Product School

Product School is an excellent introduction to product management for those wanting to break into the field.  

  The course encompasses the core functionalities of a successful PM - understanding design, marketing, A/B testing, metrics, and the product development cycle.  You'll be exposed to both the higher level theory as well as practical, hands-on examples.  Outside of class, you can sharpen the skills you've learned by working on your own personal project.     The class highlights exactly what it takes to become a great PM, helping you figure out what strengths and experiences you can leverage in a product position -- as well as the areas where you need the most improvement.     The value you get out of the class reflects the work you put into it.  If you're willing to hustle, Product School will give you the knowledge, support, and tools you need to kick off your career in product.     Other Perks:
- A boatload of free online resources
- Unlimited access to weekly talks by experts in product, design, & the tech industry
- (Most importantly) A community of product folks focused on improving and always more than happy to share experience and provide feedback

I had a great experience here at Product School. Alan was my instructor and he provided lots of insightful knowledge on what it takes to be a great PM, Carlos, Michael, and Stany were also helpful during my time there.

Pros 
- Homework was great and best of all applicable to our resume/portfolio 
- Received a lot of straight forward feedback 
- Helped me to improve my soft skills such as public speaking, interviewing 
- In class projects revolved around real features and real companies 
- I was able to receive help, feedback, or advice from Alan whenever I needed 
- Extra perks were and still are helpful for me - books, onemonth courses

Cons 
- I wished for some of our projects to be more in-depth. This is personal for me - I learn best by doing - I wanted more activities where I could get my hands dirty 
- Maybe a bit more focus on how to approach technical issues as a PM, although not all PM's are technical - many PM positions require some technical knowledge

Background

After over 15 years in the technology industry as a front end developer / web application engineer, I wanted to make a change — to tack to starboard and sail on a different course. I wanted to have a much more significant impact on the things I work on. I love building things on the web for a wide variety of customers, in a huge spectrum of languages. After some investigation, I decided that product management was a good direction to explore. As a product manager, I'll be able leverage my experience, passion, and talents, while learning and applying entirely new skills.

To make this course change, I investigated various options until I discovered San Francisco's Product School. I applied for their eight-week product management course. My cohort started in September and met on Saturday mornings until early November. We were taught by Teo, a senior product manager at a health care startup.

The course is well-crafted and has no expectation of specific prior experience (many people are engineers, but some had other backgrounds). The exercises proved relevant and directly applicable to product development work. In fact, after my primary project for Product School, I'm using the homework assignment templates to frame my thinking on a couple of side projects that I'm working on.

I enjoyed the course, got a lot out of it, and would recommend it to others.

What I really enjoyed about the course:

• My instructor was open for interruptions to clarify material. These clarifications deepened my understanding of unfamiliar (for me: especially on the business/marketing side) concepts.
• The project focus of the course allowed the concepts taught to soak in and be applied directly to a single goal.
• My colleagues were supportive of each other and came from diverse professional backgrounds.
• The feedback of my colleagues and instructor helped me solidify my ideas and improve my presentations.
• Mentor resume feedback proved indispensable, especially for those of us who needed to write a better PM-focused resume.

What I think could be improved for future cohorts:

• The San Francisco location asked us to vacate the space pretty quickly after the end of the day. Future cohorts may find it helpful to have some time to chat after class in the space (or in the lunch room).
• More one-on-one time with mentors in the field would be especially valuable.

I attended the 8-week(Fall 2015) product management Weekend course in San Francisco.  The course is very valuable for people looking for transition from Engineering to Product management. You need to keep up with technology, homework and articles in order to get the most out of it. Carlos is knowledgeable,  very friendly and really  very good in teaching(esp. Public Speaking) really did a great job giving students the confidence boost they needed into looking to become Product Managers.

I would Highly recommended especially if you don't know much about Product management, this course will cover all the basics. 

