Product School

Product management course from Product School is a must needed impetus for all engineers thinking about product management career. Before I joined Product School, I had tried very hard to move into product management on my own and had encountered only... Read More failures. Product School provided me much needed rebranding of my profile. I not only learned new concepts in product management but also used those concepts in my side project. I came in touch with product managers from various companies and they gave me feedback on my side project, on my resume and on my overall profile for a PM role. Product School completely changed my resume, LinkedIn profile and other online profiles (Blogs, About Me, Quora). I started getting calls. I started hearing this from many recruiters - “your profile is really highlighted and hiring manager is really interested in talking to you”. Product School also prepared me for interviews. I practiced a few mock interviews with actual product managers and that really helped me. Carlos, the founder, is really very friendly and helpful. Within a few months I had 3 offers in my hand. And now, I’m a product manager.

=== Overview ===
I would definitely recommend this class to anyone who wants to transition into Product Management. Remember though that: [ what you put in (effort + contributions) = outcome ]

I wrote this to the PM facilitating at the last day of class:... Read More

"Thank you again for all your contributions on the last day of class. It was really great having you there and coordinating everything with all the PM’s there. The last day was by far one of the most valuable days I had at Product School. I learned more in that day than I had in 6+ months searching for jobs in Product Management and studying online materials."

=== Elaboration / Details ===
Pros:
- Resume feedback and mock interviews from experienced / seasoned PMs
- Small group to allow for personal feedback, small group collaboration, and face-to-face time
- Developed a portfolio throughout the course
- Worked with a real feature and its data to apply PM skills
- Personal and timely feedback
- Frameworks and toolkits that are applicable for a PM
- Class diversity
- Course adapts based on students feedback and needs/wants

Cons:
- Materials were lightweight
- No whiteboards, post-its, and other such tools to engage students in group collaboration
- The Vault has horrible acoustics
- First week or first two weeks were not in-depth enough
- Some tools are discussed but not in-depth
- Lunch was not provided

Like any Product, Product School is actively testing hypotheses to ensure the curriculum is moving forward and engaging the students. Their success metrics are the number of students who move into a Product Management role and the feedback they receive for the course. However, what makes this so much better than taking Product Management at UC Berkeley Extension or other universities is that this course is taught by passionate, full time PMs who truly want to help you get a job as a Product Manager.

Josh Anon was the instructor for the weekend class I enrolled in and his was an amazing person. He always offered out his ideas, support, questions, and feedback. I had pinged him late at night and in less than 24 hours he had responded back. That seemed pretty amazing given his busy schedule—though I admit I didn’t start reaching out to him until week 3 or week 4.

Let me contrast the many positive things about this course with some of the negatives or rather concerns.

First off, this class had a large group of engineers in the course. This isn’t a bad thing since diversity is a great thing and helps with empathizing from different professional backgrounds. However our class tended to fall back onto their own roles instead of putting themselves into the mindset of a PM. This stood out and unfortunately there’s not much you can do about that if you have unmotivated peers.

Secondly, I had already spent a great deal of time studying and getting experience in Product Management. The first two weeks did not blow me away in the course curriculum and tended to bore me. If you’ve done your work, you may find yourself nodding off like I did. However, after about the third week, the material started to get “hearty”.

On my last gripe, there was a lack of materials to get people to collaborate as a group and tools/frameworks weren’t always discussed in depth. My peers would stay stuck on their laptops a lot of the time, which is unfortunate. The largest skills a PM needs are soft skills and you cannot develop those being glued to your laptop. As for the frameworks and tools, those were a mixed bag. Some were covered in great detail, which was wonderful, but others were glanced over.

Overall this course was wonderful! There were many opportunities to network and to learn from Josh and other PMs. Stany who is the Program Manager was coordinating job postings and offered many opportunities to us. The course did have us understand the role, the skills needed to succeed, and develop our soft skills as future Product Managers.

=== If you take the course, then take these two things: ===
1) Stick around for the mock interviews and resume feedback. This was the greatest experience I had with the course next to getting to know Josh.

2) Remember that: [ what you put in (effort + contributions) = outcome ]

I am glad that I enrolled for Product Management course at Product School.
I am happy with the training I received and my trainer was experienced product manager.
He was well organized and understood where his students are coming from. I am thankful to... Read More Product School for providing
perks and additional resources to continue learning product management.

I have been recommending Product School to my friends ever since I started. I am currently a PM and used this class to learn where I needed to improve my skills. The pace was perfect for this! The curriculum is high level enough for me to get a refresher... Read More on certain topics, while letting me hone in one other topics that I need to learn more about. If there was something I wanted to learn more about outside of class, I got access to tons of online classes for FREE.

I do think they need to work on improving the job placement part of the process. I didn't get much help from there there, but I think the skills I learned are still worth taking the class considering the price and duration.

