Product Institute

The Challenge

Product Institute is Melissa Perri’s Product School, an online learning hub for Product Managers. Melissa runs the Product Management Program for Harvard Business School’s MBA program. The school is an extension of her highly coveted teaching approach. I’ve been helping Melissa and the Product Institute team design the UX and User Research courses.

So, how did we create a UX course that would be effective for Product Managers?
There is A LOT of content out there on UX and User Research—whether it be blog posts from reputable product organisations or other online learning certifications like General Assembly.

I began with a competitive analysis and spoke with current and prospective students. I found the biggest question our students were struggling with was answering the question “What do I do next?”. Resources like IDEO and Google Ventures provide tons of tools, methods and bite-size nuggets of insight, but none of them follow the full product design journey, which can often feel messy and disjointed.

Discoveries

Students weren’t sure how to take design methodologies and use them to make informed decisions. In many cases, they weren’t even sure where to begin when it came to design.
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I also found that a lot of courses use consumer facing examples related to well known products with lots of users like Spotify or Airbnb. Most of our students were not actually working on products like these. Many products they were responsible for were enterprise b2b, internal or required a small handful of highly specific users. They were finding it hard to relate their own experiences with these examples.

Approach

In the course we follow along with Eugene, a fictional Product Manager who’s been tasked with building an internal workflow management tool. Eugene works with a UX designer but she’s spread thin across multiple initiatives and Eugene often needs to take many of the UX responsibilities into his own hands. We decided we needed Eugene to follow an imperfect path, full of grey areas so they could see the different ways a product design can be moved forward. This scenario is much more relatable to the majority of our students.

Defining starting points

Because students expressed wanting to understand what the whole design process actually looks like, I structured the course in a linear manner so that they can follow along with Eugene’s decision making process. I show the students how to define their starting point by identifying the area of greatest opportunity. From here they’ll find themselves jumping back and forth between stages, depending on what they learn at each step in the process. This gives them a better sense of how decisions are made and how to navigate each step.

Designing for Product Managers

Our students are Product Managers, not aspiring UX Designers. The majority of them find themselves wearing many hats, including the UX hat. Most of them wanted to learn how to work with UX designers or fill in the gaps when working solo. They don’t care about becoming design experts, which many of the UX courses focus on.
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Their main goals are to be able to speak the language of designers, define design priorities, and evaluate the UX of their product. We used this discovery to steer the lessons around design-heavy topics like Information Architecture and Visual Design. For instance, instead of trying to teach them how to create a Design System in a program like Sketch of Figma, which has a significant learning curve, we refocused the lesson on how to use a Design System and evaluate its effectiveness.

We launched UX Fundamentals for Product Managers in Spring, 2020 and will be launching User Research in 2021.