Product School

The course is not worth $3,999. Not even close.

To his credit, Mark, my instructor, was pretty good. He clearly has real hardware product experience, and is an experienced PM. He really tried to make realistic exercises that, as a newly minted PM, I can see were at least somewhat realistic.

The material/content Product School provided to him? Not so much.

First of all: course started early June. First or second class in July (it's a two-month course), you begin classes on "public speaking" and "interviewing". Basically half the course material is mostly useless or at least of questionable use. Which is why I withdrew at around the halfway point.
Second: it's really not easy (possible?) to teach product management short of having the experience. Though I got somewhat familiar with different terms and such, the usefulness of the course in my actual job today is extremely low.

Lastly, I had an awful refund experience with the program team. First, I told them to refund me via check. Then, they forgot about my refund until I followed up two weeks later. Then, they refunded my via my credit card, which I don't have access to anymore. When I told them to refund me via check (again), they did. But then that check bounced. You can imagine this was a frustrating process.

Anyways, don't take this course. It's a waste of money. Read Cracking the PM Interview, build your own product. This course isn't for true future PMs.

Product school (www.productschool.com) has a curriculum. The course touched upon many topics right from user persona, interviews, design, A/B testing, metrics, marketing, and the entire product development life cycle. You have to choose a product that you like and work on providing an opportunity hypothesis and launch that idea to market. All of this is done in 8 weeks with the help of the instructor and the lesson notes. Everyone chooses different products (mostly). Some are B2B, some are B2C, some are SaaS and some were PaaS products. At the end of the seventh week, we all presented our product-> idea-> Go-to-market strategy.

I liked every bit of the class and the assignments. But the question mostly asked that did it help you find jobs? I would say it helps you build your network and learn a few product management fundamentals. I am in the process of looking out for jobs now.

I will list out the pros and cons of the course now.

Pros:

• A good outline of the 8-week course.
• Great instructors.
• Extremely active slack community.
• Free networking events and webinars by reputed and established Product Managers.
• Cheaper compared to General Assembly.
• ProductCon is a great conference to meet and network.

Cons:

• Less focus on product management interview preparation. I wish they had a couple more weeks to cover more on this.

Overall a great learning experience. I recommend to someone pivoting from another industry into product management and looking to network.

 

More on :https://medium.com/@atashijain/why-i-went-to-product-school-8a808f83a2b1

Taking Product School's PM course has been one of my best career decisions so far! Switching careers, when you are already well established in your current role,  can be quite a daunting task. So it was imperative for me to learn from the best and get the right level of support to break into product after completion of the course. I am so happy that I chose this as it delivered and exceeded my expectations from the course!

A few aspects that make this stand-out course are the thoughtful curriculum that hones student's hard and soft skills, the access to an ever-expanding and helpful alumni group and, most importantly, the mentorship from your instructor during and after your course. 

It was a privilege to be taught by Chris Maliwat - a PM veteran with solid experience in eBay, Netflix, Warby Parker and start-ups . Chris's passion for his craft, teaching and mentorship elevated the entire experience for our group. He truly cares for his student's career growth and it showed in his engagement with our group right from the very beginning. He is a phenomenal teacher and a great mentor, and I look forward to his guidance as I take next steps into becoming a PM. 

I highly recommend Product School's PM course for anyone seeking to transition into product or improving PM skills to become better in their role. It was totally worth the time and investment! Thank you Product School, you guys are doing an amazing job!

I enrolled in Product school shortly after taking on a PM role at my current job and found it very helpful. The Product School curriculum packages the product life cycle into a simplified form that is easy enough to memorize but robust enough to apply when confronted with a mental roadblock. The lectures cover all aspects of their framework and augment the curriculum with additional tips that really empower you to tackle the demands of a career in product. I decided to attend the course in person on Saturday mornings and while that may sound like a drag I actually found myself looking forward to it knowing how much I was learning by applying what we learned to case studies. The lectures and case studies were very engaging! The instructor for my cohort was Dr. Joel Palathinkal who was very energetic for Saturday mornings! He always came in ready to tackle the days lecture and share product idea/experiences and challenged us to think on our feet. I truly appreciated his approach to teaching the course as it was very dynamic in that he covered everything on the syllabus but reacted to our input and tailored the lectures to focus on what students wanted to expand on. Joel went above and beyond by reaching out to his network of alumni to bring in guest speakers for every lecture. I can be a bit shy but he's really cool and approachable making it easy to feel comfortable participating. One of my favorite things about Product School is the Slack channels that offer a network where you can get help on a range of things from the need of advice from a SME to interview prep and even job leads! Whether you are new to product or early in your career I highly recommend the Product Management Course by Product School!

