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Learner Reviews & Feedback for Digital Product Management: Modern Fundamentals by University of Virginia

4.7
stars
5,205 ratings

About the Course

Not so long ago, the job of product manager was about assessing market data, creating requirements, and managing the hand-off to sales/marketing. Maybe you’d talk to a customer somewhere in there and they’d tell you what features they wanted. But companies that manage product that way are dying. Being a product person today is a new game, and product managers are at the center of it. Today, particularly if your product is mostly digital, you might update it several times a day. Massive troves of data are available for making decisions and, at the same time, deep insights into customer motivation and experience are more important than ever. The job of the modern product manager is to charter a direction and create a successful working environment for all the actors involved in product success. It’s not a simple job or an easy job, but it is a meaningful job where you’ll be learning all the time. This course will help you along your learning journey and prepare you with the skills and perspective you need to: Create the actionable focus to successfully manage your product (week 1) Focus your work using modern product management methods (week 2) Manage new products and explore new product ideas (week 3) Manage and amplify existing products (week 4) This course is ideal for current product or general managers interested in today's modern product management methods. Please note that there are new additions to this course and subtitles for these videos will soon be available. This course was developed with the generous support of the Batten Institute at UVA’s Darden School of Business. The Batten Institute’s mission is to improve the world through entrepreneurship and innovation: www.batteninstitute.org....

Top reviews

RA

Feb 15, 2020

The course delievers a lot of knowledge, strategy and tools for product managers. You will finish the course with many ideas and tools to implement and have more success in your company. Great course!

LK

Jun 24, 2018

I enjoyed this course very much! This course helped me ground myself in some of the core principles of product management and I'm confident that I will take what I've learned and put it into practice.

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26 - 50 of 1,370 Reviews for Digital Product Management: Modern Fundamentals

By Dr.K B

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May 10, 2020

VEDIO LECTURING NOT UNDERSTANDING...POWER POINT PRESENTATION NEEDED, I NEVER RECONMENDED THIS COURSE

By Minjeong K

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Apr 19, 2020

I'm a digital designer who works for various client projects and sometimes plays a product manager role in these relationships. I found the course helpful for the frameworks it provides. A lot in software development is fluid that it can feel chaotic. This course helped structure my thinking, and I'll now be able to distinguish between chaos versus flexibility that is necessary to succeed. Outcome over Output is one of the takeaways I'll keep with me.

By Manish M

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May 3, 2020

Thanks for producing and delivering this great product management fundamentals course. I really appreciate the effort to bring in experts. it really adds value when experts echo the ideas we learn here. Only one minor suggestion, some content goes really really very fast and hard to comprehend when message is between lines within lines. I suggest to articulate max 2 nested sentences in one. :)

By Rita A

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Feb 16, 2020

The course delievers a lot of knowledge, strategy and tools for product managers. You will finish the course with many ideas and tools to implement and have more success in your company. Great course!

By Joel H

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Jun 26, 2019

Great overview of product management in a digital world. It was very accessible to a beginner like myself. There are a ton of great tools and process that are easily transferable to the real world.

By NITIN K

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Dec 24, 2018

This course covers all the necessary and much required fundamentals about the product management. The course structure is very well balanced and covers all the aspects of product management. Thanks

By Sridhar R

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May 20, 2019

I have been a product professional for more than 5 yearns now. Even at my experience level, I could gain a lot of insights and practical frameworks which I could use at my everyday work.

By Gabe S

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Apr 27, 2020

The difficulty of the unit tests varies a lot. Unit 3 was extremely challenging compared to the others.

By Prathmesh J

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Dec 4, 2019

Not exhaustive

By Raffy B

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Feb 23, 2023

Great course on the fundamentals of PM! I like that it includes various examples of fictitious businesses to demonstrate the application skills and theories such as concierge and WoO customer testing for MVPs. The course includes a great set of guests giving tips on being PMs, growth PMs and how data analytics is applicable to products. It also shows how interdisciplinary PMs are in relation to other team members such as engineers, sales, and upper management. While retaining the three important factors of viability, feasibility and desirability of products. :) A lot of the knowledge is applicable to my current accounts retention role (growth and sustaining financial products), while seeking to pivot over to a full PM role! - Raffy

By Aleksandrs G

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Feb 23, 2021

This is my first course on product management taken at Coursera. I am very satisfied with this introductory curse. I would say that it has surpassed my expectations. Most of the courses on the topic lack an ability to present PM's job in a multidisciplinary environment at both strategical and tactical levels in a way that makes sense.

My experience with other courses is that lecturer may present different tools and conceptual models as pieces of puzzle which to not fit together very well. Here Alex manages to present the theoretical material to tell a cohesive narrative on PM's role.

The only piece of puzzle that does not fit is presentation of business models in week 4 - I suspect that that particular info might be outdated.

By Jean A

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Dec 4, 2019

Great introduction to the current world of Digital Product Management. Appreciated the examples, such as the chicken coop company, and the HR/Hiring application. Most of the speakers were great, although I would've appreciated if they shared more real life examples, instead of big picture theory (which tended to be redundant against the information already taught throughout the course). Professor Cowan has a great personality, which made it very easy to watch the lectures. Overall, I am very happy I took the course, for I feel that I have a better foundation on Digital Product Management, which will help me continue learning more about Product Management without feeling overwhelmed.

