taught by real Product Leaders, you’ll gain insight into some of the actual questions you’re likely to face and the tools to help you build the perfect response. 

Now, this isn’t a course that’s going to give you a list of generic answers – that’s not very useful. Instead, you’ll dive deep into how to tackle questions on product design, strategy, technology, and behavioral questions by using key frameworks such as the CIRCLES method or AARM. 

The course enables you to build answers tailored to your experience and to help you showcase that you’re a one-in-a-million product professional. 

In the course, you’ll get the opportunity to tackle over 50 mock interviews and get feedback on your resume and wider application. The course offers over 26 hours of content, so it’s pretty comprehensive and has been loved by Product Managers aiming for roles at giants like Google, Amazon, and Facebook. 

7. Pragmatic Institute – Focus Course 

The Focus Course from Pragmatic Institute is all about making your product work for your target market. As a Product Manager, you’re trying to craft a product that appeals to your audience. This course gives you the skills to focus on that audience and create something truly valuable. 

When on the course, you’ll learn how to best develop strategic roadmaps that align with the market opportunities that you’ve identified. It’ll equip you with the tools to objectively score market opportunities and discover where your product fits within the landscape. 

Designed for Product Managers keen to get better at identifying and pouncing on market opportunities, you’ll learn how to show your product’s value to your chosen market, increasing the chances of it being successful. 

The course is available as an in-person training module, or as a live course you can take online, making it flexible to suit you and your teams. Overall the course will take 7 hours, making it one of the shorter options on this list, perfect for a Product Manager looking to enhance their capabilities in a short space of time. 

As an aside, if you’re looking for the best tools to help market research, we’ve put together a useful list of the top tools that you should try. You can check it out below.  

If this course doesn’t tickle your fancy, Pragmatic Institute has a cool tool that, after asking you a few questions, will identify the course that best suits your needs. Do note that to take any specialized course on Pragmatic Institute, you first need to complete the foundations course. 

8. Reforge – Mastering Product Management 

Say you’re a pretty savvy Product Manager. You’ve talked the talk, walked the walk, and know the ropes. You’ve had a few successes and are now making serious steps in your career. Now is the ideal time to capitalize on Product Management courses. If you rest on your laurels, you may find that you start to stagnate. No one wants to stay still. 

For PMs who want to continue to grow, Reforge offers a great course that can take you to that next level. The Mastering Product Management course is designed for experienced Product Managers to refine their skills. It delves into more advanced topics, covering strategy execution, metrics, leadership, and more. This ain’t your entry-level course, it’s designed for hardcore Product Managers. If you’re a tad less experienced, take a look at some of the other Reforge courses. 

This course has been developed by a team of product experts, giving you a combination of real-world experience with rigorous theoretical insight. By the end of the course, you’ll have improved your strategic thinking, decision-making, and leadership skills, setting you up nicely to get those senior positions. 

The Mastering Product Management course is offered on a cohort basis. This means you’ll enroll alongside a group of other high-level Product Managers for fixed-schedule learning, great for enhancing your network. 

During the 4 week training, you’ll have live sessions with dedicated instructors focused on your cohort, and be provided case studies, practical assignments, and personalized mentorship to help you thrive. 

Choose this Reforge course to become a master in Product Management and create product strategies that align with business goals, build robust product analytics frameworks, and so much more.

9. Product Institute – User Research Course

You can learn a lot from your users, especially if you train your customer teams to give useful feedback. Your users’ thoughts and needs are invaluable nuggets of information that you can use to better your product. You just need to learn how to research your users properly. This course from the Product Institute guides you to do that. 

The User Research Course is ideal for product professionals keen to enhance their understanding of user needs and behaviors, giving you the skills to conduct effective user research that can inform your decisions. 

You’ll uncover the best practices for countless customer research methods, including interviews, surveys, usability testing, and ethnographic studies while learning how to plan and execute your research projects. 

If you struggle to validate your product decisions, this course helps you delve into the ‘why’ of quantitative metrics, helping you deliver evidence-based customer insights that can inspire your product. 

This is the newest course offered by Product Institute and can be included in a team plan alongside other courses to help improve the effectiveness of your entire team. You can also choose to study this course individually, helping to polish your skills and understanding.

Train that brain! 

As a Product Manager, you should always be learning in your role. No ifs, no buts, each day you should look to know a little bit more, be it about your product, your customers, your roadmap, or your processes. 

