columbia engineering product management boot camp

Product Management has quickly become one of the hottest, fastest-growing jobs in the economy1. Its multidisciplinary responsibilities make it attractive to some of the most ambitious and creative problem-solvers across industries, but the path to landing the prestigious role is often misunderstood. It requires diverse experiences and a specific skill set that spans technology, customer insights, and business.

The Product Management Online Boot Camp is a part-time boot camp designed to launch or accelerate a high-growth career in Product Management. Over the course of 18 weeks, you’ll get hands-on experience building products like the pros and gain skills that will help set you apart in the job market. By the end of the boot camp, you’ll have a professional portfolio that highlights your ability to manage an entire product experience — not just a feature set — using popular frameworks and tools.

1 https://www.glassdoor.com/blog/the-best-jobs-in-america-2020/

COLUMBIA ENGINEERING PRODUCT MANAGEMENT

BOOT CAMPCURRICULUM OVERVIEW

Columbia Engineering Product Management Boot Camp - Powered by Trilogy Education Services, a 2U, Inc. brand

Columbia Engineering Product Management Boot Camp - Powered by Trilogy Education Services, a 2U, Inc. brand Page 1

Whether you’re trying to accelerate your career or looking to break into Product Management, this boot camp is a fit for you if you are a:

Developer or engineer who wants to manage a product’s entire lifecycle

Researcher or designer who wants to prioritize problems to solve, not just uncover them

Operations or project manager who wants to decide what to build, not just how to do it

Product manager who wants to take their career and credibility to the next level

Is This Boot Camp Right For You?


Develop the Essentials

Module What You Will Learn Why We Teach This

Adopt a product mindset

• Product roles

• Product mindset

• Whole product concept

• Business and product goals

Product management is built on key principles. To be successful in any product role, you need to understand the product mindset and most importantly, adopt one.

Solve customer problems

• Customer segmentation

• Proto-personas and personas

• Business Model Canvas

• Value Proposition Canvas

Successful products solve meaningful problems for customers. Before you can think about what to build or how to build it, you must uncover who you’re doing it for and why it’s worth doing in the first place.

Influence without authority

• Product stakeholders

• Communication strategies

• Cross-functional facilitation

Product managers often have to lead multiple teams without direct authority. It’s essential that you master the art of persuasion and rally others to share in your product vision.

Work the Agile way

• Agile manifesto

• Agile vs. Waterfall

• Scrum and Kanban

• Agile processes

• Agile ceremonies

Agile methodologies are the gold standard for technology products. You need to understand what the most common agile methodologies are and know how to apply them.

Course Curriculum By Module


Learn to Deliver Great Product


Prioritize like a pro • Prioritization overview

• Prioritization methods: ICE scoring, weighted scoring, Kano Model

• Evaluating methods

One of the most important, yet hardest, aspects of product management is prioritization. There will always be more ideas than resources, and it’s your job as a product manager to prioritize the right work for the right reasons.

Build roadmaps and backlogs

• Product vision statements

• Themes, epics, and user stories

• Work types (ex: tech debt)

• Outcomes vs. outputs

• Strategic planning and comms.

• Workflow management

Roadmaps and backlogs are two of the most important ways to organize and communicate your work. Together, they prepare you to define where a product is going and how it’s going to get there.

Plan and execute sprints

• Product owner role

• Sprint planning and execution

• Unexpected or unplanned work

Sprints are where the work gets done. Set yourself apart as a product manager who understands how sprints are managed and has real-world experience doing it — from facilitating planning sessions to running retrospectives.

Assess and improve product health

• OKRs and KPIs

• The product life cycle

• Qualitative vs. quantitative data

• Funnel and cohort analysis

• Optimization strategies

• Product analytics tool

If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it. The best product managers define metrics that matter to the business and make data-driven decisions using industry tools and techniques.

Test and iterate to win

• Forming testable hypotheses

• A/B testing

Seemingly small decisions can be the difference between a good and a great product. Experimentation empowers you to make decisions with confidence, not guesswork.



Set Yourself Apart


Bring your vision to life

• Wireframes

• Rapid prototyping

• Design sprints

Bring your vision to life with wireframes and prototypes. If you can show a concept to potential customers before you invest in building it, you’ll reduce risk and maximize speed of innovation.

Manage data with SQL

• Relational databases

• Data structures

• Writing SQL queries

• SQL vs NoSQL

SQL is one of the most sought after skills by employers. Knowing how to retrieve data directly from a database will save you and your engineers valuable time — especially at startups, where everyone wears multiple “hats.”

Turn data into insights

• Voice of the customer

• Insights mining techniques

• Data sources and cleaning

• Worksheets and dashboards

• Visualization types

• Storytelling techniques

Data has the power to persuade. While databases help you amass the data you need, visualization tools like Tableau equip you to craft and share compelling product narratives.



