Product School

I wanted to love it, but I would not recommend the Product School for students looking to really dive into Product Management and learn about it for the first time. While the PM Certificate course does provide an overview of being a PM, it is very much just an overview. There was very little practical experience, and not much more to the content other than PowerPoint slides. We did have a few group exercises, but those weren't as beneficial as they could have been. Since there were students with prior PM experience mixed in with those of us with no experience, the group projects tended to be led by those experienced PMs. As a student with no experience, this made it difficult to actually learn or practice. Though there was homework, our instructor implied that they wouldn't offer any additional feedback other than what we already went over in class, since the homework was the same as our group projects. 

I'm sure this will help on LinkedIn, but I didn't learn anything that I couldn't have learned in PM books or through much cheaper courses via other avenues like Coursera (for reference, the PM course at Product School cost $4500 as of summer 2021).

I don't think Product School is worth it, and I wouldn't recommend taking the Product Manager Certificate course.

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I took the 8 weeks product management certification program to enhance my skills and learn the basics of Product management. I have been looking to transition into PM and this was a perfect opportunity.

Our instructor Alex Alwan was a real mentor and shared valuable knowledge shared in the course and based on his Product Manager experiences. He knew the material really well and supplemented the lessons with specific and relevant examples from his own personal experience as Sr. Product Manager. Additionally, he adjusted the pace of the lessons to our cohort's needs and interests.

I would highly recommend taking this course under him for any aspiring Product Managers.  Read less

I recently completed this 8 Week Product manager certificate course with Shilpa Vir as our instructor. The course definitely met my expectations.  Shilpa has significant amount of on-field experience as Product manager and her practical insights are what makes the difference between just reading a book on PM duties vs illustrations of various on-the-job experience she brings to the class. She is very passionate and effective in conveying the course content and encourages us to think like a PM at every aspect of product life cycle. she is honest and gives practical feedbacks on ideas and assignments.  The course itself is a well organized with decent content spread across weeks to take us through the journey of a PM for a product from idea phase to launch phase. The discussions in the class and weekly assignments help us practice the theory part learnt in the class. 

If someone is planning to make a career switch, or interested in learning and experiencing the job of a PM, then i do recommend this course and of-course shilpa would be a great instructor and coach to have! Read less

I had a great experience with the product school. I had to change my class a couple of times because of conflicting schedules at work and they were very  accommodating. I took the class with Shilpa Vir and learned a ton from her. She made the classes fun and I highly recommend her classes.  Read less

I highly recommend the Product School if you are looking to break into the PM career and are looking for a comprehensive overview of the Product Management role. 
I recently completed an 8-week Product Management Certificate course at Product School with Shilpa Vir and absolutely enjoyed it. Shilpa brings years of industry experience in this field and she always goes above and beyond in clarifying the concepts with her real-time work experience. She is very knowledgeable and supportive and I'm very happy that I got to know her and professionally connect to her through this wonderful course.  Read less

I found the Product Manager Certificate to be a great way to quickly refresh and expand my Product skills. Currently in a new job, this gave me the chance to directly apply my skills in my day job. 
The structure of the course was full: we used all of the class time for valuable exercises/learning and our break-out team often met outside of class hours. Due to my timezone, I had to coordinate work meetings around the class time, but it was manageable for the 8-week period. Flexibility was possible, when needed. 
Finally, my instructor, Toby Martin Hughes, was truly fantastic. His domain expertise and knowledge was impressive and his real-life examples made many concepts really sink in. He was extremely approachable (both during and outside of class hours). Most admirable might have been his ability to manage the class online, balancing student questions, content delivery, differing student experiences, etc. Top notch and I'd highly recommend the course!  Read less

My full stack product management course through Product School with instructor Joel Palathinkal was absolutely amazing! We learned SO much about product management, everything from product strategy to marketing to design to analytics and engineering as it related to the Product Manager role. Joel brought so much unique insight to the course with his professional experience and education that helped me learn so much about what it takes to succeed in the role. Without previous product management experience, I’m so glad I took the course with him as he’s extremely knowledgeable in the field as well as other related fields. He was able to explain the difficult content in an easy to digest format and always related what we were learning back to the product manager role specifically which was extremely helpful. He also always made himself available outside of the class for help and found creative ways to keep the class and students very engaged throughout the eight weeks. We also were able to gain insight into other extremely important parts of the role, such as office politics and handling different personalities - things I wouldn’t have learned from just reading books on the subject. I would highly recommend taking Product School’s course with him. Five stars! Read less

What a great experience! I was looking into switching from Marketing to digital Product Management and this course was exactly what I needed to get it.

