Product Ideation, Design, and Management

Great products don't happen by accident. They are created by product managers who understand customer needs, align cross-functional teams, prioritize the right opportunities, and guide products from concept to market. In this course, you'll build the foundational knowledge and practical skills used by product managers to make better product decisions throughout the product life cycle. Whether you're exploring a career in product management, working with product teams, launching your own venture, or looking to strengthen your business and innovation skills, you'll gain a clear understanding of how successful products are developed and managed. You'll learn how product managers identify customer needs, define product requirements, collaborate with business, design, and engineering teams, select appropriate development methodologies, and support successful product launches. Along the way, you'll explore proven frameworks used by organizations to evaluate opportunities, manage product development, and bring products to market. Throughout the course, you'll also have the opportunity to build a Product Opportunity Brief, an optional professional development exercise that helps you apply the concepts to a product idea or an existing product. By the end of the course, you'll have a practical framework you can continue refining for your portfolio, interviews, or workplace projects. Whether your goal is to become a product manager, contribute more effectively to product teams, or develop products of your own, this course provides a practical foundation for building the mindset and toolkit of a successful product professional.

Innovation begins with identifying the right opportunities. The most successful product leaders know how to recognize unmet customer needs, evaluate market potential, and make informed decisions about which ideas deserve investment. In today's rapidly changing markets, emerging technologies, evolving customer expectations, and increasing competition require organizations to continuously discover, develop, and improve products that create lasting value. The ability to identify high-potential opportunities before competitors is one of the most valuable skills a product leader can develop. In this course, you'll learn practical frameworks for identifying and evaluating innovative product opportunities using entrepreneurial thinking and strategic decision-making principles. You'll explore how entrepreneurial mindset, industry dynamics, competitive forces, and value innovation influence successful product decisions. Throughout the course, you'll also have the opportunity to build an Opportunity Analysis Canvas, a practical framework that you can use to evaluate a product idea, startup concept, or innovation initiative within your organization. This course is designed for aspiring and experienced product managers, product leaders, product designers, product developers, entrepreneurs, innovators, and anyone responsible for discovering, evaluating, or launching new products and services. Whether you're developing a new product, evaluating your next innovation initiative, or preparing for a career in product management, you'll gain practical frameworks that you can apply immediately in your work.

This course is for aspiring or active product leaders who wants to understand how to secure and manage funding for their activities. We will demystify key accounting and financing concepts to give product leaders a guide to developing the business case for their ideas, and securing funding to translate ideas into reality. This course focuses on four key areas: • Learning the fundamentals and how to create financial statements for new ventures within the corporate environment; • Examining valuation techniques for understanding how to assess and grow the value of the corporate venture; • Exploring the different sources of internal and external financing for the corporate venture; and • Applying lessons learned in the course to structure a funding deal and pitch the corporate venture.

Designing the customer and user experience is essential to creating great products today. Gone is the old paradigm of “form follows function” model of design. The process must be iterative and follow the best product design and development processes. While designing a great user experience can be a lengthy and expensive process, there are approaches to doing it faster and smarter, without compromising results. This essential product management course explains key design thinking principles around personas, story mapping, and prototyping. Product managers need to know and appreciate product designer tools and processes. By combining these principles with good scrum processes, you’ll learn to create great products that don’t sacrifice design for functionality or feasibility. This course enables students to transition from ideas to prototyping and concept testing of their products and services. Students learn how best to effectively translate ideas into marketable offerings so that the best product and service ideas are harnessed and create real value for customers and the organization. Emphasis is placed on an integrated and interdisciplinary approach to engineering design, concurrent engineering, design for manufacturing, industrial design, and the business of new product development. Topics include design methods, modeling and simulation, material and manufacturing process selection, platform and modular design, mass customization, planning and scheduling.