There’s a lot of theory surrounding Product Management. Countless frameworks, multiple processes, and various ways to do the same thing. It’s not like math where there’s only one universally agreed upon formula to solve a certain equation. There are different approaches you can try, conflicting ‘best’ ways to solve problems. That’s what makes Product Management interesting.

Taking courses and learning helps to expand your mind and stock up with the many ways you can do things and solve problems. When a new challenge springs up in your work, you can pull on the knowledge you’ve learned in a Product Management course to tackle it. The more potential solutions you can draw upon, the more likely you are to succeed with it. 

At ProdPad, we’re all about making you a better Product Manager. Our tool is designed to do just that. It’s easy to slip into bad habits and traps that can leave you lacking as a PM. Our tool comes with functionality that makes you better, be it our roadmapping tools, ideas management, or customer feedback management. 

Why don’t you give it a try to see what we mean? Coupled with Product Management education, you’ll be unstoppable. 

The post 9 Product Management Courses That Are Actually Worth Taking appeared first on ProdPad.

Practical product management

Hands-on experience assisting another product manager with the day-to-day work involved around managing a backlog or getting a release out, or being gradually given responsibility for certain features within a release is an invaluable way to learn the trials and tribulations of what can go wrong when delivering new product. But practical aspects of product management courses are focusing on tools to help prepare new product managers navigate these processes too. As models and methods become more established, from roadmapping techniques to delivery checklists, they are working their way into a more formalized approach to how to manage products.

Handling product strategy

It’s undeniable that those who have the most prior experience not only handling product strategy but working with executive teams against KPIs on business strategy are going to be the most comfortable and arguably the best placed to deliver a valuable product vision. But an education based on scientific method and business essentials can well-equip product managers to execute a successful product strategy. Tools and tactics for gathering market data and analyzing it, for example, will help to breed a generation of product managers with a foremost focus on business value and market strategy.

Leadership and diplomacy

Product Managers might not always be official leaders in the same sense as the classic executive team, but leadership skills are a hugely important part of this role. Again, the confidence required to exert these qualities tends to come from experience of success in taking a product to market and working with diverse business functions in order to get there. But we all need to start somewhere to get there. Many product management courses have elements that focus specifically on communications and diplomacy skills, similar to more traditional management training.

Either looking ahead to that future generation, or to the future of many of our own careers, it seems that product management will fall in line with other business functions when it comes to personal development. Rather than an alternative to experience, training and education can be seen as an an additional layer on top for existing product managers, or a grounding foundation for new ones. As training becomes more formalised I imagine that a healthy balance between experience and education will be a killer combination for any product management hopeful. And for those of us already in the industry, we can look ahead to a process of continued debate on our philosophies and optimization of our methods with the support of a more academic approach alongside good old fashioned experience.

What do you think of the product management education currently on offer to current and future product managers alike, and what direction do you see it taking in the future?

The post Education vs. Experience – The Future Generation Of Product Managers appeared first on ProdPad.

Superhuman curiosity

A product manager should have the sort of personality that means they never stop looking for answers. Rather than a simple question of creativity or ingenuity (all great qualities too, but you have a team at your disposal for that), the PM should be constantly asking ‘why’ and ‘how’. He thinks about whether a problem is really being solved in the best possible way. She’s genuinely intrigued by the needs of her users. A superhuman drive to explore the unknown equips a product manager to sniff out hidden solutions.

X-ray product vision

At the intersection of technology, business and customer and the reserve of countless sources of information, product management has to be a heavily organized game. It’s your job to take insight from anything from a sales conversation to a customer support request and translate all of that into workable product specs without missing a bit. But perhaps the biggest challenge in juggling each of these snippets of information is to maintain razor sharp focus. The product management superhero sees through all extraneous data to how to best achieve the product vision.

Charming communication

Product Managers need to be great communicators. And that means great communication of many different forms. You should be an active listener when discussing problems with your customers, but you should be assertive when explaining to your sales manager why a particular feature can’t be promised for Q4. Thoroughly understanding your countless audiences is a great basis for having real conversations with them. But combined with a strong sense of confidence, a noble product manager will go far in getting things done.

Earthly humility

Reading this post is a good sign that you’re a good product manager (as long as you’re looking to become a superhero, not just check off the list). A product management god can’t have a God complex. Always trying to learn and improve and never assuming your opinions are more valuable than others’ is hugely important to a grounded product process. A good product manager should assume that the answers lie outside of their own brains and be open to criticism of their ideas. Much like Superman and Batman keep their true identities in the shadows, a product manager hero doesn’t need the glory of being an idea’s brainchild.

