Coursera - Digital Product Management Specialization by University of Virginia

Digital Product Management: Modern Fundamentals
Not so long ago, the job of product manager was about assessing market data, creating requirements, and managing the hand-off to sales/marketing. Maybe you’d talk to a customer somewhere in there and they’d tell you what features they wanted. But companies that manage product that way are dying.

Being a product person today is a new game, and product managers are at the center of it. Today, particularly if your product is mostly digital, you might update it several times a day. Massive troves of data are available for making decisions and, at the same time, deep insights into customer motivation and experience are more important than ever. The job of the modern product manager is to charter a direction and create a successful working environment for all the actors involved in product success. It’s not a simple job or an easy job, but it is a meaningful job where you’ll be learning all the time.

Agile Meets Design Thinking
Despite everyone's good intentions, hard work and solid ideas, too many teams end up creating products that no one wants, no one can use, and no one buys. But it doesn't have to be this way. Agile and design thinking offer a different–and effective–approach to product development, one that results in valuable solutions to meaningful problems. In this course, you’ll learn how to determine what's valuable to a user early in the process–to frontload value–by focusing your team on testable narratives about the user and creating a strong shared perspective.

Hypothesis-Driven Development
To deliver agile outcomes, you have to do more than implement an agile process- you have to create focus around what matters to your user and rigorously test how well what you’re doing is delivering on that focus. Driving to testable ideas (hypotheses) and maximizing the results of your experimentation is at the heart of a high-functioning practice of agile. This course shows you how to facilitate alignment and create a culture of experimentation across your product pipeline.

Agile Analytics
Few capabilities focus agile like a strong analytics program. Such a program determines where a team should focus from one agile iteration (sprint) to the next. Successful analytics are rarely hard to understand and are often startling in their clarity. In this course, you'll learn how to build a strong analytics infrastructure for your team, integrating it with the core of your drive to value.

Managing an Agile Team
While agile has become the de facto standard for managing digital innovation teams, many wonder if they’re doing it ‘right’. Twitter is full of jokes about how teams say they do agile but don’t ‘really’ do it. The reality is that getting the most out of agile is less about observing specific procedures and more about how a team focuses and measures their progress.

Rather than just boring you with an accounting of agile methodologies, this course focuses on helping you better charter your team’s focus, definition of success, and practice of agile. While learning about agile mainstays like Scrum, XP, and kanban, you’ll also learn to help your team ask the right questions about how they’re working and facilitate good answers on how agile can help. As a Project Management Institute (PMI®) Registered Education Provider, the University of Virginia Darden School of Business has been approved by PMI to issue 20 professional development units (PDUs) for this course, which focuses on core competencies recognized by PMI. (Provider #2122) This course is supported by the Batten Institute at UVA’s Darden School of Business.