The curriculum is pretty solid: amazing frameworks, tools, best practices, etc. And the hands-on exercises allow you to put into practice all the concepts that you learn during the classes. My instructor was a senior-level Product Manager working at Facebook with 10+ years of experience in the field. That obviously added a lot of value to the whole experience.

Totally recommended to those who are willing to break into Product Management Read less

Excellent accelerated PM Course!  I enjoyed this course, it included lots of case studies, and hands on work which is the best way for me to learn.  The instructor Joel was very engaging, and provided lots of real life examples, and honest feedback to questions.  I appreciated the small class size, and that students brought their own life experiences, and diverse ideas to share.  

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The course is not worth $3,999. Not even close.

To his credit, Mark, my instructor, was pretty good. He clearly has real hardware product experience, and is an experienced PM. He really tried to make realistic exercises that, as a newly minted PM, I can see were at least somewhat realistic.

The material/content Product School provided to him? Not so much.

First of all: course started early June. First or second class in July (it's a two-month course), you begin classes on "public speaking" and "interviewing". Basically half the course material is mostly useless or at least of questionable use. Which is why I withdrew at around the halfway point.
Second: it's really not easy (possible?) to teach product management short of having the experience. Though I got somewhat familiar with different terms and such, the usefulness of the course in my actual job today is extremely low.

Lastly, I had an awful refund experience with the program team. First, I told them to refund me via check. Then, they forgot about my refund until I followed up two weeks later. Then, they refunded my via my credit card, which I don't have access to anymore. When I told them to refund me via check (again), they did. But then that check bounced. You can imagine this was a frustrating process.

Anyways, don't take this course. It's a waste of money. Read Cracking the PM Interview, build your own product. This course isn't for true future PMs.

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Product school (www.productschool.com) has a curriculum. The course touched upon many topics right from user persona, interviews, design, A/B testing, metrics, marketing, and the entire product development life cycle. You have to choose a product that you like and work on providing an opportunity hypothesis and launch that idea to market. All of this is done in 8 weeks with the help of the instructor and the lesson notes. Everyone chooses different products (mostly). Some are B2B, some are B2C, some are SaaS and some were PaaS products. At the end of the seventh week, we all presented our product-> idea-> Go-to-market strategy.

I liked every bit of the class and the assignments. But the question mostly asked that did it help you find jobs? I would say it helps you build your network and learn a few product management fundamentals. I am in the process of looking out for jobs now.

I will list out the pros and cons of the course now.

Pros:

• A good outline of the 8-week course.
• Great instructors.
• Extremely active slack community.
• Free networking events and webinars by reputed and established Product Managers.
• Cheaper compared to General Assembly.
• ProductCon is a great conference to meet and network.

Cons:

• Less focus on product management interview preparation. I wish they had a couple more weeks to cover more on this.

Overall a great learning experience. I recommend to someone pivoting from another industry into product management and looking to network.

 

More on :https://medium.com/@atashijain/why-i-went-to-product-school-8a808f83a2b1

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Taking Product School's PM course has been one of my best career decisions so far! Switching careers, when you are already well established in your current role,  can be quite a daunting task. So it was imperative for me to learn from the best and get the right level of support to break into product after completion of the course. I am so happy that I chose this as it delivered and exceeded my expectations from the course!

A few aspects that make this stand-out course are the thoughtful curriculum that hones student's hard and soft skills, the access to an ever-expanding and helpful alumni group and, most importantly, the mentorship from your instructor during and after your course. 

It was a privilege to be taught by Chris Maliwat - a PM veteran with solid experience in eBay, Netflix, Warby Parker and start-ups . Chris's passion for his craft, teaching and mentorship elevated the entire experience for our group. He truly cares for his student's career growth and it showed in his engagement with our group right from the very beginning. He is a phenomenal teacher and a great mentor, and I look forward to his guidance as I take next steps into becoming a PM. 

I highly recommend Product School's PM course for anyone seeking to transition into product or improving PM skills to become better in their role. It was totally worth the time and investment! Thank you Product School, you guys are doing an amazing job!

