Product management is one of the fastest growing and most lucrative jobs available today. Companies have awoken to the desperate need for product managers to create products that customers love, that integrate design, functionality, and business solutions. This is a one of kind product management certification that covers the skill sets for the entire product lifecycle.
We start with the fundamentals of product management and why this role is so coveted as a launch pad for future CEOs and startup founders. By exploring the roles and responsibilities of being a product manager, we’ll identify its relationship to stakeholders external and internal, including customers, engineering, legal, finance, marketing, and customer service.
As a product manager you have to own the results of your product’s success by tackling risks early and setting up your teams for success. This is why we immediately move on to discussing product-market fit, with a detailed examination of target customers, customer’s underserved needs, value propositions, feature sets, and user experiences.
Designing the customer and user experience is essential to creating great products today. Gone is the old paradigm of “form follows function” model of design. The process must be iterative and follow the best product design and development processes. This essential product management course explains key design thinking principles around personas, story mapping, and prototyping. Product managers need to know and appreciate product designer tools and processes. By combining these principles with good scrum processes you’ll learn to create great products that don’t sacrifice design for functionality or feasibility.
Agile systems engineering ensures great products truly excel over time in all three areas of design, functionality, and technical feasibility. Agile systems engineering uses tools such as rapid prototyping, open set architectures, and platform design. By using an agile methodology not just for business and design, you’ll innovate and collaborate better, manage costly technical debt, and validate your product ideas with data science and innovation metrics.
Finally, you cannot lead products without core skills in leadership and influence. Product managers are masters at internal sales, team building, delegation, and empowerment. They also know that great product management careers are not built alone. From envisioning a product strategy to correctly portraying the product roadmap, the process must be inclusive, interactive, and motivating. This course will enable you to align product teams, product designs, and product development for speed and innovation at scale.
View the article on 5 Skills an Aspiring Product Manager Needs to Have
Whether you’re delivering a small part of a project or portfolios of large multi-million-dollar government works, these principles scale and apply to all industries to achieve delivery success.
The certificate consists of five individual courses and when all five are successfully completed, the certificate will be issued (for verified learners – see cost information below). All courses are asynchronous which allows individual students to sign up and start the courses when they want and at their own pace. Students from all sides of the project management community will also be able to collaborate with others registered in the program. The list below identifies the five courses required to complete the Professional Certificate program.
Earn 50 PDUs for completion of all five (5) courses.
Each course is free for the first four (4) weeks and it takes approximately ten (10) hours to complete. For a small fee, edX does provide a Verified Certificate which provides proof for an employer, school or other institution that the course was successfully completed by the student. To qualify for a Verified Certificate, participants complete all aspects of the courses which can include watching all videos, participating in discussion forms, and completing any required homework and exams with a passing grade.
Costs for a verified version of each individual course in the Product Management Professional Certificate program are shown below.
“At Softek Enterprises, we know that modern product development means rapidly responding to customers and evolving the value delivery systems of the organization. We do this every day for our mission driven clients in government supporting healthcare, welfare, records management, and business intelligence. To do this we employ radical application development, built on the principles of product management, agile, and DevOps taught in the UMD Product Management Certificate on edX. We highly recommend that those looking to lead new products take this certificate and join in the product management revolution.” – Imran Memon , CEO of Softek Enterprises LLC
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Data Analytics for the Project Manager