This is the course I wish I'd had when I made the transition from engineering to product management.
It's designed for people who are early in their PM careers — either aspiring PMs who haven't held the role yet, or early-career PMs who've been in the job for a year or two and want to build a more rigorous foundation. I teach it at Mesa School of Business.
What we cover
The course is organized around stages of the product lifecycle, not around functional topics. This is a deliberate choice: the skills of a PM shift dramatically depending on whether you're working on a 0-to-1 product (does this thing deserve to exist?), a 1-to-10 product (how do we make this work for ten times as many people?), or a 10-to-100 product (how do we scale this without breaking it?).
User Research and Problem Discovery. We start here because it's where product thinking starts — not with solutions, not with ideas, but with problems. We cover qualitative and quantitative research, the difference between what users say and what they do, and how to synthesize messy data into clear problem statements.
Product Sense and Design Intuition. Product sense is not a mystical quality. It's a muscle built through deliberate practice. We analyze products together — what's working, what isn't, what the designer was thinking, where the seams are — to build the habit of seeing products as designed artifacts, not natural phenomena.
Data Intuition. Numbers without context lie. We work through exercises in reading dashboards critically, identifying what a metric doesn't measure, and asking the right questions before acting on data.
The Product Lifecycle. 0-to-1 work, 1-to-10 work, and 10-to-100 work require fundamentally different approaches. We take case studies from each stage and work through what the PM's job looks like at each one.
The thing that makes this course different
Every session includes a puzzle. Not a case study — a puzzle with incomplete information, where the "answer" isn't the point. The point is the quality of the reasoning process.
I also bring in guest speakers from industry — PMs at different stages of their careers, in different types of companies — specifically to contradict each other. Students should hear multiple perspectives on "how to do product work" and develop the judgment to synthesize them, rather than choosing one voice to follow.