Product School

Product School was an amazing place to start my career as a PM. The PM course has fantastic reading materials with important product management principles. Each chapter has plenty of applicable real-world examples. The lectures and in-class exercises were very helpful.

My instructor Shendi Wang did a terrific job delivering course concepts and referencing her experiences from the workplace; she is the Director of Product Management at Mastercard. I highly recommend enrolling in a cohort taught by Shendi. Not only does she know what she's talking about, she goes above and beyond by being a professional mentor for her students.

I highly recommend the Software Product Management course as an excellent baseline introduction for a Product Manager role. 

Our instructor, Rich Headley, Lead Product Manager at Cornerstone, ensured the class was engaging for the students; he varied the pace of the course at times and shared great examples from his professional experience and sample work product.

Each class includes small group exercises and presentations, which facilitate collaboration and feedback.  We built a strong camaraderie in our class; in fact, a few students offered to continue meeting (after the course ended) to explore enhancements for a consumer-facing product.

I gained insight into key success factors for product management and practice analyzing a company's vision, customers / persona, aligning product roadmap to the strategic goals and analyzing which features to develop or enhance next.   We practiced design sprints and used Balsamiq to create wireframe mockups of our product enhancements. 

A small bit of feedback to Product School is that some of the early exercises included features (bookmarks) which seemed basic; however, the focus of the course is not technical.  

Overall, I looked forward to the Tuesday & Thursday evening classes, learning about the latest tools and UX design best practices; it was a highly valuable and informative experience.

My path to Product School was inadvertent. Initially I was looking at product management as a transitional role to bring me closer to a dev role, since I believed a good PM would need to be technical to work with engineers. As I learned more about product management though I realized that this multifaceted role was actually exactly what I was looking for. I decided to enroll in Product School, and after some research and finding rave reviews I decided on Dr. Joel Palathinkal as my instructor (and I was not disappointed). Dr Joel brings his professional experience from a broad product background and this was most valuable for me in class. Anyone can learn product management from a book or online materials, but realistic case studies and insight into what a head of product looks for in a candidate when hiring was invaluable. He is an expert instructor able to weave his professional experience into the Product School curriculum, and resonate with students from diverse backgrounds. I hope I cross paths with Dr. Joel in the future and would recommend him as a product expert.

Going to the 8 week course at Product School in NYC was one of the best decisions I could've made. I've worked with the product team for two years at my current job, but needed experience with the product development process. While I've worked on many releases, I didn't know all the in's-and-out's of how to build and launch a product. This course will help lay a great foundation for you to cover what you need to know to make the jump into product. It has a well thought out curriculum. The optional homework assignments give you a chance to apply what you are learning and provide a good challenge. You also get to bring the work to life through team exercises. They help you use your new skills quickly on-the-spot, while collaborating with others. By the end of the course, you'll know how to take a product from ideation/validation through design, and bring it to market. You get to present a full product plan that you built over the course of the class. It's also an excellent piece to put in your portfolio for future interviews. 

The instructors are fantastic and well versed in product. For our course, it was Chris Maliwat (former Netflix, Facebook, eBay, Warby Paker). His presentations were very insightful, as he often referenced real world experience to bring topics to life. He even brought in colleagues from other companies to give small talks. He was extremely enthusiastic about all topics and answered any questions very thoughtfully. He made you want to grow and do your best in each class. His input to all homework assignments is valuable to help you understand where you can improve. He also was open to taking a second look at homework after you made updates. Additionally, he provides individual attention. He went the extra mile to meet with you outside of class for anything you want to discuss further. For me, that was help with prepping from resume to apply for product positions. 

Pros
Great curriculum and product school book
Experienced and well versed instructors 
Engaged students
Challenging homework assignments
Hands on team exercises
Outside learnings/readings from instructor 
Outside speakers

Areas For Improvement
Time to complete and get feedback on team exercises
Additional outside reading suggestions
Better learning management system that houses course content

Product School was an amazing experience, especially since I had little to no product management experience when I enrolled in the course. The course itself truly takes you through every step of the product life cycle from ideation to iteration and everything in between. The lectures were informative, the notes provided excellent context, and the readings offered a fantastic in-depth foundation for everything learned in person. My instructor, Chris Maliwat, is a true product management veteran, having worked as a PM at some of the world's top companies. He was a fantastic teacher and provided excellent advice through lectures, hands-on projects, and interview/career prep. If you are seeking a career transition into Product Management, this course is for you. The tools to become a PM are truly at your disposal!

