Product School

I attended the 8-week(Fall 2015) product management Weekend course in San Francisco.  The course is very valuable for people looking for transition from Engineering to Product management. You need to keep up with technology, homework and articles in order to get the most out of it. Carlos is knowledgeable,  very friendly and really  very good in teaching(esp. Public Speaking) really did a great job giving students the confidence boost they needed into looking to become Product Managers.

I would Highly recommended especially if you don't know much about Product management, this course will cover all the basics. 

I am a new Product Manager, so I took the class to gain a deeper understanding of exactly what a PM is responsible for and how to work together with all the other teams in the company. It's helpful if you have a background in software engineering, but I came from Marketing so I'm continuing to study some programming on my own so I can talk to developers. The material is fantastic, but your experience will vary depending on the instructor and number of students. The course was geared toward people who were just getting started in their career and who wanted to be a PM. 

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 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:

    "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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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.
4. 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 initially stared the PM class at GA (General Assembly) before transferring over to Product School (PS), so I can provide some insights into the difference. At PS, the classes were a lot smaller. You can get more individual attention; on the other hand, you can miss out on learnings from having more classmates as well. At PS, the classes were less structured and the materials were not as developed - presentation-wise. This depicts the bootstrap feel, but I'm sure this will change as the program grows. PS class was much faster pace. PS was 8 weeks vs GA was 10 weeks. I think that's part f the reason why the materials were not as developed because they try to cram you with lots of "to-the-point" information, which you should then go do further research and readings yourself. The nice part was the ability to attend either the weekday or the weekend program, especially when work schedule is unpredictable. Also, great that food was provided. 

I would say this program is great to get you a taste of key things a PM does and it's probably sufficient to get you started to look for an associate PM role. You have to keep in mind that you should still do a lot of your own homework post class, especially if you're trying for a non-associate role. Your PM career journey will most likely be a long one. Don't expect taking this program to be the start and the end that journey. In fact, PS can remain a part of your jourmey because they will still notify you of opportunities, events and various promos even after you have completed the program, so that's a great benefit as you continue to job hunt. This is something you won't find with the GA program. 

Good luck! 

Few things :
1. Structure of curriculum:
Curriculum is structured in most efficient way. It  is tailored to gain real hands on experience of product management. From the start of the course each student selects a company to work on and then by the end of the course recommends a feature in the company's product( app,website) . Hence the probability of getting the interview increases since throughout the course each candidate has gained enough knowledge about the company and its reviewed by instructors(Product managers).

2. Flexibility to attend the missed lecture:
Due to my academic stuff I was not able to attend all the weekends but due to availability of week night classes I was able to make up for the missed lecture.

3. Insights about the hiring process:
During the resume review and interview session they had called real product managers to mock the interview for us and it was really helpful since we knew exactly about their expectations and specific traits which are required for PM job.

4. Mike's network:
Mike helped me a lot to connect with Product managers and to schedule a interview. He has great network and really resourceful.

thanks Product School

Prior to starting my career as a product manager, I had spent considerablemoney and time on other PM courses but was never impressed and felt that the material from other courses were too high level and never practical. I first met Carlos González de Villaumbrosia a year ago when Product School had recently been founded and was extremely impressed with the curriculum of the course. 

I was curious what differentiated Product School from other programs (I knew that Carlos had initially been the top lead instructor for GA's Product Manager course) so I spent a few weeks dropping by the school as well as attending their one-time workshops to learn more about the program. Not only was I even more impressed with what I saw but I also continuously heard extremely positive feedback from initial student cohorts, some of whom had already managed to land Product Manager jobs after the course.   

The course has continuously gotten even better over time and I have yet to find any other course that can even come near to the level of practical education that Product School provides. If you are looking to acquire product management skills, and get access to a strong PM alumni and mentor network, I highly recommend checking out Product School.

I just finished the Product School and the course is very valuable. You need to keep up with homework and read the shared articles in order to get the most out of it. Instructors Carlos and Hamid are solid, genuine and have a very deep knowledge of Product management. They will always give you real feedback and push you in order to improve and reach your goal to transition to a PM role. The location is nice and amount of people for each class is perfect, not overcrowded and good to interact with everybody. Highly recommended especially if you don't know much about Product management, this course will cover all the base.

