University of Virginia

Digital Product Management: Modern Fundamentals

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Not so long ago, the job of product manager was about assessing market data, creating requirements, and managing the hand-off to sales/marketing. Maybe you’d talk to a customer somewhere in there and they’d tell you what features they wanted. But companies that manage product that way are dying. Being a product person today is a new game, and product managers are at the center of it. Today, particularly if your product is mostly digital, you might update it several times a day. Massive troves of data are available for making decisions and, at the same time, deep insights into customer motivation and experience are more important than ever. The job of the modern product manager is to charter a direction and create a successful working environment for all the actors involved in product success. It’s not a simple job or an easy job, but it is a meaningful job where you’ll be learning all the time. This course will help you along your learning journey and prepare you with the skills and perspective you need to: Create the actionable focus to successfully manage your product (week 1) Focus your work using modern product management methods (week 2) Manage new products and explore new product ideas (week 3) Manage and amplify existing products (week 4) This course is ideal for current product or general managers interested in today's modern product management methods. This course was developed with the generous support of the Batten Institute at UVA’s Darden School of Business. The Batten Institute’s mission is to improve the world through entrepreneurship and innovation: www.batteninstitute.org.

From the lesson

Using Today's Product Management Methods

You’ve probably heard that the days of ‘build it and they will come’ are over. But what exactly should you be doing instead? There’s no shortage of material out there on how to be innovative--but you only have so much time. This week we’ll step through the method’s today’s most successful product managers are using and give you tips to “sell” those methods to your stakeholders. We’ll also show you how to analyze growth, engagement and monetization using qualitative and quantitative methods. You’ll finish the week with an understanding of which methods to apply when and hear from practitioners who are using these methods to make breakthrough products.

Module intro: Ready for Week 23:29

What Kind of PM Are You?3:38

Methods and PMs8:47

Agile and Product Management7:21

Design Thinking and the Product Manager6:13

Lean Startup and the Product Manager9:48

Managing Habits: Trigger and Action5:25

Managing Habits: Variable Reward and Investment5:55

Nir Eyal on Managing Habits6:26

Meet the Instructors

Alex Cowan
Faculty & Batten Fellow
Darden School of Business

One of the things you'll hear about the product manager role is that it varies a lot.

There's so many different kinds of product managers and that's true.

But they also have a lot of things in common and they tend to

vary in some relatively similar systematic ways.

What I thought we would do, is take a minute and talk about

the dimensions along which the role of product management might tend to vary,

and then we're going to talk about

how these different methods you're going to learn how to use

this week may apply to those different takes on being a product manager,

different roles that you may have.

These are the dimensions I chose,

they're not necessarily the absolutely only dimensions that you could

use to describe the role but I thought that they were useful and practical.

This idea of abstraction is,

are you in there working with the team every day on the details of

the implementation in which case you're also

probably acting in that product owner role we have talked about?

Or are you mostly working on setting direction and

looking at the larger picture of how the business is operating?

You're still a product manager here but you're also a PO.

Then on the business facing versus engineering side,

are you more out with business people,

if your internal or a customers and stakeholders,

if external or are you more working with engineers and you're

working a lot on that feasibility dimension that technology infrastructure?

Let's look at a few examples of the types of PM's that might fall,

and how they might fall on this spectrum.

There is this idea of a growth PM which means that

you are overall responsible for growth, revenue growth,

user growth, across a particular product or market

or interaction sort of channel with the product.

Here, your job is primarily business facing,

you're looking at how the product is used and how it's sold,

and explained, and you're operating at

a relatively high-level of abstraction in that sense.

If you are managing

a third party developer program and you're this

generalists PM that looks after the whole thing,

you're operating at a high-level of abstruction but you're primarily working

with probably both internal and external engineers on,

what are we providing these third party developers?

How are they using it?

Is it working for them?

What kind of results are we getting?

Let's say that you're the product manager for a specialty piece of enterprise software

or a specialty use of a piece of enterprise software then you're

going to be primarily business facing understanding this particular set of users like,

let's say, we have a piece of enterprise software that helps with financial compliance,

and you're going to be working with business people at a low-level of abstraction.

The engineering part might be relatively straightforward,

you have a very flexible enterprise software environment.

But there's a lot of details about how you make this work for the user.

And then finally, if you're working on

a developer platform internal or external to the company,

you're working on a specific API then you're probably,

relatively engineering facing at a low-level of abstraction.

These are some ways to look at where you should focus and that's

why I thought it might be useful for us to step through this

so as we proceed we're going to look at,

what are the focal points that are particularly important

depending on generally which one of these quadrants you're in.