It was good experience to be part of product school. The best part was guidance provided by the lecturer, resume review. The area where I feel it could be enhanced are

a) Revisit lectures ( recordings) if possible.

b) Increase number of hours as mostly class cover is definitions, a brief intro of terminology/jargon which basically force you to google to read more about it and sometimes connect with what's taught in lectures. 

c) it's a course to enhance and make professional ready for product management role. So I think assignment should have ample time for completion in order for the student to learn properly, understand and complete it. It might be wrong not precise but the student should understand rather than just try to complete as time line to complete is less. This does not help much as by the time one student complete assignment and g t reviews which he think to work on further another class comes up which just pile up work of revisiting assignments.

Product School is  a great place to get a structured understanding of product management and start a career as a Product manager. I'm lucky to have the privilege work with my mentor Sudheera who shares enormous insight about not only what a product needs to know but also how a PM should think and act. I would recommend this course for people who are looking for new opportunities in product management.

I took the Product Management class offered by Product School this spring. The course was comprehensive and touched upon all the phases needed to build a product. It was further enriched by our instructor Nima Shafiee's (https://www.linkedin.com/in/nimas/) personal anecdotes, tips and advices. His vast experience in the field of product management and across various industries helped the students enormously. Nima was always encouraging, ready to respond to the students' queries and giving constructive feedback. After taking the class, the students came out with a holistic idea about the product management and more confident to make a career switch to product management. 

The course curriculum could have been better if we had more material on data analytics and how it influences the product success strategy, feature prioritization etc. I also wished we had more sessions on mock interviews and design sprints. 

This is a review of my Product School instructor Joel Palathinkal. I highly recommend taking this course with this instructor. He has an easy going demeanor and speaks clearly. He knows what he is talking about and is always ready to help. He is quick to provide meaningful and relevant guidance. He keeps the class going and engaged. Sign up. Don't wait. 

Having fun with the class.

I am half way through the 8 week Product Management course with Product School. It’s been a great journey so far, learning a lot and formalizing the product management knowledge from the materials presented and most importantly through the expertise of the course instructor Dr. Joel Palathinkal.  In addition to having already taught a number of the Product Management courses at the Product School, Joel has extensive work experience in Product Management having served as a PM in diverse industries.  Joel is extremely responsive to all the students in and outside of the classroom.  He is able to connect concepts and frameworks to real examples.  He is very familiar with all the current trends and products in technology, financial services and start-ups. 

Attending the class provides a unique experience to learn from real PM experts in the field.  Joel invites other PM speakers and professionals to class and that allows us to expand our understanding of what the different companies and hiring managers are looking for in Product Managers.  The class is great for both the new entrepreneurs and those interested to formally transition to PM field.  Joel is mindful in that he tries to create a class environment where every student is able to gain and be exposed to the experience they are looking for in obtaining as part of the class.  Look forward to continue through the next 4 weeks of the class as well sharpening my PM skills and knowledge.

Product School is exactly the program I was looking for, at just the right price and timeframe. I’ve been in product marketing for over 10 years in the fintech industry and now want to be more involved in building the product and not only the go-to-market strategy. The PM role sits at a unique intersection with designers, developers, sales/marketers, which fits my personality as a translator or diplomat that can bring together a team who can drive product strategy on behalf of the user. I came across Product School because I was looking for a quick way to build on my existing skill set (instead of going back to an academic program). Product School is perfect for mid-career pivots. The curriculum teaches the fundamentals of a PM role such as writing product roadmaps, wire framing, prototyping, identifying personas and user stories, writing engineering requirements, pricing/revenue mapping, etc. which are all the skills you need to start a career as a PM. I took the course in NYC and had Joel Palathinkal who is a great teacher. He’s very attentive to each student’s background, detailed in his lesson notes and brings a lot of field experience having worked as a PM across various industries. Best parts of class are the open discussions and case studies of real world examples. Included in the tuition is the added benefit of mock interviews and resume prep. That’s exactly what I need if I want to transition into a new role, and it’s great to lean on the network of PMs that Product School has built. They host weekly Meetups and AMAs so you can hear from PMs at some of the best startups in the industry. I highly recommend Product School for anyone looking to make the jump into Product Management. Course is targeted for the role, affordable, and has all the extra benefits to help you get a job. 

