XCPD-600 - Digital Product Management
Course Description
The Certificate in Digital Product Management is a distinctive program that helps professionals build and deliver great digital products to their users. While our program is built on industry best practices for product management, human-centered design, and agile development, there’s also a strong emphasis on helping you develop a culture that empowers product teams to understand user needs and root cause problems in order to design and deliver minimum viable products (MVPs) that deliver value quickly, and enable iterative development based on user feedback and data. Led by a faculty of industry experts and practitioners, our program equips you with the skills and best practices that position you to add value to any organization.
This course includes the following three modules:
Module 1: Introduction to Product Management
Many project managers today are leading the delivery of digital products, but they are using project management methods and tools. Most organizations use “project” and “product” management synonymously, but they are different disciplines. Both are needed to deliver excellent digital products. Project management focuses on developing and managing to a plan; project management focuses on managing costs, schedule, risks, communications, and other knowledge areas outlined in the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK). Product management emphasizes delivering the right thing to a user that satisfies a want or need; product management focuses on user research, human-centered design (HCD), and shipping minimum viable products (MVPs) quickly.
Product management is emerging as a new formal discipline in many organizations. This program is relevant to anyone working on a digital product team.
Module 2: User Experience & Human-Centered Design
Building empathy with users to understand their needs is critical to delivering excellent digital products. Human-centered design (HCD) is a collaborative, creative way to solve problems and build empathy with users. HCD is not about fancy design labs; it’s about understanding the real user problem or user needs.
Module 3: Technical Development
Delivering digital products iteratively allows teams to get feedback early and often from users. Using methods such as Agile, Kanban and DevOps accelerates delivery speed and optimizes user input to products.
Most product teams know early if a product is off track, but they are not able to pivot, so they keep delivering to the plan (using project management methods). Using modern delivery methods, early prototypes, and minimum viable products (MVPs) enables teams to collect usage data and user feedback early--and pivot based on that feedback.
Course Objectives
Upon successful completion of the course, participants will be able to :
- Differentiate between project management and product management methods
- Apply concepts of human-centered design (HCD), Agile, Kanban, and DevOps to deliver digital products.
- Define minimum viable product (MVP)
- Lead digital product teams to conduct discovery sprints and user research
- Oversee development of rapid prototypes
- Enable continuous deployment and integration
- Measure and report product outcomes