The Master of Professional Studies in Product Management’s 30-credit, 10-course curriculum can be completed in 15-months, with students enrolling in two 3-credit courses per 12-week term.
Term I — Becoming a Product Manager
Purpose:
Discover how to deliver products that customers love, deliver value, and work for the business.
Learn the basics of customer discovery, product discovery, product delivery, and the core-context model for managing products through maturity. Explore how these change given the product adoption lifecycle and the market life cycle maturity, including how to detect which stage you are in and what types of strategies can be employed at each stage. Examine the processes of technological change and how firms can creatively recognize, screen, and evaluate tools and techniques to practice innovation.
Term II — Customer and Product Discovery
Purpose:
Discover if the problem is worth solving and explore solutions with early product prototyping by engaging the customer through proven discovery and validation techniques.
Customer and product discovery is the process of using ideation methods and minimum viable prototypes to discover and test product-market fit. This is best accomplished by using a sound product discovery process with validating tests that confirm your product-market fit. Knowing how to build and conduct tests for value, usability, feasibility, and viability are essential so you can lead products with data-driven decisions. These techniques and skills enable you to evangelize your product concept, and answer important questions about your product, including:
Is the value proposition compelling and urgent?
Can the customer actually use it to solve the problem?
Does the business model make sense for our business?
Can you build the business and technology in a scalable way?
Term III — Product Delivery
Purpose:
Enable business agility using design thinking and DevOps that empowers product teams to scale product innovations, delight customers, and capture market share.
With a strong product idea, the work to take that product to market at-scale begins. Doing this well means transforming the business and the customer experience. Design thinking drives this change through bias for action and a confident approach to innovating solutions that scale. Accomplishing this also requires DevOps principles for engineering, and empowering teams through modern product leadership for development and operations. Product managers must enable productivity and delivery by actively influencing the delivery pipeline to address scalability, reliability, performance, and maintainability.
Term IV — Gaining Traction & Influence
Purpose:
Gain traction through actively managing the customer journey while influencing stakeholders and negotiating business partnerships that drive growth.
With modern product frameworks in place, marketing takes on completely new dimensions. The rise of growth hacking means finding your optimal growth channel and driving customers into it. Therefore, the product is no longer just the features, but the entire customer journey. Meanwhile, negotiating a great business relationship can often leap a product or company an order of magnitude higher in customer access and acquisition, while reducing costs.
Term V — Managing Products at Scale
Purpose:
Lead product portfolios and innovations at scale with tailored product frameworks, lean budgeting, empowered teams, and aligned objectives and key results.
As products scale and diversify across market segments, and vertically orchestrate as product suites, how do you keep innovating? Delivery and growth create momentum that push down on costs and people to do more with less. This is the greatest challenge for product leaders and heads of innovation. Learn how to establish product frameworks for flow, empower teams, leverage lean budgeting strategically for product value streams, manage long-term product teams and continuous employee engagement, and ensure that every aspect of the product work ties to business value, key financials, and the objectives and key results (OKRs).