My purpose for attending Product School (PS) is to prepare myself as a day-to-day product manager (PM) in an interactive setting, improve upon my strengths and weaknesses as a PM, and to network. Let me unpack that:
1) We all have different learning styles.... Read More My learning style is heavily visual-spatial / solitary. However, I’ve realized early on that I needed to develop other learning style to be succeed in the work place. Having worn many collaborate hats in my professional career, I understood what learning style worked best for me. Being a PM is a social role, and it was easy to see that the practical knowledge can only be improved upon when it’s seen in practice and used in application. For a good portion of you readying this, we’ve all read at least two to three books about Product Management. If you haven’t used what you’ve read, then you need to put yourself in a spot where that transfer of knowledge to application takes place. For me, it was putting myself in front of current and aspiring PM’s. How else do you get feedbacks, fail fast, and iterate fast?
2) The catch-22 for breaking into Product Management is that even associate PM positions often require a minimum of 2-year experience in product management. And I didn’t see myself fitting the perfect product role that these job posts often seek since I’m transitioning into products. The truth is, a medium to large company often do not have the ideal PM as one person, but four different people - tech, market, domain, and business. From talking to a seasoned Director of Product, I learned that the ideal PM should have more than one strength while developing all others over time and experience. With that said, I took the 14 week course at Product School. The first 6 weeks was to develop my technical understanding for code with Ruby on Rails framework. The later 8 weeks focused on learning about the product management lifecycle (software) and applying the missing puzzle pieces to my current projects. From my own experience, I couldn’t have gotten there with just books.
3) I’ll offer this the comparison. The top reason for going to a top MBA program is to network right? I look at PS as a setting where I took the opportunity to engage the tech/product community. Don’t get me wrong, I’m still attending meet-ups, PM panels, and demo-days around the area. The reality is that our time is precious, and it takes time to nurture those relationships. I think PS is a great place where product minded people can come together to connect.
A PS classmate said it best: “Product Management is a mindset put into execution.” I agree with this wholeheartedly because it encapsulates the essence of Product Manager. We live by Agile, and we are humble, collaborative, empathetic, and so much more.

I attended this 8-week PM bootcamp in San Francisco. Our instructor was a PM from a local Bay Area startup, Udemy. The goal of the bootcamp is twofold: 1) teach students a foundation of PM concepts/skills, and apply those skills on an 8 week project,... Read More and 2) to prepare you to get a PM job.

My background is sales/marketing, but after taking this course, I can confidently say I have a solid understanding of what PMs do, why they do it, and how they do it. I would recommend this to anyone who doesn't have any PM background at all to learn skills necessary to compete for PM jobs in the Bay Area.

The PM job market is extremely competitive, so if you're coming from a non-technical/non-PM background, you'll really need to shine during interviews so that you don't hear "we're looking for someone with more experience."

Would definitely do it all over again :)

I attended Product School in Spring of 2015 to learn Product Management skills and to pursue a career as a PM. I was an engineering manager and wanted to transition to Product Management. The program provided a good review of relevant topics, and extensive... Read More coverage of PM interview strategies and practice. All the instructors were passionate individuals with hands-on industry experience. I highly recommend Product School!
I really appreciated that Carlos, the founder, went over my resume many times until it was refined to land me several interviews. I built a great network with the instructors and fellow students. The instructors go out of their way to connect students with hiring managers. My job search was incredibly positive and fast. Within a month of finishing the program, I got 5 phone screen interviews, out of which 4 resulted in on-site interviews, and I received 2 job offers. Not every graduate will have this experience, and the instructors are honest about setting realistic expectations. Now I work as Senior Product Manager!

I'm an instructor at Product School, and I wanted to share my perspective.

This past session (July/August 2015), Nik Laufer-Edel and I have completely redone the curriculum based on the original curriculum, student feedback, and our own experience. We... Read More set out with three personas in mind.

1. People looking to transition into product management (engineers, designers, business experts)
2. Startup founders looking to gain a better experience of product whether to manage product themselves or to make their first product hire
3. Current PMs who stumbled into the role, looking to fill in any gaps in their knowledge.

While we optimized for the first persona by setting a course goal of "we want our students to have their first entry-level product job within 6 months of graduating," we had students from the other personas in our classes. We received really great feedback about how useful the content was to them, so we're on the right path!

To achieve that goal, we focused different parts of the curriculum. The lectures still remain quite practical, but we have tried to create a balance between theory, example applications of that theory, a consistent in-class case study to apply the theory with exercises, and an ongoing homework assignment/final project where you apply what you learned in class with the goal of producing an artifact that will help you get a job.

While it'd always be nice to have a little more time to go more in depth into the exercises and material, my students seemed very happy with the density we covered. Many of them after the last class specifically told me how useful certain weeks were to them immediately and how they really appreciated learning about areas they had limited experience with before.

We're also working on updating the curriculum further, based on feedback, so it will be even better when you enroll!

Product School pre-screens its students, taking people they feel will get the most out of the course. This keeps class sizes small (<= 12 students), and I think it helped create a really motivated and interesting group. I taught the Saturday session, which had many students driving up to San Francisco from San Jose, and they were there at 9:30, smiling (well, once they had their coffee). This diversity also led to some great discussions where we talked about people's experiences in product and with PMs, both good and bad.

Product School's staff (Carlos, Mike, Stany, and beyond) all work really hard to make this a great experience for the students. Practically, Stany made sure we had all the handouts, materials, and snacks we'd need for each class. Mike and Carlos work hard with students to help their job search after class ends, and as others have noted, Carlos is a great instructor, too!

I will say that what you get out of this course is proportional to what you put into it. If you skip most classes, show up late to those you attend, and don't do the homework, you're probably not going to be happy. If you only apply for one or two jobs, you'll likely not make the transition to PM. However, nearly everyone in my class did put in the effort, wanted to get something out of the class, participated and made it fun to teach them, and I look forward to seeing where they are in six months!

I took the 10-week product management course. My instructors were Carlos, Hamid, Kevin, & Jason. Prior to attending PSchool I had joined a couple of workshops, but they were never very consistent. Carlos and his team have created a very tight and thorough... Read More series of courses that take you through every function and likely situation that you would face as a PM. The instructors were all clearly very experienced in their field and could zero in on key issues during in-class exercises. I learned structured problem-solving techniques that helped me get multiple job offers (one of which was product-related) before the course ended.