MASTER OF PROFESSIONAL STUDIES IN PRODUCT MANAGEMENT

Data Analysis and Decision Making

Understand decision making under uncertainty for products, portfolios, and programs across various industries and environments.

Delivery

Online

Duration

12 Weeks

Commitment

8-10 Hours per Week

Today’s product managers must have a comprehensive understanding of making decisions under uncertainty for products, portfolios, and programs across various industries and environments. This course focuses on the use of Bayesian methods for informing decisions on products and programs when directing experiments. Examines the testing of product ideas throughout the lifecycle, from customer discovery, to product discovery, to product design and optimization, to channel testing and marketing for growth.

What You'll Learn

  • Develop survey methods and evaluation models for better development of data in qualitative assessments and how to integrate with quantitative data sets for customer and product discovery.
  • Develop demand forecasting and simulation models that leverage both small and big data techniques to develop scenarios for product and program planning.
  • Understand the best method choice for evaluating user experience, customer experiences, marketing channel selection, and team operational health and analytics.

Who Will Benefit

  • Aspiring product managers interested in learning the key decision making frameworks, scenarios, and methods for product discovery and marketing.
  • Active product managers who want to understand the best methods, how to improve surveys, product A/B testing, multivariate testing, and lean analytics.
  • Agile coaches who want to instill an experimental mindset and culture of learning through leveraging expert judgment and decision making techniques.
  • Educators, consultants, and organizational leads desiring to improve their capacity to teach, advise, or empower their constituencies to effectively lead innovation and drive growth across emerging and established markets.

Course Topics

Module 1: User Data

Goals, KPIs and metrics, product management metrics, and improving the product.

Module 2: Qualitative Data

Comment surveys, customer feedback, interviews, and forensics.

Module 3: Quantitative Data

Developing a product hypothesis and user personas, demographics, behaviors, online reviews, and Net Promoter Scores (NPS).

Module 4: Sampling and Surveys

User research, asking questions, and statistics of surveys.

Module 5: Experiments and Hypothesis Testing

Lean analytics cycle, Bayes Factors, A/B testing, multifactor testing, classical significance tests and effect size, linear models and regression, and logistic regression.

Module 6: Product Data

Types of product data, user flows, meta data, bounce rates, abandonment and adoption rates, and innovation accounting.

Module 7: Market Research

Competitor analysis, brand positioning analysis, consumer insights, and User segmentation.

Module 8: Document Engineering

Information and systems analysis, business process analysis, business informatics, and database theory and management.

Module 9: Team and Operational Analytics

Flow metrics, team happiness, team velocity, burndown, cycle time, ROI, defect rates, resource capacity utilization, and queuing theory.

Module 10: Big Data Analytics

Machine learning, natural language processing, nearest neighbor analysis, and proforecasting.

Learning Experience

Asynchronous Lectures

Coaching and Mentoring

Live Office Hours

Peer Interactions and Networking

Project-Based Learning

Real-World Assignments

Faculty

Gregory B. Baecher
Center for Risk and Reliability
Civil and Environmental Engineering
University of Maryland

Gregory B. Baecher is Glenn L Martin Institute Professor of Engineering at the University of Maryland. He holds a BSCE from UC Berkeley and a PhD in civil engineering from MIT. He is the author of four books on risk, safety, and the protection of civil infrastructure, and 200+ technical publications. He is recipient of the USACE Commander's Award for Public Service, the Panamanian National Award for Science and Technology Innovation, and is a member of the US National Academy of Engineering. Dr. Baecher consults to government and industry on project risk management related to civil infrastructure.