You will complete the boot camp with product management skills, including*:

Deliver Great Products

• Roadmap development • Backlog management • Epic and user story creation • Feature prioritization• Sprint planning and execution • Product Life Cycle management• Customer insight analysis• OKR and KPI definition • Funnel and cohort analysis • Data analysis • Product optimization • Hypothesis formation • A/B testing

Develop the Essentials

• Cross-functional leadership• Market analysis and segmentation• Persona development • Business model development • Value proposition definition• Agile project management

Set Yourself Apart

• Design thinking • Rapid prototyping • SQL • Insight mining • Data visualization• Tableau

*The material covered in this course is subject to change due to market demand.

Skills Gained


By the time you complete the boot camp, you can expect to be able to:

Communicate effectively with diverse stakeholders, from developers to executives

Create Objectives and Key Results (OKRs)

Craft captivating product vision statements

Define your target audience using tools like personas and value proposition canvas

Gather customer feedback on product ideas and experiences

Create and present a compelling product roadmap

Prioritize a product backlog of work to be done

Write effective user stories with detailed acceptance criteria

Plan and execute an agile product sprint

Conduct funnel analysis to optimize a conversion funnel

Identify Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) tracked across the product life cycle

Form testable hypotheses and run effective experiments

Build wireframes and prototypes using in-demand industry tools

Write SQL queries to pull usage data from product databases

Create and present product narratives using data visualization tools

Use product analytics tools to make data-driven product decisions

Present yourself authentically and convincingly in interviews for product manager roles

What You Will Learn


Depending on past experience, those who complete our boot camp will be qualified for a range of roles, including:

Associate Product Manager Product Operations Manager

Product Manager

Product Owner

Senior Product Manager

Product Lead

Business Analyst

Real World Application, Real Jobs


A Week in the Life

Mon. Tue. Wed. Thur. Fri. Sat. Sun.

Online work Virtual class Online work Virtual class Challenge work

Challenge work

Challenge submission

Learn and practice new

skills through the online curriculum

Progress through the online curriculum



Begin to work on your weekly

challenge

Continue to work on your weekly

challenge

Submit weekly challenge

Join an instructor-led virtual class

Join an instructor-led

virtual class with office hours

before and after

Join optional, TA-led virtual office hours for support on your challenge project

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Course StructureThis is a fully online boot camp that pairs a high-touch learning experience with a flexible schedule. Over the course of 18 weeks, you will progress through a blend of online curriculum, real-world challenges, and live classes led by instructors in the field.


Meeting Employer ExpectationsIt’s a fact: companies care about what a person can do, not what a person says they can do. For that reason, our curriculum teaches you how to put what you’ve learned

to work on actual portfolio projects.


Agile Product DevelopmentYour team has been charged with developing a new product designed to meet the evolving needs of customers. You’ve been given a detailed description of your target customer and the problem they are looking to solve. With your team, you’ll create a product vision statement, along with a roadmap and backlog designed to get you to a Minimum Viable Product (MVP). You’ll even plan and execute your first development sprint to get the action underway!

Skills Needed• Customer insight analysis• Product vision statements• MVP definition• Product roadmapping• Product backlogs: themes, epics, and user stories• Sprint planning and execution

Objectives• Develop a compelling product vision statement that will

resonate with target customers• Define the form factor for your product• Define the MVP that will lead to customer adoption• Break the bigger vision into a series of actionable epics

and user stories• Plan and execute the first sprint toward building the MVP

Winning with Data and AnalyticsYou’ve joined the product team at an online retail business that sells outdoor gear to backcountry adventurers. Sales grew rapidly in the company’s first five years, but now have begun to plateau. Your team’s challenge is to mine the product’s usage data in search of actionable improvements to the site that will get sales growing again. You’ll need to use your data ninja skills — and your creative thinking — to form a few hypotheses for how to get the business back into growth mode.

Skills Needed• SQL• Data visualization• Product analytics

• Innovation and experimentation

• A/B testing

Objectives• Extract product data from a database using SQL• Create visualizations of product data that help tell the

story of what’s going on• Analyze conversion funnels in search of optimization

opportunities• Analyze different cohorts of users to make

recommendations for product improvements• Form hypotheses for testable improvements• Conduct A/B testing to make site improvements

Sample Projects


One-on-One Career Coaching Online Career Events With Industry Professionals

Career Content and Practice Sessions

Soft Skills Training

Database of Customizable Tools and Templates

• Technical Resume Templates• LinkedIn Best Practices• Guidelines to Building a Portfolio• Creating an Elevator Pitch• Developing a Bio

We’re Here To HelpWe expect you to have questions as you learn. We’re here to help — through virtual office hours as well as a dedicated Slack channel where you can get assistance from instructors, support staff, and your fellow peers. You will have access to career services that will help you prepare for employment through activities such as:

columbia engineering product management boot camp

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