MEM490: Product Management is back! Here's why you should take it.

Birju Shah, adjunct faculty MEM490: Product Management is back for the second term this Fall! Following great success last year, the course is now cross-listed with Farley Center for Entrepreneurship incorporating broader NU community.

Prof. Shah holds a bachelor degree in Industrial Engineering from Northwestern and an MBA from Sloan School of Management, MIT. He is currently a Group Product Manager at Uber, leading the sensor intelligence and search groups.  Drawing upon 15 years of building, launching, and scaling software, hardware, and big data solutions to solve large consumer problems he shared some insights for his upcoming class.

What Motivated You to Start Teaching?

 Technology is at an inflection point where we are exponentially innovating new products every day that will dramatically impact everyone’s daily life. From thinking about living on Mars, 3D printing food, and how we measure the health on our body. Sharing information and experiences is one of the greatest inventions and unique to the human mind outside the genetic code. It’s time for me to share my experiences and knowledge with the next generation and see what they can invent and disrupt.

What is your Definition of Product Management? And What is the Difference Between that and Project Management?

To be clear PRODUCT management is not PROJECT management.

Good project management skill is fundamental and a component of product management. The simple answer is: as a product manager you are responsible for the ideation, vision, execution of a sellable or usable product for whatever use case you are solving. Good product managers identify a problem and build a product to solve that problem. Great product managers figure out a way to do this at scale, create roadmaps to continuously enhance their product, measure the success and failures, and ultimately figure out how to cannibalize and build the next generation of their product.

To date, the best product managers I have seen, mold innovative business thinking and think like a founder into one.  Drive, passion, and ability to ruthlessly prioritize & communicate across all the stakeholders at a company is key.

I also answer this in my syllabus: Product Managers (PMs) can have a big impact on a technology company’s performance. PMs define a product’s functional requirements and then lead a team responsible for its development, launch, and ongoing improvement. MEM Product Management aims to build an understanding of the PM role and develop skills required to perform the role by addressing the following issues:

• What is a PM? Why are they necessary in Companies, Start-ups? Are they a mini-CEO?
• What does a PM do and with whom do they work at different stages of the product life-cycle? What are the attributes of successful PMs?
• What techniques do PMs use to understand customer needs and validate demand for a product?
• What does a PM need to know about user experience design?
• Why do some tech companies require PMs to write detailed product specifications while others do not?
• What is the difference between waterfall and agile software development methods, and when/why would one chose one over the other?
• What does a PM need to know about technology, e.g., model-view-controller architecture, APIs, databases?
• How do you develop an actionable Profit and Loss statement for your product (NOT A BUSINESS CASE!)?

How Does your Background Fit with Teaching the Topic of Product Management?

I have built my own products in my own start-up, for big companies, and even re-built products for medium-sized companies to get them out of trouble and sell to private equity. My products are used by over 1+ billion people and in 190+ countries, and range from large everyday usage like traffic time in maps applications to lesser used niche but difficult to adopt markets like doctors and farmers diagnostics. All of these products had different experiences from deeply technical expertise needed to more business savvy partnerships required. However, the product process is remarkably similar.

 I bring a unique perspective of what it is to build a successful product and scale it. This course aims to focus on building a successful product and arming you with the tools to scale it.

What Is Unique or Different About Your Course / Teaching Style?

This course is all about action learning. This means using your mind and hands (mense manus) to think strategically and get down and dirty in execution.

What Do You Expect Student to Takeaway from Your Course?

MEM490 Practiced in Product Management is designed as a 101 course for students who lack prior product management experience and who either wish to work in that role after graduation in a big tech company, in a startup or for aspiring founders who want to gain a better understanding of the product development process.