Why Technical Products Management?

This course is about Tech Product Manager – a rapidly growing role in today’s IT industry.

Many innovative companies (Google, Amazon, Facebook, Booking, Uber, etc) build a big portion of their value on the non-intuitive (for a classical PM) tech insights, and need a mix of  product and technical skills to drive it from a vague idea to the end customer facing solution. Think Google Search: minimum UI, but maximum algorithmical and infrastructural magic, which almost fully determines value of the overall experience. As you probably guessed, search algorithms and large-scale infrastructure are two examples of a sweet spot for a Tech PM.

And, since everything is a service these days, you do not need to work in a IT giant to deal with Tech Products. They are everywhere! Then, for any successful Product Manager/entrepreneur in any real project/startup it is:

• crucial (50% of success) to know how to deal with customer requirements, in other words to have a solid PM base (i do not teach here how to do it – there are already hundreds of courses on the topic)
• important (30% of success) to know how to combine systems together, what to keep in mind and at the end turn your product idea into a real practical IT service. This course is exactly about this part.
• nice to have (20% of success) a specific domain knowledge on top (e.g. about payments, or about ML, or a content processing, etc) to ask the right questions and go deeper if your product needs it. It is nice to have because you can always learn if your base is strong enough.

Why i can talk about Tech Product Management?

I have a solid tech background (a PhD in Computer Science with 7 years of software development), and then 5 years of the Tech Product management in Booking. com in different tech departments. In other words, i have a lot to share with you regarding Tech PMing.

Structure of the course

In the Part 1 i explain in details why Tech PM role is gaining popularity with the examples of Google, Uber, AWS, Stripe, etc.

In the Part 2 I quickly cover specifics of the TPM role (it is expected that you already know PM basis from another course) and explain the main difference between a Technical Product Manager, a classical Product Manager, an Engineer, a Project Manager and a Technical Program Manager (completely different roles!). It will help you to frame the right context and avoid a confusion about who does what.

The core practical Part 3 of the course consists of the 4 real tech product use cases (different industries and company setups), which i solve for you applying Tech PM thinking process. There are also quizzes after each case and the final assignment to solidify your knowledge. Students who understood and completed all the assignments of this part would be able to apply TPM thinking to their projects.

In the Part 4 i provide learning directions of how to grow your Tech PM skills. I cover main Tech Product building blocks (APIs, infrastructure, architecture, monitoring, reliability, and security), give you more low level materials to boost your technicality and PM skills, and mention popular Tech PM specializations.

Enjoy and join a growing community of Tech Product Managers, passionate about building new rockstar products on yet undiscovered tech insights!