What skills do you need as a product manager in digital? While the specific answer will vary from job to job, there are a few fundamentals I’ve found are consistently important. You need to be able to participate in a modern product pipeline, something like this:
To do that, you need a few fundamental skills, something like this:
How do you get there? Where do you start? First and foremost, I recommend pairing your lifelong learning with what you’re actually doing on the job. It will be much more meaningful that way. However, if you want a starting point, I’ve described baseline recommendation in the sequence you see here and detailed it in the table below.
| Item | Area | Online Option | Learning Objectives and Transition Points |
| 1 | Digital Product Management | 4 Weeks (Coursera: Digital Product Management: Modern Fundamentals) |
Inputs Agile Program Charter Learning Objectives By the end of the course, students will be able to: 1. Create the actionable focus to successfully manage your program 2. Focus their work using modern product management methods 3. Manage new products and explore new product ideas 4. Manage and amplify existing products Outputs Working View of Product/Market Fit Prioritized Discovery Backlog |
| 2 | Continuous Design (Design Thinking, Product Design, & Design Sprints) |
8 Weeks Total: 4 Weeks (Coursera: Agile Meets Design Thinking) 4 Weeks (Coursera: Running Design Sprints) |
Inputs Agile Program Charter Working View of Product/Market Fit Prioritized Discovery Backlog Learning Objectives By the end of the course, students will be able to: 1. Discover and test focal user problems through subject interviews 2. Formulate testable propositions and design experiments and rapidly test them (a la Lean Startup) 3. Create development-friendly, collaboration-friendly inputs through user stories and prototypes 4. Drive parallel prototyping and testing of user interface concepts Outputs Validated Learning Prioritized Backlog for Digital MVP User Stories & Interactive Wireframes |
| 3 | Digital Literacy | 12 Weeks (Coming Soon) |
Inputs Agile Program Charter Validated Learning on Product/Market Fit Dev. Inputs & Backlog (User Stories & Wireframes) Learning Objectives By the end of the course, students will be able to: 1. Take user stories and translate them into functioning web applications using HTML, CSS, and Javascript 2. Evaluate alternative approaches to software implementations 3. Work through coding issues with analytical debugging techniques Outputs Working Software Course Syllabus https://www.alexandercowan.com/software-development-class/ |
| 4 | Agile Development | 4 weeks (Coursera: Managing an Agile Team) |
Inputs Agile Program Charter Validated Learning on Product/Market Fit Working Software Learning Objectives By the end of the course, students will be able to: 1. Diagnose what’s important to your team and pair it with relevant agile practice 2. Facilitate your team’s retrospectives and adaptive practice of agile 3. Support your team’s transition from traditional approaches to agile 4. Create an agile-friendly environment across functional disciplines Outputs Agile Team Charter (Fully Articulated) |
| 5 | Continuous Delivery | 4 weeks (Coursera: Continuous Delivery & DevOps) |
Inputs Agile Program Charter Validated Learning on Product/Market Fit Working Software Learning Objectives By the end of the course, students will be able to: 1. Diagnose a team’s delivery pipeline and bring forward prioritized recommendations to improve it 2. Explain the skill sets and roles involved in DevOps and how they contribute toward a continuous delivery capability 3. Review and deliver automation tests across the development stack 4. Facilitate prioritized, iterative team progress on improving a delivery pipeline Outputs Working Software Working Delivery Pipeline |
| 6 | Continuous Design (Hypothesis-Driven Dev.) |
4 Weeks (Coursera: Testing with Agile) |
Inputs Agile Program Charter Validated Learning on Product/Market Fit Working Software and Delivery Pipeline Learning Objectives By the end of the course, students will be able to: 1. Identify where and how to invest your agile team’s scarce time and energy into better testing for maximum impact on outcomes 2. Coach your team on the relationship between idea, usability, and software testing to get buy-in for strong evidence-driven innovation 3. Test ideas before building to avoid waste and alternative interface patterns with parallel prototyping to maximize usability Outputs Agile Program Charter Validated Learning on Product/Market Fit Working Software & Delivery Pipeline |
