Foundations 101 is an overview course intended for individuals who hold the title of Product Manager, or have some working knowledge of the product development process. The intention of this course is to help product managers develop a broader understanding of their role. It seeks to answer the questions:

• What are the core functions and primary responsibilities of a product manager?
• What does good product management look like?
• How do product managers know if they are adding value?

As such, the course is tightly focused on running an effective core team that is centered around inquiry-driven development process. Participants will improve their understanding of customer problems and perspectives, solution testing, delivery mechanisms, and team process.

Essentials 102 is an overview course intended for confident product managers who are looking to increase their strategic skills and influence. The intention of this course is to help product managers build a strategic layer onto their core product practices, and focus on the soft skills and influencing tactics that are often needed to ensure effective product delivery. It seeks to answer the questions:

• How can product managers increase organisational understanding of product practice?
• What parts of their process can be used as tools for increased alignment?
• How can product teams craft an evidence-driven product vision and ensure buy-in?

This course is centered on the senior product manager’s role between the product team and the broader business. In order for teams to deliver effectively, they need buy-in and support from their stakeholders. Participants will gain an understanding of how to sharpen their product practice so that it becomes an alignment and educational tool.

How do we improve the way we prioritise to ensure that we’re delivering value quickly and not wasting our precious capacity to innovate? Since economics is all about scarcity, we can turn to economics to help us quickly discover, nurture and speed up the delivery of value.

The first essential building block is to understand the value. To help structure the conversation we will use a simple economic framework to surface the assumptions and drive to the economic impacts. The second essential building block is to understand the urgency. For this, we will look at different urgency curves to help us understand how value is likely to decay over time.

We will look at some simplified scenarios that help you put what you’ve learned about Value and Urgency into practice, then do the same for a real-life example from a real company. To help us learn about what the key assumptions where we will compare results across the group to help us understand what the value might be and the areas of greatest uncertainty.

You will learn how understanding Value and Urgency helps with managing demand from multiple stakeholders, prioritisation decisions, surfacing assumptions about where the value is, and how time-sensitive that value is, enabling the team to make better trade-off decisions, and changing the focus of conversations: less about cost and dates, more about value and urgency.

A practical, hands-on way to understand how the human brain works and apply that knowledge to user experience and product design. Learn the psychological principles behind how our brain makes sense of the world and apply that to product and user interface design.

What you’ll learn
Through a series of fun, practical exercises you’ll learn:

• Psychology and interaction design. How to evaluate and design interactions such as onboarding, search, navigation and eCommerce using psychology.
• Psychology and user experience. Evaluating and improving digital products based on psychology. How humans perceive and understand the world around them and how to build your product around that framework.
• Psychology and the dark arts. Persuasive design, cognitive biases and other brain hacks. Do they really work and how to apply them in product design.

After the workshop you’ll be able to:

• Design products, apps and websites that match how people think and behave
• Find, understand, evaluate and apply psychology theory to digital product design
• Make better, informed design decisions and advocate to the wider team using psychology theory
• Put psychology into practice as soon as you get back to the office.