I am a new Product Manager, so I took the class to gain a deeper understanding of exactly what a PM is responsible for and how to work together with all the other teams in the company. It's helpful if you have a background in software engineering, but I came from Marketing so I'm continuing to study some programming on my own so I can talk to developers. The material is fantastic, but your experience will vary depending on the instructor and number of students. The course was geared toward people who were just getting started in their career and who wanted to be a PM. 

Product management course from Product School is a must needed impetus for all engineers thinking about product management career. Before I joined Product School, I had tried very hard to move into product management on my own and had encountered only failures. Product School provided me much needed rebranding of my profile. I not only learned new concepts in product management but also used those concepts in my side project. I came in touch with product managers from various companies and they gave me feedback on my side project, on my resume and on my overall profile for a PM role. Product School completely changed my resume, LinkedIn profile and other online profiles (Blogs, About Me, Quora). I started getting calls. I started hearing this from many recruiters - “your profile is really highlighted and hiring manager is really interested in talking to you”.  Product School also prepared me for interviews. I practiced a few mock interviews with actual product managers and that really helped me. Carlos, the founder, is really very friendly and helpful. Within a few months I had 3 offers in my hand. And now, I’m a product manager.

=== Overview ===
I would definitely recommend this class to anyone who wants to transition into Product Management.  Remember though that: [ what you put in (effort + contributions) = outcome ]

I wrote this to the PM facilitating at the last day of class:

    "Thank you again for all your contributions on the last day of class. It was really great having you there and coordinating everything with all the PM’s there. The last day was by far one of the most valuable days I had at Product School. I learned more in that day than I had in 6+ months searching for jobs in Product Management and studying online materials."

 

Elaboration / Details
Pros:

• Resume feedback and mock interviews from experienced / seasoned PMs
• Small group to allow for personal feedback, small group collaboration, and face-to-face time
• Developed a portfolio throughout the course
• Worked with a real feature and its data to apply PM skills
• Personal and timely feedback
• Frameworks and toolkits that are applicable for a PM
• Class diversity
• Course adapts based on students feedback and needs/wants

Cons:

• Materials were lightweight
• No whiteboards, post-its, and other such tools to engage students in group collaboration
• The Vault has horrible acoustics
• First week or first two weeks were not in-depth enough
• Some tools are discussed but not in-depth
• Lunch was not provided

Like any Product, Product School is actively testing hypotheses to ensure the curriculum is moving forward and engaging the students.  Their success metrics are the number of students who move into a Product Management role and the feedback they receive for the course.  However, what makes this so much better than taking Product Management at UC Berkeley Extension or other universities is that this course is taught by passionate, full time PMs who truly want to help you get a job as a Product Manager.

Josh Anon was the instructor for the weekend class I enrolled in and his was an amazing person.  He always offered out his ideas, support, questions, and feedback.  I had pinged him late at night and in less than 24 hours he had responded back.  That seemed pretty amazing given his busy schedule—though I admit I didn’t start reaching out to him until week 3 or week 4.

Let me contrast the many positive things about this course with some of the negatives or rather concerns.

First off, this class had a large group of engineers in the course.  This isn’t a bad thing since diversity is a great thing and helps with empathizing from different professional backgrounds.  However our class tended to fall back onto their own roles instead of putting themselves into the mindset of a PM.  This stood out and unfortunately there’s not much you can do about that if you have unmotivated peers.

Secondly, I had already spent a great deal of time studying and getting experience in Product Management.  The first two weeks did not blow me away in the course curriculum and tended to bore me.  If you’ve done your work, you may find yourself nodding off like I did.  However, after about the third week, the material started to get “hearty”.

On my last gripe, there was a lack of materials to get people to collaborate as a group and tools/frameworks weren’t always discussed in depth.  My peers would stay stuck on their laptops a lot of the time, which is unfortunate.   The largest skills a PM needs are soft skills and you cannot develop those being glued to your laptop.  As for the frameworks and tools, those were a mixed bag.  Some were covered in great detail, which was wonderful, but others were glanced over.

