Top Courses to Kick-Start Your Product Management Career
Product management is one of the most leading professions nowadays.
If you are a junior product manager or someone who is inquiring about the role, you might find the role duties a bit confusing as the role won’t seem to have any precise or consistent definition. This is, simply, because the role duties actually differ from one company to another.
Being at the intersection of business, user experience, and technology, and bearing the responsibility of taking care of one of the most important business cornerstones, the Product, not only is product management one of the most important, crucial, and evolving career paths nowadays, but it is expected to grow by 10–15% in the next 10 years.
If you are searching for the best places where you can kick-start your learning journey towards becoming a successful PM, you must be doing a lot of research! In this article, we, at Knowledge Officer, have saved you research time and effort and prepared for you a list of the most beneficial courses that present great content that can help you start your journey towards becoming a successful PM.
Before starting to present these courses, their similarities, differences, pros, and cons, for starters, you may be interested in checking the following article that we’ve published previously. https://productcoalition.com/who-are-product-managers-715e1dbdd83f. It simply illustrates the role of a product manager and clears all the confusion you may have about the role. Then, you can preview the best courses listed below to learn product management in more depth.
1- UpGrad
Duke. Corporation Education
Product Management Certification Program
If you are looking for a certificate course or physical evidence of your product management skills and course attendance, UpGrad is definitely one of the good choices you can go for.
In product management, it provides great content that is very well organized and specific, prepared by both industry and university partners. The program covers growth management or business growth, in general, while focusing on product management concepts and requirements. This takes us back to what I previously mentioned when I pointed out that a PM role differs from one company to another, one product to another, and also from one learning platform to another. Some of the skills that the course guarantees you will learn are user research, prototyping, design validation, and product deployment.
UpGrad’s Duke program is a very good choice for committed learners who aim at landing a job directly with a PM certification. It also offers real-life projects that you can undertake to learn from experience as well as from the personalized feedback from existing product managers that are available throughout the projects and assignments.
The program’s duration is quite long; it takes 22 weeks to complete. One of this program’s restrictions is that the course applicants should have a minimum of one year of work experience and an undergraduate degree. The program is available online in a web version only and it comes at quite a high price compared to other courses and learning platforms.
2- General Assembly
This is one of the leading platforms of career transformation. It offers highly interactive courses that mix the liveliness of campuses and groups with the flexibility of online syllabi. It offers around 20 campuses in six countries and also online courses with both part-time and full-time options available. General Assembly is a good choice for people who prefer interactive learning to self-managed online learning.
A 10-week online product management course of GA is suitable for learners from different backgrounds. Whether you are aiming at acquiring an entry-level strategy job, enhancing your current career, or switching to a new project, the course is beneficial and customized for you.
It presents a very neat, well-organized, and detailed syllabus including many aspects of product management. You will learn about the role itself, the product life cycle, business fundamentals, market research, user experience, and a lot more.
At the end of the course, students are to deliver a presentation of a project covering the whole process of launching a product, using all that they have learned in the course. It’s a great way of applying and assessing the knowledge you’ve gained and, also, a chance to discuss the project with course peers and instructors, gain feedback, and identify your points of weakness and strength.
A good thing that GA offers is completely free, live-streaming sessions held on a regular basis which you can attend online by simply registering two hours before the session time. A two-hour live-streaming session won’t cover all product management topics with their diverse branches and scopes, for sure, but it can be a free quick win for you to kick-start your product management career knowledge.
The course is still yet expensive for an unaccredited course.
3- One Week PM
One of the best short, yet informative, courses that helped more than 1000 students learn about product management fundamentals is One Week PM.
It’s very suitable for freshers with almost no experience in product management who want to start in this career or anyone who is contemplating making a career shift to product management. It’s not suitable for experienced PMs, though, as they are not its target audience.
One Week PM is a course given by Kevin Lee, the founder of Product Manager HQ, one of the leading resources on the web that helps people break into product management. In this course, Kevin leads people into the journey of how to become a PM and what it takes to start this journey, as he, himself, was lost and had difficulty deciding whether product management is the right career path for him or not. So, in this course, he shortens the way for you by illustrating all the PM career essentials in a chain of short videos which can be completed in one week, provided you dedicate one hour daily for the course, its assignments, and projects.
The course covers product development, the product lifecycle, the most common product delivery methods like Agile and Scrum, user testing and interviews and how to conduct both, product marketing, the product roadmap, and a lot more beneficial information about the role.
The course comes at a very suitable price compared to the knowledge you will gain.
4- Knowledge Officer
Towards its goal of helping people achieve their career goals, and while being followed by thousands of users, Knowledge Officer presents the product manager career goal as one of the many career goals the platform caters to, each representing a trending job in the market.
It takes you on a journey of different topics illustrating the most important tools and objectives that the job role requires. Every topic is available in three different levels ‘Beginner, Intermediate, and Advanced’ which you can choose from according to your level of knowledge about each. Each topic consists of very well-selected articles, curated by specialized content engineers and validated by experts that have many years of real-life experience in the PM role.
Instead of spending so much time and effort searching the internet for information about the job and what you need to learn to be successful in a PM role, we do all the work for you. You just pick the PM career goal and your topic of interest and start your journey in learning what the job takes. The good thing about Knowledge Officer is that it offers challenges and assessments all along your learning journey. This type of intermittent assessments provides you with quick wins that help you remain focused and validate your learning and content retention.
On this platform, you are not limited by any time restriction to complete the course, which gives you more freedom to pick up from where you leave when your time allows. The application is available in three versions, IOS, Android, and Web, so it can be easy for you to study the content anytime anywhere.
The Knowledge Officer course requires completely zero prerequisites concerning previous work experience or knowledge of product management or any other field of knowledge. KO will provide you with very detailed information about product management duties and responsibilities as well as all the knowledge and skills it takes to become a successful PM. It covers several topics such as PM fundamentals, product marketing, product delivery, Agile principles, product roadmaps, mental models, cognitive biases, Design Thinking, product development, and a lot more.
The app is free and offers some premium features at quite suitable prices to help you gain the knowledge you need, prepare for your dream career, and achieve your career goals.
We hope the article has been useful and has presented you with the most trending and beneficial courses available that can help you start your journey toward becoming a successful product manager– one of the highly in-demand roles in business nowadays and in the future.
— — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — About us
Knowledge Officer is a learning platform for professionals. Our mission is to empower a generation of lifelong learners and to help people, however busy, learn something new and relevant every day and achieve their career goals.
If you want to progress in your career and learn from the best people and the best resources on the internet, then try our mobile and website and support our campaign on ProductHunt.
And we’d love to hear your thoughts! So send us at team@knowledgeofficer.com
— — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — —About the Authors
This article has been proudly presented to you by the co-authorship of Dina Sabry (Research & Content Engineer at Knowledge Officer) and Ahmed El Sharkasy (Founder & CEO of Knowledge Officer)
