What you will learn
- Understand the keys to successfully navigating the roles and responsibilities of being a product manager to champion change with internal and external collaborators and influencers.
- Learn how to truly know your target customer, your customer’s underserved needs, your value proposition, your product feature set, and your user experience, then integrate this knowledge into product and market requirements and positioning plans.
- Translate product ideas into tangible assets by creating wireframes, 3D renderings, prototypes, and minimum viable products (MVPs) to test assumptions and validate customer interests.
- Develop techniques for designing and modeling for fast feedback and idea sharing, system optimization with open architectures, validating functions and verifying performance, and leveraging and enabling the system designs, platforms, and ecosystems.
- Embrace modern product leadership to form and motivate product teams, and grow organizations that can both discover and deliver products at scale.
Product management is one of the fastest growing and most lucrative jobs available today. Companies have awoken to the desperate need for product managers to create products that customers love, that integrate design, functionality, and business solutions. This is a one of kind product management certification that covers the skill sets for the entire product lifecycle.
We start with the fundamentals of product management and why this role is so coveted as a launch pad for future CEOs and startup founders. By exploring the roles and responsibilities of being a product manager, we’ll identify its relationship to stakeholders external and internal, including customers, engineering, legal, finance, marketing, and customer service.
As a product manager you have to own the results of your product’s success by tackling risks early and setting up your teams for success. This is why we immediately move on to discussing product-market fit, with a detailed examination of target customers, customer’s underserved needs, value propositions, feature sets, and user experiences.
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. 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.
Agile systems engineering ensures great products truly excel over time in all three areas of design, functionality, and technical feasibility. Agile systems engineering uses tools such as rapid prototyping, open set architectures, and platform design. By using an agile methodology not just for business and design, you'll innovate and collaborate better, manage costly technical debt, and validate your product ideas with data science and innovation metrics.
Finally, you cannot lead products without core skills in leadership and influence. Product managers are masters at internal sales, team building, delegation, and empowerment. They also know that great product management careers are not built alone. From envisioning a product strategy to correctly portraying the product roadmap, the process must be inclusive, interactive, and motivating. This course will enable you to align product teams, product designs, and product development for speed and innovation at scale.
Courses in this program
UMD and USMx's Product Management Professional Certificate
- 2–3 hours per week, for 4 weeks
Understand the keys to successfully navigating the roles and responsibilities of being a product manager to champion change with internal and external collaborators and influencers
- 2–3 hours per week, for 4 weeks
Learn how to truly know your target customer, your customer’s underserved needs, your value proposition, your product feature set, and your user experience, then integrate this knowledge into product and market requirements and positioning plans
- 2–3 hours per week, for 4 weeks
Translate product ideas into tangible assets by creating wireframes, 3D renderings, prototypes, and minimum viable products (MVPs) to test assumptions and validate customer interests
- 2–3 hours per week, for 4 weeks
Deliver faster, higher quality, and fault-tolerant products regardless of industry using the latest in Agile, DevOps, and Data Science.
- 2–3 hours per week, for 4 weeks
Lead product teams and organizations to deliver winning solutions for customers while driving engagement and innovation across the enterprise
- The average salary for Product Managers in the U.S. is $125,835. (Source: Glassdoor)
- Product Managers are one of the fastest growing jobs with a year-over-year growth of 29% with over 35,000 new positions posted each week on LinkedIn. (Source: LinkedIn)
- Career prospects include roles such as Product Manager, Product Life Cycle Manager, Marketing Manager, Product Line Manager, and Director of Products.
Meet your instructors from The University of Maryland, College Park (UMD), University System of Maryland (USMx)
Experts from UMD, USMx committed to teaching online learning
Program endorsements
At Softek Enterprises, we know that modern product development means rapidly responding to customers and evolving the value delivery systems of the organization. We do this every day for our mission driven clients in government supporting healthcare, welfare, records management, and business intelligence. To do this we employ radical application development, built on the principles of product management, agile, and DevOps taught in the UMD Product Management Certificate on edX. We highly recommend that those looking to lead new products take this certificate and join in the product management revolution.
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