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I enrolled in Product school shortly after taking on a PM role at my current job and found it very helpful. The Product School curriculum packages the product life cycle into a simplified form that is easy enough to memorize but robust enough to apply when confronted with a mental roadblock. The lectures cover all aspects of their framework and augment the curriculum with additional tips that really empower you to tackle the demands of a career in product. I decided to attend the course in person on Saturday mornings and while that may sound like a drag I actually found myself looking forward to it knowing how much I was learning by applying what we learned to case studies. The lectures and case studies were very engaging! The instructor for my cohort was Dr. Joel Palathinkal who was very energetic for Saturday mornings! He always came in ready to tackle the days lecture and share product idea/experiences and challenged us to think on our feet. I truly appreciated his approach to teaching the course as it was very dynamic in that he covered everything on the syllabus but reacted to our input and tailored the lectures to focus on what students wanted to expand on. Joel went above and beyond by reaching out to his network of alumni to bring in guest speakers for every lecture. I can be a bit shy but he's really cool and approachable making it easy to feel comfortable participating. One of my favorite things about Product School is the Slack channels that offer a network where you can get help on a range of things from the need of advice from a SME to interview prep and even job leads! Whether you are new to product or early in your career I highly recommend the Product Management Course by Product School!

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Course: 8 week long Software Product Management on Tuesday and Thursday evenings, from March to May 2018. 

Location: Santa Monica, CA 
Instructor: Rich Headley, currently a PM at Cornerstone OnDemand. 
Rich is very knowledgable, engaging, and covered all the relevant course topics on the syllabus. He also took time to address additional questions and concepts during class. I especially liked the way he applied PM concepts to real-world anecdotes and connected them to what we were learning. I was referred by mymbacircle to Rich.

Product School learnings: To get the most out of PS, you’ll need to put in more effort beyond doing the assignments. Participate in class, get to know your classmates, take advantage of the multitude of meet-up opportunities, and dive into the Slack community. By the end of this course you will learn what you need to know to develop a new feature or product from idea to prototype and present it, using any number of the PM tools discussed along the way. 

They are always looking for feedback to make this program better and encourage interaction, which I appreciate. As far my evaluation of the school itself, there’s always room for improvement in a relatively new tech business learning program geared toward professionals. However I firmly believe that with instructors like Rich there it will continue to get better and better with each class.

I look forward to using what I’ve learned from this course in my career.

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I was looking for a school to learn more about product management. Went to many PS events and decided to give it a try to help me transition into product. I was pleasantly surprised by instructors who were industry practitioners and learnd LOTS in a short period of time. This does help with product job search as I navigate the landscape much better. Recommend to others.

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I joined the Product School 8 weeks course with the following expectations
1) understand end to end responsibilities of a Product Manager from an expert
2) A support forum to tap into, for queries
3) Interact with other hopefuls, and learn from them Shweta Goyal, the instructor, fulfilled all these expectations. She was smart, funny, forthright with her inputs and gave lots of examples from her vast experience, to help me soak in the concepts. She was also very structured in her time management. 
The course structure was well defined, with case studies, group exercises, presentations and reference materials. Interview prep and final presentation was invaluable. The pace was fast enough, and 3-4 hours per week is what I needed to dedicate, in order to keep up with class.
We had a few people drop-out, and Shweta adapted accordingly and gave the remaining team members more of her time. She also brought in Guests, for unbiased feedback, which was really appreciated.
For 7 weeks, the facility was not that great, however in the last class we moved to a much better location. I am glad the feedback was received and acted upon.
The online learning management site, is straightforward, and so is the forum interface, with mobile app version for the latter that I found very useful. Read less

I recently enrolled in Product School's product management 8-week training course in New York and have been really happy with both the quality of the content taught and my instructor, Joel Palathinkal. I got lucky that I had an instructor who not only had a wealth of experience and knowledge but also was always accessible and eager to help.

The course was a great combination of information/lecture and hands-on practice/role play and projects. Overall, I'd definitely recommend this course to anyone considering moving into the product management role.

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I am glad I took this product management course. It has taught me the fundamentals, frameworks and design thinking in depth. The course was structured in a way that gave me the opportunity to have a hands-on experience by collaborating and brainstorming with my classmates.

Shout out to Gaurav, our instructor who taught this course splendidly. Along with sharing his personal experiences, he was always ready to dive deeper into our questions. His concise advice on product modeling helped me instill a sharper perspective in me. I vividly remember the first day, where he took us as distinct products and gradually devised the course around us. I highly recommend attending his class. 

Thanks to Product School, I got to meet brilliant minds hailing from different sectors. I have a powerful network that I am moving forward with. 

Last but not the least, you need to be a hustler! Be it assignments, classes, hands-on projects, I suggest you do it all and make the most of it.

Recommending this course to people who are willing to learn about product management or work as a PM.

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