Brewed in a science lab?

A product manager doesn’t have to be an engineer. In companies across many different industries product managers are coming forward from many different backgrounds, from customer support to coding. But for anyone managing even mildly technical products a strong understanding of those technologies is a must. And for anyone managing any kind of product at all, a sensibility for a scientific approach to experimentation is equally important. From A/B tests, to impact and effort measures, to simply a record of how many times a feature has been requested, product managers should be sufficiently equipped to make informed decisions. 

We already revealed our alter-egos – Prod Man and Epic Girl – for the product management superheros we try to be every day, at last year’s WebSummit. Tell us yours in the comments below!

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If you’d like to read more best practice, read our 7 pillars of good product management

And if you’d like to see how ProdPad might help you to bring out your inner superstar, sign up for a 14 day free trial here

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You’re struggling to manage expectations with your roadmap

Perhaps our number one challenge (at least according to this survey way back in 2009) is roadmapping. In my chats with product managers, what is specifically challenging about a roadmap is not simply deciding what to build when, but how to communicate this out to your team and customers. If you often find yourself backtracking when artificial deadlines come around, you likely need to reconsider many preconceived ideas about roadmaps to better manage expectations.

What can you do?

• Banish dates from your roadmap, and instead be firm on your commitment to current, near-term or long-term developments.
• If you can find a proxy that everyone is comfortable with, you can set vague time brackets for these allocations to help with communications.
• Make your roadmaps as open and visible as possible so that your colleagues and customers feel that they are integrated in the product loop
• Treat your roadmap as a fluid, changeable document. Use a format that is appropriate for demonstrating changes and making updates in light of new decisions. Share these processes visually with your team.

It’s hard to focus on your strategic product direction amidst day-to-day demands

Many product managers see their most important objectives slipping further and further away as the day is taken over by urgent, but less important tasks. Perhaps roadmap features are getting pushed back in favour of quick fixes, or the distraction of endless emails and meetings means you can’t find the time to concentrate on strategy.

What can you do?

• Break down big strategic goals into manageable tasks – whether this be to interview a customer or source intelligence from a colleague – and integrate these into your daily routine.
• Keep your product vision at the fore of your mind by making it physically visible. Print it out and stick it around the office.
• Consider the business case for every decision, no matter how small. Develop a system whereby if you commit resources to a product change, you’ve measured whether the impact will outweigh the effort.

Aligning your company on product direction is threatened by different teams’ biases

A product manager should be 100% focused on the needs of their target customer. But there are many different people in your organisation who are key in how to get there. Sales, Marketing, Customer Support and every other customer-facing role has invaluable insight into what customers want and what is key to success in gaining new ones. Trouble is, every team is biased towards their own objectives and world-view, making it difficult to align each one on product direction.

What can you do?

• Be the link that brings different teams together to collaborate on product discussions. When everyone is able to see the big picture – and the different viewpoints that come with it – part of your mediation work is done for you.
• Make sure that all employee input is securely captured and traced. This way if a particular departmental concern can’t be satisfied by one project or development, you can point to how it is being actioned elsewhere.

Your executive level doesn’t always agree with your product decisions

The role of your executive team in the minutiae of product decisions depends heavily on your business, its size, and the individuals involved. But regardless of how interested your executives are in day-to-day product management, these are the people you ultimately have to convince of your vision and decisions to get there. So when they aren’t behind you, this is a product manager’s most crippling challenge.

What can you do?

• Follow a rigorous and repeatable process to qualify new ideas, whether they come from a customer support rep or the CEO. You must be equipped with reasoned arguments for or against any product decision, and train your executive team to expect the same for their brainwaves too.
• Make sure your product decisions are grounded in business value. If you’re finding yourself battling your senior team to push back on or push through a suggestion, are you sure you’re taking the right approach? Every product change should reflect a real value to the business – be it customer retention or competitive survival – and you should be collecting the evidence to prove it.
• Again, be open and transparent on roadmapping. Once aligned with your executive team at the highest level of product strategy, the smaller decisions should be easier to support against this framework.

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If you’d like more best practice, read our 7 pillars of good product management

And if you’d like to see how ProdPad can help to make your life easier, sign up for a 14 day free trial today

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