Course: 8 week long Software Product Management on Tuesday and Thursday evenings, from March to May 2018. 

Location: Santa Monica, CA 
Instructor: Rich Headley, currently a PM at Cornerstone OnDemand. 
Rich is very knowledgable, engaging, and covered all the relevant course topics on the syllabus. He also took time to address additional questions and concepts during class. I especially liked the way he applied PM concepts to real-world anecdotes and connected them to what we were learning. I was referred by mymbacircle to Rich.

Product School learnings: To get the most out of PS, you’ll need to put in more effort beyond doing the assignments. Participate in class, get to know your classmates, take advantage of the multitude of meet-up opportunities, and dive into the Slack community. By the end of this course you will learn what you need to know to develop a new feature or product from idea to prototype and present it, using any number of the PM tools discussed along the way. 

They are always looking for feedback to make this program better and encourage interaction, which I appreciate. As far my evaluation of the school itself, there’s always room for improvement in a relatively new tech business learning program geared toward professionals. However I firmly believe that with instructors like Rich there it will continue to get better and better with each class.

I look forward to using what I’ve learned from this course in my career.

I joined the Product School 8 weeks course with the following expectations
1) understand end to end responsibilities of a Product Manager from an expert
2) A support forum to tap into, for queries
3) Interact with other hopefuls, and learn from them Shweta Goyal, the instructor, fulfilled all these expectations. She was smart, funny, forthright with her inputs and gave lots of examples from her vast experience, to help me soak in the concepts. She was also very structured in her time management. 
The course structure was well defined, with case studies, group exercises, presentations and reference materials. Interview prep and final presentation was invaluable. The pace was fast enough, and 3-4 hours per week is what I needed to dedicate, in order to keep up with class.
We had a few people drop-out, and Shweta adapted accordingly and gave the remaining team members more of her time. She also brought in Guests, for unbiased feedback, which was really appreciated.
For 7 weeks, the facility was not that great, however in the last class we moved to a much better location. I am glad the feedback was received and acted upon.
The online learning management site, is straightforward, and so is the forum interface, with mobile app version for the latter that I found very useful.

I recently enrolled in Product School's product management 8-week training course in New York and have been really happy with both the quality of the content taught and my instructor, Joel Palathinkal. I got lucky that I had an instructor who not only had a wealth of experience and knowledge but also was always accessible and eager to help.

The course was a great combination of information/lecture and hands-on practice/role play and projects. Overall, I'd definitely recommend this course to anyone considering moving into the product management role.

I am glad I took this product management course. It has taught me the fundamentals, frameworks and design thinking in depth. The course was structured in a way that gave me the opportunity to have a hands-on experience by collaborating and brainstorming with my classmates.

Shout out to Gaurav, our instructor who taught this course splendidly. Along with sharing his personal experiences, he was always ready to dive deeper into our questions. His concise advice on product modeling helped me instill a sharper perspective in me. I vividly remember the first day, where he took us as distinct products and gradually devised the course around us. I highly recommend attending his class. 

Thanks to Product School, I got to meet brilliant minds hailing from different sectors. I have a powerful network that I am moving forward with. 

Last but not the least, you need to be a hustler! Be it assignments, classes, hands-on projects, I suggest you do it all and make the most of it.

Recommending this course to people who are willing to learn about product management or work as a PM.

I took the Product School product management course in the spring of 2018 in NYC. I would definitely recommend this class to anyone new to a PM role, or trying to make the transition into a PM role.

I’m a failed startup founder now moving into a PM job. The product management experience I had building and launching my own product gave me insight into product strategy, but I was working mostly through intuition and on the fly. This class was a great place to get a more formal education on product management. It provided frameworks and a methodical approach to product. It can be very hard to break into product management and this class is a great resource on top of everything else one can do to prepare and build confidence for a PM job.

I chose my Product School course specifically for the instructor, Brian Crofts, and I was not disappointed. What a great teacher. He had experience launching new products for a hugely successful company famous for it’s product culture, was the head of product at a startup in NYC, and is now the CPO of his own startup. Besides his experience, his passion and personality added a lot to the class.

The class is a mix of lecture and workshop. I wish it was more focused on the workshop exercises. The book for the course is useful and well-written so more class time could have been spent on building skills through practice. Communication is a huge part of product management, especially because as a PM you don’t have much control, but you have a lot of influence. Performing at a high level around others and demonstrating leadership has been an extremely important part of my interviewing and finding a PM job. There is an opportunity to focus on these things in class during exercises, but there could have been more.

Overall, this class if a great resource to get educated in an area that many people don’t have a lot of visibility into. Product jobs are competitive and rigorous, and product school can you help you get a leg up.