I have been a Product Manager for a few years now but it never came with a structured class. So, I…read moredecided to go attend Product School for this reason.
My review on Product School are as follows:
Course: It validated what I was already doing. It discussed the entire process from Research, Opportunities, Prioritization, Relationships, Development and so. (I can still hear Laurie repeating "Prioritization" every week haha!) In such a short time we were able to cover so much. The course was concise, direct and comprehensive (thanks to the notes!). I haven't even passed 4 weeks into the course and I have already been recommending it.
Instructor: "Product Managers are measured by impact of features... not release." - Laurie uttered these words on Day 1.
Laurie was amazing! She didn't even need to look at the notes. She knew exactly what one slide meant even if it only had 1 photo and 1 word, astoundingly, she manage to tell us so many things with a 1 word slide. In every lesson she made sure her stories and insights were relatable to everyone, which felt really nice, because, based from experience, not every instructor would do that extra step.
She was able to answer everyone's question very directly and honestly.
Made sure everyone was participating and learning. Keeping everyone on their toes. She researched everyone's backgrounds and always asked us cases and questions in relation to our background.
I specially loved that she went above and beyond for us. Our class would sometimes go overtime and some of my classmates would still ask for extra time after class to discuss things with her. Not to mention the weekend commenting on homework and replying in slack.
So you see now, why I started with "Laurie was amazing!" because she was.
In summary:
If you're new to Product Management, I highly recommend this course. Mainly because how the course was structured and flowed. I really appreciated that notes and presentations were available to review between classes.
If you are someone like me, who has been a Product Manager for quite a while but kind of ended up in the position from a developer or an analyst, I still highly recommend this course to give you the validation that what you're doing is correct and maybe adjustments to make you even better at the job. :)