Overall this course was wonderful!  There were many opportunities to network and to learn from Josh and other PMs.  Stany who is the Program Manager was coordinating job postings and offered many opportunities to us.  The course did have us understand the role, the skills needed to succeed, and develop our soft skills as future Product Managers.

If you take the course, then take these two things:

1. Stick around for the mock interviews and resume feedback.  This was the greatest experience I had with the course next to getting to know Josh.
2. Remember that: [ what you put in (effort + contributions) = outcome ]

I have been recommending Product School to my friends ever since I started. I am currently a PM and used this class to learn where I needed to improve my skills. The pace was perfect for this! The curriculum is high level enough for me to get a refresher on certain topics, while letting me hone in one other topics that I need to learn more about. If there was something I wanted to learn more about outside of class, I got access to tons of online classes for FREE. 

I do think they need to work on improving the job placement part of the process. I didn't get much help from there there, but I think the skills I learned are still worth taking the class considering the price and duration.

My purpose for attending Product School (PS) is to prepare myself as a day-to-day product manager (PM) in an interactive setting, improve upon my strengths and weaknesses as a PM, and to network. Let me unpack that:

1. We all have different learning styles. My learning style is heavily visual-spatial / solitary. However, I’ve realized early on that I needed to develop other learning style to be succeed in the work place. Having worn many collaborate hats in my professional career, I understood what learning style worked best for me. Being a PM is a social role, and it was easy to see that the practical knowledge can only be improved upon when it’s seen in practice and used in application. For a good portion of you readying this, we’ve all read at least two to three books about Product Management. If you haven’t used what you’ve read, then you need to put yourself in a spot where that transfer of knowledge to application takes place. For me, it was putting myself in front of current and aspiring PM’s. How else do you get feedbacks, fail fast, and iterate fast?
2. The catch-22 for breaking into Product Management is that even associate PM positions often require a minimum of 2-year experience in product management. And I didn’t see myself fitting the perfect product role that these job posts often seek since I’m transitioning into products. The truth is, a medium to large company often do not have the ideal PM as one person, but four different people - tech, market, domain, and business. From talking to a seasoned Director of Product, I learned that the ideal PM should have more than one strength while developing all others over time and experience. With that said, I took the 14 week course at Product School. The first 6 weeks was to develop my technical understanding for code with Ruby on Rails framework. The later 8 weeks focused on learning about the product management lifecycle (software) and applying the missing puzzle pieces to my current projects. From my own experience, I couldn’t have gotten there with just books.
3. I’ll offer this the comparison. The top reason for going to a top MBA program is to network right? I look at PS as a setting where I took the opportunity to engage the tech/product community. Don’t get me wrong, I’m still attending meet-ups, PM panels, and demo-days around the area. The reality is that our time is precious, and it takes time to nurture those relationships. I think PS is a great place where product minded people can come together to connect.

A PS classmate said it best: “Product Management is a mindset put into execution.” I agree with this wholeheartedly because it encapsulates the essence of Product Manager. We live by Agile, and we are humble, collaborative, empathetic, and so much more.

I attended Product School in Spring of 2015 to learn Product Management skills and to pursue a career as a PM. I was an engineering manager and wanted to transition to Product Management. The program provided a good review of relevant topics, and extensive coverage of PM interview strategies and practice. All the instructors were passionate individuals with hands-on industry experience. I highly recommend Product School! 
I really appreciated that Carlos, the founder, went over my resume many times until it was refined to land me several interviews. I built a great network with the instructors and fellow students. The instructors go out of their way to connect students with hiring managers. My job search was incredibly positive and fast. Within a month of finishing the program, I got 5 phone screen interviews, out of which 4 resulted in on-site interviews, and I received 2 job offers. Not every graduate will have this experience, and the instructors are honest about setting realistic expectations. Now I work as Senior Product Manager!