I enjoyed being part of a diverse class. Joel introduces the concepts really well and is an excellent mentor even outside the class. Joel shares his enthusiaism and keeps the class more interactive.Group exercises were also a good way to get our creatiuve juices flowing. I am looking forward to my next class.

I spent a reasonable amount of time comparing General Assembly and Product School for the Product Management course including Instrucutors, course content, etc. and am I glad that I chose Product School!  Based on other reviews for Joel, I decided to sign-up for the weekend classes (since he was teaching that cohort only), even though it wasnt the most convenient time for me, but again, so glad I decided to do that.

Joel is very personable and goes out of his way to spend one on one time with the students, he supports all course content with real world examples (which are abundant given his experience) and does a great job of trying to cover anything there is to know to get ur career started as a PM. Cherry on the cake is that he even invites experienced PMs to class sometimes (during lunch) to talk to us and share their experiences with us

Course: 8-week PM/Location: Santa Monica/Instructor: Gio

I just wrapped up the 8-week product course and am really happy with my decision. I had an awesome experience and would highly recommend it for anyone who is motivated to learn more and get a more formal framework/education for how to approach product thinking to advance their career, become more effective in your job, or transition into a product role.

Since product is really the intersection of design, business, and engineering let’s start there.

• Business: If you don’t have a business background, Product School gives you a nice overview of some key frameworks that help you structure your approach to problems. You don’t go super deep but if you’re someone technical or just don’t have a formal education in business this is a great way to get it. If you have a business background (like I did) its a nice overview but don’t expect these pieces to be the real value add for you at PS.
• Design: In PS you’ll do some wireframing in Balsamiq but that’s pretty much the extent of it. To be fair, PM’s don’t really need to design in most cases but it seemed like my classmates would have liked a bit more of this. Personally, I do the prototyping and design for my startup and spend a lot of time in Sketch and Invision so I’m glad we didn’t spend too much time on this. I think spending too much time on design takes away from the real ‘job to be done’/value to be added/purpose of a PM…identifying/validating opportunities and solving problems. I think PS does a nice job of focusing on these important aspects but also covering concepts like usability research, UX, and a touch of wireframing.
• Engineering: I think this really depends on (a) your instructor and (b) your classmates more than the cirriculum. Gio always provided awesome examples from his experience at Yahoo and Snapchat that really helped paint vivid & tangible pictures of experiences and challenges as a PM working with engineers. I think this is one area PS could add some more umph with maybe some videos to watch at home or a required Udemy overview of coding class ahead of starting PS to help students come in with a little more confidence and color (or you could just do it yourself ; ). Again, you can only cover so much in 8-weeks but I think we had time to squeeze in more about concepts like front end vs. backend, common terminology, etc. There were a few of us with technical backgrounds but for the others I would imagine some things went in one ear out the other without having prior experience with engineers.
• Project Management: I think this is sort of the ugly duckling/4th circle of the PM ven diagram that isn’t talked about as frequently bc its not as sexy and more administrative than anything, that said I think its pretty important. PS doesn’t touch too much on project management so I’d recommend (if you don’t have prior exp and aren’t detail oriented) to take an online class in project management to help fill that gap for yourself. Learning is much better on-the-job with real experience (as with everything) but a key PM skill is being able to take a goal, and turn it into manageable small pieces that can be sequenced and executed on which often can be complex with dependencies.

Some Qualitative KPIs from my experience at PS (in order of importance)

• Instructor (A+): When it comes to product, I felt without a teacher with real, relevant, AND current experience, there was point in taking the course. Other courses at different schools (no names need be mentioned) had pretty weak instructors…not PS. Our instructor Gio has really deep product experience, is a PM at Snapchat, and was absolutely awesome. Every question brought up he had 10 salient and relevant real world examples to color his answers and was extremely articulate. Gio is also just an awesome and fun guy which made sitting in class for 2+ hours and giving up Tuesday and Thursday a lot more fun than it sounds ahah.
• Cirriculum (A-): After taking PS I personally think this cirriculum should be taught in every business school and honestly every undergrad as a general requirement. PS does a really nice job of putting product knowledge into a logical flow that’s easy to understand, with a great reader filled with examples to help reinforce the lessons. The reason I didn’t give it an A+ is because I think there are a few areas that could be improved but overall was really happy with it and just what I was looking for.
• Classmates (B++): To me this was really important so I researched literally every alumni that had gone through PS before taking the course. One of the big selling points of PS (for me) was that everyone was supposed to have some prior relevant experience and that it wasn’t an intro level 101 type of class and overall I was pretty satisfied along this criteria. We had a APM from Dollar Shave, Proj Mgr from Fox, PMM from Activision, etc which was great to bring various experiences into the conversations. The reason I give it a B+ is only bc I think there was still a little more variance in the experience and motivation levels than I was hoping for—but obviously this is going to be the case in any course (even was in business school). The people were great though and we all had a lot of fun together and I definitely hope to keep in touch with people afterwards.

