Helpful Course

great course

Good

good

It's challenging to teach and learn product management through an online course. You can get an overview of the important topics and learn the theory, but this doesn't enable discussion, exchanging experiences, and forming balanced opinions. A product management does a lot of her/his work by talking (to many different people involved), which is very difficult to train online (it could be done with role playing assignments supported by video conferencing, but I think learning from experienced colleagues in practice is a much better way). The quizzes are often a good way to rehearse the topics that have been explained, but sometimes feel like an extremely simplified black-white view on very nuanced issues.

The best parts of the Software Product Management courses for me were the larger assignments you make that are reviewed by fellow students (getting feedback is very useful and it's also instructive to see what approach your peers took) and the interviews with experienced product managers which offer valuable insights in the complicated situations product managers often have to deal with.

I recommend this course to anyone that is new to software product management and quite new to software development. The course can be a good first step on your path to becoming a product manager, as long as you realize that you will also need a lot of skills that an online course cannot teach you.

There are some quite good things in this course like an overview of requirement types or tools to help requirement elicitation more efficient. However, I found the part on user stories quite dogmatic and imprecise (my opinion); the same for assignments, which lead to confusion in assessment. Nevertheless, not a bad course in general, I'd just recommend not to take all you see/ read in this course too literally and learn presented topics from other sources as well.

I know a lot of work went into preparing this material. Although the Table of Contents serves this purpose in a more text-rich, visually complicated way - something I would find very useful is a step by step table or guide (to ensure no step is skipped) for the entire process, i.e.

Requirement Activities

Use Cases

Wireframes

Story Board development

User Story Development

Product Backlog Development

and so on. I hope this will be helpful.

The exam questions could have been written more clearly.

Too high level course. Expected more from it.

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Incredibly frustrated by the peer grading system. I've been able to work on the course at relatively fast pace and have now completed all of the lectures, readings, quizzes and test but can't go on to the next course because not enough people have submitted the homework for me to grade. I understand the advantage of being able to "learn from others" but it doesn't outweigh the disadvantage of not being able to work at one's own pace .

Could be a useful course if you've never worked with IT projects, or for younger students. Everything seems to be about building a mobile phone app.

I don't know how useful the ambiguous requirements exercise is when we only have one-way feedback. I also think that the ambiguous requirements exercise is the most important of the course, and the exercise missed the mark.

I would suggest you structure that exercise as a dialogue, where a PM is working with the customer to elicit requirements, and not give us a big long wish-list of functionality. Structured as a dialogue, you can show that a PM would ask, "You said that the game would make noise. When is the first time it makes noise? How often would game noises be made? Does it ever stop? What makes it stop? Why even have the game make noise in the first place? Are there different noises made during the course of game play/"

So, I can't recommend this particular course, and I'm concerned about what the capstone will look like if you give us an assignment where we're to make sense of functionality delivered as a block of text .