By Manjit M

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Apr 10, 2022

Alex gets in to the nitty gritty of product management and has come with an excellent course to get started on product management. This course is an excellent overview of all the PM tools that a product practitioner uses and covers tools for mature products as well. This course genuinely covers the entire lifecycle of product management.

Thats about the pros. The only con that I can find is that most of the concepts are just introduced and the detailed description and usage are missing; however I think for the length and scope of this course - the above con is OK.

All in all, 5 stars!! Thanks Alex for this wonderful course!!

By Anand P

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Oct 28, 2024

Great course! I checked the date and when it said it was released/produced in 2015, I was a bit skeptical. After all, this is 2024! However, as I went through the course, I felt it was timeless and the concepts were very well articulated. Most importantly, the examples were well structured and well presented. One idea for improvement -- the course says "Digital" Product Management. I would probably put in newer examples other than "Cooped up LLC"... all in all, great use of my time and I would heartily recommend this course to other learners who, like me, are breaking into Technical/Digital/Software Product Management.

By Andy V

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Jul 26, 2018

This was a terrific introduction and explanation of recent concepts and methods which a product manager can use to be much more effective in his or her role. Alex Cowan did an outstanding job in presenting the information clearly and in keeping me engaged. For the most part, the guest speakers were very informative. I have not checked the repository of the content, so cannot speak to that (another comment may be forthcoming... ) I say this because I would like the opportunity to refer to the documentation from time to time, to refresh my memory, when needed. Really enjoyed it, and learning the material.

By Abdul M K

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Aug 14, 2017

I want to truly thank Mr. Alex Cowan for carving out such a nice course for all the product managers and aspiring ones as well. The course content is very good and if any one has been in the industry and worked as a product manager then he / she can relate to it very well. The way Alex has explained the concepts and how we need to implement them is of immense importance for any product manager in their daily product management related work activities. I will recommend this course to all the aspiring product managers as well as those who are already practicing product management.

By Aashish N

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Jul 2, 2020

I have been in the digital space for many years, and the course helped me gain some amazing perspectives on creating the actionable focus to successfully manage products using modern product management methods, plus exploring new product ideas as well as managing/amplifying existing products. The modules, questions, inputs from industry experts and frameworks are really synced well together.

Thank you, Professor Alex Cowan and the team at University of Virginia Darden School of Business and also thank you Coursera for the great platform and course experience.

By suyash r

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Dec 5, 2020

The course was everything it said it would be, fun but a lot of work. And it was! I enjoyed the forums because they were a lot of fun and a great way to interact. I never expected to learn so much from an online class; I now see the product management in a whole new way. I know I could have done better, but in the end, I learned that an online class could be as much work or more than a regular class. However, I still enjoyed it very much. I Loved the way existing product managers share their learnings and experiences, it was the best part of the course.

By Kumar S

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May 2, 2020

Being a founder of 2 startups and author of 2 technical books Alex brings experience to this course along with greatly formulated content which covers principles, practices, processes, frameworks which are being used in the industry. Short interviews with industry experts give insights to real time practices

With this Course i am able to get the fundamental knowledge of core principles in all the aspects of product management. Since the content is dense, as Alex suggests need to put them to practice one at a time to get acquainted with.

By Romina Y H S

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Mar 8, 2022

Realmente un curso que te amplia la visión sobre un Product owner vs Product manager. Adicionalmente, explica la intervención de los stakeholders involucrados en el éxito del desarrollo y la gestión del producto en todos sus procesos, como también en la experiencia del usuario. Finalmente, se ven metodologías ágiles y herramientas como el BMC y el proceso para el lanzamiento de un producto.

Recomiendo el curso si te interesa saber tips y metodologías sobre el desarrollo de un producto o la mejora de uno y la experiencia del usuario.

By Joshua S

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Aug 1, 2020

Great course overall. Only recommendation is to have more time spent on Roadmaps, and show samples in the session on good and bad ones. This will help if it can be visualized more for students, and the process to create and maintain them. Without this we can't communicate about the product and our plans to others. Also some time on why to use some popular roadmap tools like ProductBoard, ProductPlan, Aha!, etc would be good. But that is my main feedback. Overall the course is superb. And the Professor, Alex Cowan, is outstanding!

By Kanushka S J

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May 19, 2019

This is an excellent course indeed in every aspects. I have learned the much needed Product Management fundamental and also current trends and best practices. Alex has a great teaching and practical experience in delivering what we want to learn and the course is well organized. I really like the talk sessions with industry partners. The resources section have lots of valuable things that we can learn. Thank you Alex, UOV - Darden School of Business and Coursera platform for giving me this valuable opportunity to learn.

By Vanessa R

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Jan 23, 2020

This is an amazing course. It is exactly what I was looking for. I have told friends about the course who have also started it and felt as excited as I am. I had studied and executed various aspects of product management but did not know where my gaps were and, in some cases, the language commonly used. I feel much more confident about the approaches I have been taking and am clear on how to move forward in areas that I can learn more. I only wish I had found this course sooner. Thank you!

By Tony B

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Jan 4, 2019

This is a brilliant high level introduction to Product Management with further reading and work available to deep dive into some of the concepts and tools introduced through the lectures.

Alex is a super engaging, clear and personable lecturer with a great list of guest speakers who relate the course content to real life scenarios and experience.

I truly believe that this course helped me get my first junior product role during a career transition from project management into product management.