If you have questions or want some personal advice on whether its the right fit for you I’m happy to reply on this thread or hop on a quick call. Overall I had a great experience and would highly recommend it for anyone who is motivated to learn more and get a more formal framework/education for how to approach product thinking. I truly believe this thought process and approach is the future of creating value in any business and applicable to everything you do in life so there’s no way to go wrong here.

Thanks for a great 8-weeks Gio and team PS!

Coming into Product School's Coding for Manager's course, I had little technical experience: I was an English major as an undergrad and most of my work in tech has been in marketing.

Considering that I wanted to get closer to the product in my day-to-day and how glaringly untechnical my background was, I decided that learning to code was the best first step.

Upon examining the syllabus, my expectation for this course was to gain a light but diverse understanding of the technical stack a typical PM should be familiar with. After speaking with a sales rep, I learned that this was indeed the intention of the course, as it introduces frontend development, backend development, and deployment/hosting all in a part-time two month program.

Despite such a fast-paced and hands-on curriculum, course instructor Charlie Depman's strong theoretical foundation in CS enabled me to understand the conceptual underpinnings of what we were coding. Additionally, his patience and clear articulation of responses to the many questions asked by our class added an extra boost of context that further reinforced my learnings.

Besides creating full-functioning product that I can add to my portfolio, by the end of the program, this class has inspired me to seriously explore an actual role in software engineering. Product School has provided us with great support from Charlie, his TA, and even the program manager: all of them willing to help post-graduation. I highly recommend this class for the purpose of:

1. Getting more technical for a PM role
2. Intro to software engineering at a reduced price (coding bootcamps are typically $15k)

Product School certainly reinforced my passion for building great products and on pursuing "product" for my career.  I was lucky to have a great instructor, Yenyi Fu, and a great cohort to work with.  

(CONFIDENCE) It gave me the confidence that I too have already acquired similar skill sets over the years in the product owner role. It also helped fill in the remaining knowledge gaps.  Though this course is probably geared toward anyone who is new or with little product management experience, I was able to put in the extra efforts and to acquire deeper learning by taking my assignments to the next level.  I was fortunate that our cohort also brought in interesting ideas and experience to share.  

(CAREER) For job seekers, the course is designed to provide useful, practical tips but with product management flavors.  Everyone in class got first hand practices with presentations, resumes reviews, participated and evaluated mock interviews, and practiced and evaluated design and estimation assessments.  

(NETWORKING) This is a great place to network with others who share the same passion.  Our instructor Yenyi Fu is the Director of Product Management from Tripadvisor who brought practical industry experience and wisdom. Where else can you spend 40 hours (over 8 weeks) with a PM veteran willing to help you learn?  Even in an actual work environment, one may not feel safe or appropriate to freely ask any product or any career questions.  She demonstrated many of the great PM qualities: leadership, openness to ideas, and great relationship skills on making everyone feel collaborative but guided. 

Overall I'm very happy to have spent 8 weeks learning from and making new friends with the same passion.

Suggestions for Product School:
(1) More "real-life" case studies - It would be great if we can learn from the network of the many instructors real-life experience.  If we can try tackling their real-life examples, it would give us more hands-on experience to learn and "fail."

(2) B2B vs. B2C product management - There are many nuances with the two disciplines, more information would help guide us choose wisely and understand how to get from B2B to B2C or vice versa.  

(3) Beyond basics - since everyone has different level of understanding/ experiences in aspects of product management, it would be great to provide "bonus points" questions or exercises and additional references for some of us who want to learn beyond the basics.

Product School created a great foundation for all things related to product management. Coming from a non-technical background, it helped give me a roadmap for all the things I needed to continue to learn in order to attain a product manager job.  The instructors gave us invaluable feedback, support, and insights on what the life of a product manager is like (most if not all of them were Product Managers in well-known companies).  Even after the class was over, I continue to learn through access to their events and slack forums that provide never-ending sources of knowledge. I definitely recommend you sign up for the class if you are interested in learning what it takes to get a role in product management.