After researching a couple options to learn more about Product Management and advance my career, I settled on Product School. I completed the 8-week part time Product Management course in early 2015, and would highly recommend it to others. As the course is targeted towards engineers looking to make a career transition, this allows more class time devoted to the non-technical aspects of Product Management, which is exactly what I was looking for.

Carlos (founder) is a knowledgable and super friendly instructor, and you can tell he genuinely cares about teaching the subject, as well as helping out his students in whatever way possible. Carlos’ passion shines in his lecture style, and I thought he really did a great job giving students the confidence boost they needed into looking to become Product Managers.

One of the key differentiators for me between Product School and some other programs out there is that a huge focus is placed on post-class development, which included resume reviews, mock interviews, public speaking, and assistance in the job search process. To me this is reason enough to go with Product School for anyone with a technical background who is looking to get into Product Management.

This class taught me how to validate and rapidly prototype my ideas and also to write technical specifications that could be handed to software engineers to develop. I had been a Product Manager before (in consumer goods, not software) and have worked as a Product Marketing Manager (works closely with PMs) so the topics covered were a little slow for me at first since most of the class came from zero Product Management or startup exposure, but eventually sped up and ended up being really fun and constructive once we got into the building phase.

I recommend it to friends looking to transition into Product roles all the time. 

I took this class when Carlos (Founder) and Hamid (Co-Instructor) were teaching the same curriculum at General Assembly, prior to Product School launching. GA provided us little to no job support, but Carlos and Hamid themselves have consistently been there for me throughout my journey to help out in any way possible.

I just completed to Product School T/TH program and wanted to give a review for people considering it.   I am a 40+ year old professional looking to make a career transition.  I have been a start-up founder recently and in my twenties so have managed products before but without all the process, frameworks and lingo used in startups today.  These were the missing elements in my own background I wanted to supplement and understand.   First, the staff.  The Founder is Carlos González de Villaumbrosia, and he is very experienced and super-friendly.  There is another instructor as well, but Carlos was mine.  The classes had a very informal collegiality but we didn't mess around.  All the students were attentive to the material and Carlos made this easy by being well prepared, interactive and generally very likable.  Other members of the staff were friendly and competent.  Michael Duchen in particular went out of his way to be helpful in reviewing and revising my resume with a skilled eye and insights.   One caveat on staff.  Some of the classes are taught by visiting lecturers.  I believe we had 3 and each one was outstanding.  They were all very experienced and added tremendous insight with stories about challenges, successes, characteristics of startups in different phases, etc...  Guys like Nik Laufer-Edel @Udemy, Carlos Jiminez @Trov, and Kevin Lee @AltSchool.  I learned so much from these guys!   Second, the curriculum.  Recognize that the program was 2 nights a week including dinner.  It is not a 9-5pm submersive.  At first it felt like some of the issues were covered at too high a level.  But then you really get into some of the subjects in additional readings and the "side project" each student is working on.  For example, we covered some high level prototyping elements, but much of the real learning came in applying the concepts in Balsamiq and Invision, 2 of the top tools available and frequently used in Bay Area startups.  Overall, I think the curriculum covered the ground well and segued nicely into a job search element covering resume, interview and product presentation.  It was all very valuable stuff   One caveat on the curriculum.  We covered Agile, again, at a high level.  This was an area where I felt most employers would require a more robust education.  It's clearly beyond the scope of the Product School, however.  I supplemented the Product School with a Certification as a Scrum Product Owner (CSPO) at Agile Learning Labs, which was outstanding.   Second caveat on the curriculum.  If you have little to no programming skills, The Product School gives you access to programs like OneMonth.  I bolstered my skills strongly during this period and was then able to have productive conversations with classmates around ruby, git, heroku and other key areas in the engineering domain.   Third, the students.  In my class there were a mix of engineering skills from none to robust.  Some people played a product management role already. One was a Scrum Master (engineering focused) and wanted to broaden her skills.  Some people were paying their own way and some were paid for by their companies.  In all, a good mix of people.  Everyone I met was friendly, inquisitive and eager to learn.  When it came time to present side projects I was blown away by some of the great ideas!  There was a lot of talent there.  We have already established a group to stay connected and I believe these folks will be an important part of my network going forward.   In summary, I found the experience extremely valuable.  I am currently pursuing a side-project using the skills and frameworks I developed at Product School while simultaneously looking for a Product Management role at a funded (series A+) startup where I can add significant value.  I highly recommend the Product School to anyone looking to upskill or transition roles or career.